We’ve had an unbelievable first season!
Shazam founder Dhiraj Mukherjee was our last guest. We spoke about why founding Shazam was too risky (link).
These are our 3 takeaways from our first season.
1. It’s dangerous to copy others
There’s no simple and solo answer for how Steve Jobs and Melanie Perkins can succeed — and they couldn’t be further apart.
The wisdom here is that people can succeed in multiple ways. People should take in a lot of data and understand what Steve, Melanie, Elon Musk do and then develop their own path and method.
Just don’t become a little mini-me of anybody.
Guy Kawasaki drove this point home.
Avoid copying their heroes because you’re different from them — in personality, interests, skills, and experiences.
Just like the next Google won’t be a search engine, the next Guy Kawasaki or Elon Musk won’t be like them — they’ll be unique in their own way and leverage that distinctiveness to help them.
Listen to Guy Kawasaki
2. Don’t just minimise your risk
Haseeb spoke about how people tend to follow the path with least risk — not the path with the best expected outcome.
He grounded this in fear. Being afraid — like afraid of failure — is what drives you to make bets with your life that minimise your chance of catastrophe but don’t have the best upside.
So this is about being honest with yourself, better judging the risk you’re taking and being decisive in taking your best options.
We had a fascinating chat of how he applied this when transitioning from poker to software engineering. It’s best to listen to it from him — it’s a masterclass in how to think about risk in your life.
Listen to Haseeb Qureshi
3. Logic never provides insights
Great insights are provided by your unconscious mind. After you get the insight you figure out the logic of it. Einstein didn't come up with the Theory of Relativity. He had an intuition around it, then provided the logic for it, and later tested it.
So you don’t leave it to intuition. Intuition is the starting point. Then you provide the reasons for things and the logic, and then you look for the evidence.
If you want to find a great truth, Adam Robinson’s convinced logic won’t get you anywhere.
It’s fascinating because we live in a world that glorifies logic and reason.
Adam isn’t arguing logic is useless — far from it —, but he’s arguing that logic is commoditised.
Being logical isn’t thinking. Anyone can be logical, anyone can apply reasoning to known facts — it's another thing to step outside of the domain and redefine terms.
The mental leaps and connections that you make with intuitions take you further when they’re founded because they’ve been less explored.
Listen to Adam Robinson
Stay tuned…
We’ll be back with season 2!