February 23, 2025 - #617 - read online - Free Version

Welcome to Brain Food, a weekly newsletter of timeless ideas and insights you can use.

Tiny Thoughts

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Your choices determine your trajectory.

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Waiting for perfect conditions is how otherwise intelligent people keep themselves stuck.

Two entrepreneurs spot the same opportunity. One builds elaborate plans; the other tests crude prototypes. The planner is still planning when the tester sells their company.

While you wait for perfect conditions, others are creating them.

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An imperfect solution that exists outperforms a perfect one that doesn't.

Facebook wasn't the first social network - it was just the one that kept iterating and showing up. The Wright brothers weren't the most educated aviation pioneers, but they were the ones who got a plane off the ground.

What you build matters more than what you could have built.

Insights

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Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham on fooling yourself:

“If you’re trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.”

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Steve Jobs on finding satisfaction through work:

“You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.... Don't settle.”

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Tom Brady (lightly edited) on how the right people in your life double the pleasure and divide the pain:

“Things happen in life that you don’t want to happen—whether you lose a game, things don’t go well at work, or something happens with your child. There are many moments in our personal and professional lives that don’t go the way we want. How do you deal with them? Do you handle them with class and integrity, with courage and resilience? Are you able to share your emotions with others?

Do you have people in your life who can help you through those challenges? I’m blessed to have had people walk through those moments with me. They always say, “Double the pleasure and divide the pain,” and that’s what relationships are all about. When you care for and love those around you, they give back—and that’s where the reward comes.”

The Repository

The simple framework Jeff Bezos used to make faster decisions at Amazon:

“Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high-judgment individuals or small groups.

As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavy-weight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention. We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency.”

Source: Amazon Shareholder Letter, 2015

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The Knowledge Project

Imagine leaving a six‐figure Wall Street salary behind to chase a single, daring idea. In this episode, David Heacock shows you how he turned air filters into a $250M empire.

“Momentum is everything…Either you’re improving or regressing.”

If you've ever wanted to see inside the mind of someone while they are pursuing a big goal, this conversation is for you.

+ Listen and Learn on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | FS | Transcript

Mental Model of the Week

V2 | Chemistry | Alloying

Alloying is the art of mixing elements to create something greater than the sum of its parts. While our intuition tells us that pure substances are best, alloying shows this is not always true. One plus one can equal ten. By blending ingredients in precise proportions, metallurgists can create materials with bespoke properties—the lightness of aluminum with the strength of steel, the corrosion resistance of chromium with the affordability of iron.

But alloying isn’t just about physical properties. It’s a metaphor for the power of diversity and combination in all walks of life. In teams, alloying is the mixing of different skills, perspectives, and personalities to create a more creative, adaptable, and resilient group than any individual could be alone. In ideas, it’s the blending of concepts from different fields to spark innovation and insight.

In people, alloying is the combination of skills that makes them unstoppable. Consider a person possessing deep engineering skills who can clearly explain ideas. They are more valuable than someone with just the engineering skills. Now add empathy, humility, resilience, and drive. This person becomes incredibly rare.

The key to successful alloying is knowing which elements to combine and in what proportions. Too little of one ingredient and you don’t get the desired effect; too much and you might end up with something brittle or unstable. The art lies in finding the sweet spot, the golden ratio where the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts.

— Source: The Great Mental Models v2: Physics, Chemistry, and Biology

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Thanks for reading,

— Shane Parrish
Author of Clear Thinking

P.S. How Glasses are Made.

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