Bill Gates

Take a Think Week like Bill Gates

Shaan describes Bill Gates's habit of carving out a week to lock himself in a cabin with books on one topic he's curious about, emerging with deep understanding. Shaan applied it to crypto, clearing his whole calendar to go fully immersive.

“So I had read that Bill Gates does this like once a week out of the year. He calls it his think week or his reading week or something like that, where he's just like throughout the year he gets interested in certain topics, but he's so busy that he doesn't get to go as deep on that topic as he would otherwise want to. Like he's got more curiosity than he has time in the moment. And so what he does is he carves out this one week a year.”

Steal thisBlock one full week, kill all meetings, and go cabin-deep on a single topic you've been curious about.

The best hackers are lazy, so they invent shortcuts

Sam paraphrases a Bill Gates line: the best hackers are super lazy, and that laziness drives invention because they refuse to do the same thing over and over, so they build tools to find the quickest path.

“There's this, uh, like quote where Bill Gates, he says something like, yeah, like the best hackers are super lazy and that's why they invent stuff, is because they don't want to do the same thing over and over again.”

The 'tribe of maniacs': frontier telegraph operators were the original Silicon Valley

Wilson argues the tramp telegraph operators were a textbook 'tribe of maniacs' that mirrors early Silicon Valley: both on America's frontier a generation after settlement, both run by tinkering 20-somethings with access to the most advanced tech of the day.

“I've talked before about the tribe of maniacs phenomenon, and it was in full effect here. In fact, this is sort of a textbook example, and it's crazy how much it resembles Silicon Valley in its heyday. Both are on the frontiers of America, born a generation or two after it was settled, and during a time of really rapid population growth. Both had access to the most advanced technology at the time— silicon chips in the case of California, telegraphs in the case of Edison and his contemporaries. Both scenes were started and run by men in their 20s who were obsessed with tinkering”