In my mental library, this book is part of a trilogy with Range and Talent about how to do your best work.
The book probably only gets published because itâs about late bloomers, but I canât think of any part of it that is only applicable to late bloomers.
I thought about survivorship bias basically the entire time I was listening to the book. Some of it is definitely embedded in here, but some wisdom is too.
A common theme in Oliverâs late bloomers is earnestness. Earnestness to the point of being annoying to their contemporaries. I think earnestness is a quality that ages really well.
Many of the lessons I took from this book can be reduced to the sorts of things a youth baseball coach would say to me during practice. This is related to the earnestness.
The need to move through periods of exploration and exploitation at different stages of a career is a lens that will stick with me. If you think your potential is capped in your current situation, itâs probably time to turn the dial towards exploration. This is not one I got in youth sports.
Luck from motion â when you get an opportunity because youâre out in the world doing interesting things
Luck from awareness â when you notice an opportunity is available to you (or youâre open to it)
Luck from uniqueness â opportunities that come to you because of your unique interests, passions, and projects
âThe harder you work, the luckier you get!â
Networks are important because of the influence they have on your aspirations. You need to be around people that expand your idea of whatâs possible through words and actions.
Itâs really important to (appropriately) display your work. People canât bump into you if they donât know you exist.
Caring is a source of alpha. Ray Kroc was one of the late bloomers. McDonaldâs dominance made more sense when I better understood how much Ray Kroc cared. His passion for french fries isnât something I share, but it makes sense that he of all people created the dominant fast food company. He cared more than anyone else!
Being a little reckless can be a good thing as you age. He cites a study (I think this one) where people who make a life change by flipping a coin are ultimately happier when it forces them to change rather than stick with the the status quo.
People who keep trying have more successes and more failures than those that donât. Chaos and failure are not to be avoided but part of taking many chances at success. You do your best work when you do your most work. Quantity precedes quality. âYou miss 100% of the shots you donât take.â
Courage / not counting yourself out is underrated. Believing that you have the ability to be excellent is not sufficient for becoming excellent but it is necessary. This is increasingly important with age. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
Recommended if you, like me, hope your best work is ahead of you.
Many wonderful public servants made valiant efforts and scored some great wins, but Democratic leadership did not make it a top priority to clear out the underbrush that jams the gears of government.
Every second for the viewer is just that viral video where the person picks between two pop stars. Youâre always deciding what to pay attention to. The relationship between person-who-makes and person-who-consumes is paramount to long-term success, because if you are winning that game then you will be able to survive.
Things I learned
Eyes have evolved more than 50 times - Salon via Rohit
Musings
You can only avoid competition by avoiding good ideas. â Paul Graham
Product market fit provides a business with gravity
- It lets you know up from down â this helps
- But it also weighs on you; itâs tough to take the business in a direction that your current product / market / customer isnât pulling you
A key skill for the future is going to be how to work with something that is:
1. smarter than you in many / most domains
2. sometimes wrong
A surprising amount of life is figuring out the right words to say in order to get what you want
A surprising number of pregnant womenâabout 1 in 2,500â are in denial about their pregnancy until birth
Fascinating, but extremely hard to read, especially as my infant daughter slept on my chest.
From my friend Oriana: The more males and females of a bird species look alike (e.g. cranes), the more likely they are to mate for life. The more males and females of a bird species look dissimilar (e.g. mallards), the more likely they are to be promiscuous.
The oldest bond in the world dates from December 10, 1624; pays âŹ13.61 of interest a year. From the FT via The Browser.
Worth your time
Ben James on Fusion. Canât wait to read the rest of his guides.
Some thinking on how companies get penalized for trying to be more sustainable by the Green Beauty Community. I do think that one reaction to the backlash on greenwashing has been some companies pulling back from talking about what theyâre doing.
My coding stack as of December 2024 looks like this:
I keep a running Google doc that functions roughly like a PRD:
Whatâs the product â whatâs the vision, where does it stand today, what am I building towards
Whatâs the current project â e.g., set up a system for taking a pdf, extracting the text, and then organizing it in a way thatâs useful to the rest of my app
Whatâs part of the current project am I working on â at the moment, squashing a bug related to super large files
Any files that I canât upload directly to the Claude project (e.g., my prisma database schema)
I have this connected to a Claude project so it stays synced. In this Claude project, Iâve got the ~5-10 most critical files for the project at hand also uploaded.
In my Claude project, Iâve got some background information about my tech stack (e.g., NextJS app, Iâm using yarn, not npm, Iâm on a mac) and some guidance (I want you to challenge my thinking rather than flatter me; ask questions if you have them; I prefer simple solutions).
I sit down and start chatting with Claude on whatever I happen to be working on (at the moment, uploading PDF files and extracting key data). I chat through different considerations and then create or update a file. Iâm using Cursor as my text editor, but really only rarely using the AI features at this point as I was running into too many places where it would spiral off and start making changes I didnât need and couldnât follow. Claude feels better at staying on the task at hand. I probably wonât re-up my subscription when itâs done.
I usually code in 2-3 hour blocks. When one of these blocks is ending, I ask Claude to summarize what weâve been working on:
What we accomplished today
What the next steps are
What the 5 most important pieces of context would be for them to get started again
I then paste this into my Google doc and Iâm done for the day, picking back up at the beginning the next day.
The first part of the book was too dense for me. But when the book gets into how the Montessori classroom works, the role of the child and the role of the teacher, it really shines. It is a continuous struggle for me not to expect my children to behave as adults.
Some gems:
Children are taught to speed up their performance by an emphasis on completing a task or test accurately within a fixed time. The young child has, in his own view, all the time in the world. And he needs this time. And he needs this time. The number of perpetually harassed mothers who tell their children to stop dawdling and get it finished, whether âitâ be supper or dressing, is legion.
The action has merit above and beyond the actual physical fact of the childâs accomplishment. It has the merit of allowing the child to participate in the society in which he finds himself, not at the level of an adult, but at the level of an emerging individual. The importance of a strong sense of self can be seen when we think of the tasks which will be demanded of an American child of three in a few short years. The ability to work independently, to continue to accomplish, whether or not the adult is physically present at oneâs elbow at all times, the ability to initiate work because one has had previous successful experience, are important learning skills for a child. Many children are so conditioned by adults that they will refuse to attempt anything new until they have been given either explicit directions by an adult or, what is more frequent, explicit approval to do so by an adult.
The rhythm of the child is a rhythm different from the adult. The child works at a thing until he is satisfied. The teacher has no foolproof way of knowing when this point is reached. The teacher must constantly guard against over-teaching and over-correctingâcorrecting a child who is unaware that he has made an error, intervening to show a child how to improve a skill he has barely learned. Respecting at all times the childâs right to help himself, and to solicit help only when he feels it is needed, requires tremendous patience.