The case against morning yoga, daily routines, and

🎀 Highlights

We all fall into routine patterns, but what if the key to success lies in rejecting those routines?

Instead, he advocates for embracing serendipity and focusing on high-impact, game-changing tasks.

the concept of "10x work," highlighting the importance of tasks with significant impact that can define one's professional output.

He contrasts this against daily routines, arguing that the true path to success involves breaking free from comfort zones and harnessing moments of unpredictability to drive substantial outcomes.

Embracing the unexpected and thinking outside the routine can spark innovation and elevate your design prowess to new heights!

evaluating tasks based on their potential impact and relevance to long-term goals.

Create work assets that compound over time so that it spreads even when you sleep.

Or build a decentralized conference, as we’ve recently done with “Tech Week” that causes a spontaneous community to form,

This is why I’ve become a fan of “building in public” rather than creating a ton of decks/memos/etc but then hoarding them for internal/private use online.

Imagine the thousands of tasks you did in the past year and sort them by impact. How many of them actually moved the needle?

These are what I’ll call “10x work” — these are key tasks where your doing them well/poorly really matters, and the result might define your professional output for an entire year (or more).

10x work is weird and often the opposite of routine. 10x work seems to come up randomly,

Pivotal moments often happen when you inject more risk, new information, or create upside in an otherwise stable situation.

people talk about a sequence of key events precipitated by changing new jobs, meeting a new mentor, launching products, moving across the country, etc.

Start new projects and make big moves. Raise your hand to volunteer for work with high variance outcomes.

Start new projects and make big moves. Raise your hand to volunteer for work with high variance outcomes. Execute

Execute based on your own plan and not in reaction to others.

this is why “Send email to X” is stronger than “Send reply to Y” — the best work does not happen in reaction to what others do.

the same way, it’s important not to get caught into the loop of simply doing work that is assigned to you, answering emails that are waiting in your inbox, etc. Reactive loops are easy, but lead to decay.

sending outbound emails to interesting people, hosting dinners and events that bring together smart folks, and publishing any and all thoughts online

pro reading random books on a topic, or googling/wikipedia’ing/chatGPTing for hours to dig into things — sometimes semi-random exploration leads to the best ideas.

low-signal socializing at conferences and random coffee 1:1s that don’t move things forward. These are fun but are too low yield)

“tests of skill.” You can learn all that you want, network with great people, and never know if you have what it takes.

Within bigger companies, these are the new/unproven projects, or just join a startup.

It’s not enough to just be competent at what you do — learn its history, and figure out where it’s going next.

If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like.

But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.

top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people.

few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare.

Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable.

Proactively position yourself to jump into action when 10x moments emerge, and create the opportunity to pour resources (time, people, capital) into a project that catches on.