☕ saturday mornings - April 16, 2022

envy of the dead, the end of history & uncovering opportunity

Good morning all!

Happy Saturday. I hope you’re having an excellent start to your long weekend.

What I’ve been up to:

• One exam left! Very reminiscent of that “summer vacation” feeling 😎

• Working on analysis of different pricing models for note-taking and personal knowledge management (PKM) software. If you have any thoughts on this, or what your favourite software has done, let me know!

Below is your edition of “saturday mornings”, a weekly recap of the coolest things I’ve been pondering and exploring this week.

Thanks for being here. Your support means a lot to me.

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✍️ Quote I’m pondering:

"Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time.

Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.”

— World of Tomorrow

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💡 Idea I’m exploring: The End of History Illusion

If I asked you how much you've changed in the last 10 years, you'd be pretty good at giving a detailed description.

But, if I asked you to predict how much you're going to change in the next 10 years, you'd probably have a much tougher time.

Although we've experienced significant personal growth up to the present moment, we believe we won't substantially grow or mature in the future. We are unable to predict change in ourselves.

We think the person we are today is roughly the same as the person that we're going to be 10 years from now.

Psychologists named this effect the "End of History Illusion". 

We tend to think that the bulk of our personal change is behind us. We see ourselves as finished products at any given moment.

But, this is an illusion. Clearly, we've grown immensely in the past and will continue to grow.

Although people’s rate of change slows as they age, their predictions of the future were just as far off as younger age groups.

Even if you know how you want to live your life, with certainty, chances are you will change your mind at some point in the future. 

Leave yourself room to grow. Expect that things are unlikely to go as planned.

"The greatest superpower”, Naval Ravikant notes, “is the ability to change yourself."

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💡 Idea I’m exploring: The Law of Opportunity

The fishing is best where the fewest go.

In his research on evolution, Charles Darwin found that competition is fiercest where most people are trying for the same thing.

Under the same logic, the best opportunities today don't look like the best opportunities.

They're not obvious. They don't look attractive. If they did, people would have already flocked to them and they would no longer be the best opportunities. Everyone would already be doing it.

The Law of Opportunity states that the future success of an opportunity is inversely related to its level of popularity.

We often get captivated by current "successful" or "high-status" opportunities.

The reason is simple. People in these areas have been successful. Our brains make the logical shortcut that if we enter into these areas, we will be successful like them.

There's a collective agreement that the best opportunities today will be the best opportunities tomorrow. We extrapolate the past into the future, assuming things will continue. 

Yet, many of the industries that are attractive today weren't 20 years ago.

In 2000, Silicon Valley was beginning. Less than 50% of households had computers and mobile devices were figments of imagination. USB flash drives had just come out and the iPod was still 1 year away.

One of my mentors experienced massive success in buying Tim Hortons franchises. But, he was buying as many locations as he could before it became a household name. You couldn't replicate his success by buying Tim Hortons today. It would be too competitive and too expensive.

Many of the best opportunities today will only be obvious years from now.

The degree of success you experience, in a certain area, depends somewhat on “being early”. Timing is everything.

When something is “obvious”, it’s too late.

Many of the people that have experienced massive success were early. They didn’t do what was “popular”. They took a chance by entering an uncertain but growing field. And because they were early, they built expertise before everyone else, developed critical skills, and benefited from rapid industry growth.

It's impossible to replicate someone’s success by doing exactly what they did. You can't rely on the paths successful people took years ago to predict where the future opportunity lies. "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise," Matsuo Basho notes, "seek what they sought".

Yet, many people start their careers by entering soon-to-be declining industries, working for firms that have already peaked.

Rather than make decisions on what's "popular" now, we should have an eye for where the future is going. "The biggest competitive advantage in business", Sam Altman writes, "is long-term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together."

You need the vision to see what others cannot, the courage to act when others wouldn’t, and a willingness to face uncertainty and change.

Uncommon success comes from doing uncommon things. Plus, it's fun to be different.

“One of the most conspicuous patterns I’ve noticed", Paul Graham writes, "is how well it has worked to work on things that weren’t prestigious.”

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That’s all for this week’s edition of “saturday mornings”.

If you have any feedback, I’d love to hear from you.

I may be wrong. I frequently am. If you see something differently, I’d be interested to read your thoughts.

Reply to this email, leave a comment, or find me on Twitter @tommy_dixon_

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Have a fantastic weekend.

Much love to you and yours,

Tommy