MNTS #35
[Week 2/ Year 2024] Pod Notes, Ben Franklin, Firestone, Thinking in Bets, Meta Generalists, 40 years of Projects, Deutsch files, Portrait
Mainly, Notes To Self - my weekly attempt to compress everything noteworthy I read, watched, listened to, and discovered during the past week.
New Post - Pod Notes
Reading
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin- I finished reading the first book on the recommended readings from Charlie Munger and Peter Kaufman's list. Loved it! I have the book notes queued up to be published in a couple of weeks.
Men and Rubber: The Story of Business by Harvey S. Firestone is the second book we will be reading from the reading list. I’ve had this in the reading stack for a while, and I’m happy to prioritize and finally move to the top of the stack.
Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke - Revisiting my highlights this week. I’ve planned to publish my book notes on this one for a while, but I highlighted so many passages I’d essentially be re-writing her book. I’m working through distilling my insights and will publish a dedicated post in the coming weeks.
Spikey and Meta Generalist by Byrne Hobart - interesting dichotomy proposed by Hobart. Self-assessing, I fall fairly squarely in the meta generalist schema.
The meta-generalist approach is less about getting good at a discrete set of tasks, and more about getting generally good at picking up new areas of expertise. Interestingly, this shows up in two kinds of CEOs at opposite ends of the spectrum: salesman-CEOs and capital allocators. The salesman CEO has to pick up enough information about a prospective customer's problems to articulate how their product can solve them, suss out unstated obstacles, and build a model of the customer's true org chart as opposed to the formal one. Capital allocator CEOs are, of course, looking at a broad set of investment opportunities, fitting them into some kind of framework that makes them comparable, and then doing deals.
Forty Years of Projects by Seth Godin is a cool way to reflect on one’s career and a valuable reminder of what can be accomplished with a long time horizon.
Here are a handful of the projects I’ve created and shipped over the last three decades–not my favorites, necessarily, or the biggest, but ones that indicate where I was when I was doing them. This is way more self-referential than I’m usually comfortable with, but the combination of timing and the specifics that come from the example made me think it was worth posting a chronology. Happy anniversary, and thanks for letting me create…
Listening
David Deutsch tends to be above my intellectual comfort zone, but this one is pretty approachable. His takes on AGI, creativity, and goal-driven life are thoughtful and insightful.
Random
Working on my portraits with one of my muses.
Until next week!
Stay spirited, stay resilient.
Andrew