I’m reading Warren Buffett: Inside the Ultimate Money Mind, which is a book about the mindset of Warren Buffett and other investors. One of the things it discusses is how Buffett and other investors make decisions. Robert Hagstrom points out that to understand psychology is to understand human decision-making. That’s why successful investors like Charlie Munger studied psychology to improve their own decision-making.

I’ve never thought much about psychology,  but this book got me thinking about it in relation to entrepreneurship—specifically, entrepreneurial wisdom. In this post, I shared that wisdom is the ability to apply knowledge in a manner that aligns with the outcome you desire. Wisdom means changed behavior and improved decision-making—knowing what to do and when to do it.

I’m always looking for ways to improve my decision-making (and share what I learn). But I’ve never really thought about trying to understand psychology to accomplish this until now. Hagstrom has me interested in learning more about psychology.

I’m going to try to find one of two books about psychology and add them to my reading list.

As I was poking around on the internet over the holiday, a book written by an indie hacker entrepreneur caught my eye. Traditional places like Amazon don’t sell the book. Instead, this entrepreneur is not only self-publishing but also self-distributing the book—the only place you can buy it is his website. I’ve seen this before, but it definitely piqued my interest.  

The founder does two things that made me lean in more (and want to purchase his book). First, he posts stats about book sales: total books sold since launch, total revenue generated, and number of books sold today were prominent. I hadn’t seen this before, and I loved it. I took it as his way of communicating how much value has been provided to others—in the aggregate and recently. And it’s more social proof.

Second, the book is never finished. He’s constantly updating it as he learns new things. He shows the last time he updated the content and the last time he published new book files. The book was written about five years ago, his last update was within the last twenty-four hours, and new files were published today (as of this writing). I like this approach because his book content stays current. I’ve never seen this before.

This entrepreneur is doing a great job of marketing his book, and he got me excited about it. I’m going to grab a copy and add it to my booklist.

I did a lot of reading this weekend for my “book library” MVP. I dug deep into retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and learned some helpful things:

• There are different variations of RAG: GraphRAG, StructRAG, LightRAG, etc. New versions have been introduced every few months this year. Which is the right one depends on your use case.
• Normal RAG isn’t great for a large data set like a book. It struggles to make connections when presented with a lot of data.  
• RAG’s results are better when you feed it relationships in a data set via a schema. GraphRAG, StructRAG, and LightRAG try to make up for this by using a knowledge graph to index the information better, which leads to understanding the data better and providing better results.

I’m realizing that how the information gets indexed in large data sets is critical, especially if I want to query across lots of dense data sets like books. Thinking about why entrepreneurs with photographic memories have an edge, I decided that their minds have done a superior job of indexing everything they’ve consumed and making nonobvious connections across the data. Those connections lead to unique insights that lead to creative solutions to problems or actions to get closer to their goal.

This weekend highlighted that I need to focus on and understand how information gets indexed as I evaluate RAG and other alternatives.

Today I read an article about a hack that helps you learn better. It suggests writing a one-page summary after you’ve read ten pages of a book because this increases your retention by 50%. The idea is that to learn, you must stretch yourself. You’re forced to do that if you have to process and organize what you consumed and then express your understanding in writing.

A few months back, I was writing a series of five or so blog posts for every biography or autobiography I read. I created a digest of each book and then shared the important parts via the blog series. Then, I began using the blog series to create a podcast series.

I was doing multiple levels of distillation, which helped me uncover insights from each book and retain more about each founder’s journey that I’d read about. Doing all of this weekly wasn’t sustainable, and I want to find a more sustainable process for doing the same thing. That’s why I’ve created an MVP to help me create book digests.

I’m a fan of writing. It’s a powerful practice that helps me organize my thoughts. When I write about what I’ve read, it feels like a superpower. I identify core concepts and insights I wouldn’t have found by reading passively, I retain them, and I can share them with others.

Writing about what you’ve read is something everyone can do, but most won’t. It’s more work, but I think the reward is worth the effort.

I’m using Google AI Studio to run one of the MVPs for my book project. Google’s AI is called Gemini, and there are eight different Gemini large-language models (LLMs). Determining which would yield the best result was a concern. Google had thought it through, though: AI Studio has a compare feature: you can ask a question and select two LLMs, and Gemini will provide responses from both of them in a side-by-side view.

I’ve been testing prompting and system instructions this week, and the compare feature has been helpful. Seeing how the different LLMs respond to the same question is helping me narrow my choices faster.

Google AI Studio has limitations, but it’s a good tool for someone who is nontechnical and wants to fine-tune their AI experience.

I’ve spent the last few weeks diving into Google’s AI Studio, NotebookLM, Vertex AI Agent Builder, and various other AI-related tools from Google and other companies. A developer friend has helped me a lot. I was aware of some of these technologies from reading about AI and LLMs in general, but now that I’m trying to use them to create solutions for my personal project, my understanding of them has gone much deeper.

I have a clear idea of what I want the technology to do. I’m trying to figure out if it can specifically do what I want. If so, what are all the ways? What are the implications of each option? What I learn sticks in my memory. This is different from my normal approach of poking around to understand a tool’s general capabilities, which doesn’t result in good retention.

I’ve also noticed that when I seek help from technically oriented people to learn new technologies, describing the problem and how I want to solve it helps tremendously. It gives them a better idea of where to start, and the conversation is more focused on solutions to my problem than on a broad overview of the technology.

I’m not sure which, if any, of these technologies will be part of the solutions I build. But I’ve learned something: If I have a problem I’m excited to solve, I should try using new technologies to create a solution. Worst case, I’ll gain a better understanding of the technologies. Best case, I understand the technologies better and create a solution to my problem.  

This year, I’ve read roughly twenty biographies and autobiographies about entrepreneurs in media—broadcasting, publishing, and cable. I didn’t plan to read so many books about this industry; it just happened as I followed my curiosity. As I read about one entrepreneur, I learned about competitors or business partners I wasn’t familiar with, so I found books on them too. Almost every book led me to at least one other person I wanted to learn more about.

Before I read all these books, I had zero understanding of media. I didn’t know its history, how people made money, or how it has impacted other industries and society. Now, I’m far from a media expert, but I have a working, high-level understanding of the industry and the strategies used to build large media companies. Reading books about numerous entrepreneurs back to back (mostly) helped me see the industry from different perspectives by way of each entrepreneur’s journey. This gave me a clearer picture of the industry and an understanding I wouldn’t have if I’d read about only one or two media entrepreneurs.

I gained lots of value from this media deep dive, and I want to mimic it in the future, but more intentionally. Next time, I’ll do a few things differently. The main thing is to start with a desire to understand a specific industry—and a clear reason why. Ideally, I’d be highly motivated to understand the industry to help me solve a specific problem. The other thing is to research the major players who helped create the industry and try to find books about them. Entrepreneurs who help build an industry in the early days and achieved outsize success are likely to have done business with, employed, or be connected to other entrepreneurs in the space.

Reading the life stories of multiple entrepreneurs in an industry feels like a major hack. I can’t wait to find out what the benefits are when I’ve studied several industries this way.

I published a six-part podcast series on Ted Turner, the visionary entrepreneur who created CNN and other cable channels like Cartoon Network and TNT under Turner Broadcasting System. He also owned the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and MLB’s Atlanta Braves, and had a fortune of $10 billion at its peak. I really enjoyed his autobiography and learned a lot from it. If you're interested in learning more about Ted and his remarkable journey, you can start listening to part one in this series on Apple Podcasts here or Spotify here. Ted's journey is covered in episodes 98 through 103.

I’ve recently read books about two founders who founded massive publicly traded companies, but in different ways: Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, and Willis Johnson, founder of Copart. Both companies offer online auctions. As of this writing, eBay has a market capitalization of roughly $27 billion, while the Copart valuation is roughly $53 billion.

Omidyar worked in Silicon Valley and was financially comfortable after a previous employer was acquired. He thought the world was unnecessarily unfair economically. He envisioned an efficient market that empowered people financially so they could control their own lives. His mission was to create an online auction with a strong community. His vision- and mission-first approach led to his nailing product–market fit straight out of the gate. The company went from zero to $41.7 million in revenue and was publicly traded on the stock market in three short years.

Johnson didn’t want to work for anyone but needed to support his family. He knew the salvage industry and started a salvage yard because he knew he could make money. As more problems presented themselves and money-making opportunities arose, he took them on too. After twenty years of opportunistically solving various problems, the rapid success of his online auction market in 2003 caused him to question his “job.” He shifted his mission from solving various salvage problems for profit to “streamline and simplify the auction process.” Johnson’s twenty-year transition from mercenary to missionary led to unprecedented growth at Copart. It’s now a global online auction market.

I, too, began as a mercenary when I started my company. I wanted more control over my life and needed to replace the salary from the job I’d had. I went from problem to problem with a focus on profitability. Years later, after I had financial breathing room, I started to focus on the painful problems. I became something of a missionary. This led to $10 million in annual revenue, but that could have been $300 million if I’d gone full missionary. I should have been laser-focused on our customers’ most painful problem.  

As I thought about my founder friends and myself, I realized that Johnson’s journey is most common among my peers. Most of them picked a market and focused on making money to support themselves. They often attempted to solve various problems. But my friends who had outsize success didn’t stick with that approach. When their companies began to grow rapidly, it was because they were laser-focused on a single problem and mission. Their outsize success was the result of converting to being missionary founders, often after they had financial breathing room.

Entrepreneurs wanting financial independence and control of their lives can accomplish these goals as mercenaries, but if they aspire to have a bigger impact or build something significant, crystallizing a vision and mission is likely the key.

Listen to the audio versions of my blog on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Tune in here and here!

Today I finished reading Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. Here are some high-level thoughts:

• À la carte – Allen’s complete system, as described in the book, isn’t something I’d fully implement given my digital workstyle and other factors. However, as an à la carte framework, I see lots of value. Allen details several concepts that can add immediate value. I implemented his 2-minute rule years ago and will implement others now.
• Locus of control – People who want to drive the direction and outcome of their life (rather than having life happen to them) may see immediate value in several concepts in Allen’s framework.
• Brain – Allen believes the brain is better suited to making connections between ideas and creating new ideas than to storing information. He cites a study to support this. I agree. I’m more creative and insightful when I’m not worrying about everything I’m managing. Allen’s framework is good for generating more ideas and insights.
• Wisdom – Wisdom is the ability to apply knowledge in a manner that aligns with the desired outcome. Wisdom means changed behavior and improved decision-making—knowing what to do and when to do it. President Hoover once said, “Wisdom consists not so much in knowing what to do in the ultimate as knowing what to do next.” Allen’s ideas around continuously and quickly identifying next actions can be powerful and accelerate the acquisition of wisdom.

I’m glad I revisited this book. I’m looking forward to testing ideas it triggered.

This book contains ideas that are useful for anyone looking to be highly productive and approach work in a disciplined way.

For founders looking for a better way to manage the inevitable chaos of company building, wanting more creative or strategic time, or wanting to be more in the driver’s seat of their life, the ideas in this book are a great starting point, and many are worth cloning.