Five Podcasts That Changed My Life
I have an obsession with podcasts.
Ever since moving to New York City, podcasts have been a part of my daily routine. I'd listen on my walk to work, on my walk to lunch, and on my walk home. This came out to about an hour of listening per day. At 2x speed (which I worked up to over time), this meant I was listening to 10 hours of conversations per week.
My process for taking notes on them was simple. Any time I started a new episode, I would pop upon a fresh page in the Drafts app and paste in the link. Any idea that resonated, I would make a little note. At the end of the week, I would comb through these notes and save the links and best ideas.
Over the past few weeks, I've started digging through this library of notes I've created. I was looking to remind myself of some ideas I'd forgotten or ones that are more relevant to me now.
After going through these notes, I came away with the five podcasts episodes that had the biggest impact on my life. These episodes were easy to find because they had the longest and most detailed notes.
So let's dive in. Here are those five episodes and the three biggest lessons I learned from each of them.
1. Jim Collins on the Tim Ferriss Show
Guest bio: Jim Collins (jimcollins.com) is a student and teacher of what makes great companies tick, and a Socratic advisor to leaders in the business and social sectors. He has authored or coauthored eight books that have together sold 10+ million copies worldwide, including Good to Great, Good to Great and the Social Sectors, Built to Last, How the Mighty Fall, Great by Choice, and his newest work, Turning the Flywheel.
This episode is my favorite podcast of all time. I say this because the three ideas I walked away with are three ideas I think about every single day.
1. The Hedgehog Concept
Your hedgehog is a simple, crystalline concept that flows from deep understanding about the intersection of three circles:
- What are you deeply passionate about? (that you love to do and that absolutely reflects your values)
- What can you be the best in the world at? (and equally important, what you cannot be the best in the world at?)
- What drives your economic engine? (what will the world pay you to do?)
The most successful people have simply found their hedgehog.
2. The Flywheel Principle
The Flywheel principle — a series of good decisions, supremely well-executed, taken with discipline thought, that added up over time will inevitably produce a great result.
Creating a flywheel should be the goal of any system you create. Your health, wealth, relationships, and career should each be flywheels themselves and be part of the giant flywheel of your life.
The key principles of a flywheel:
- Every spin reinforces the next one.
- The 100th spin is easier than the 10th spin is easier than the first spin.
- You can't point to any single event that makes the flywheel spin - every part plays an equally important role.
3. Bullet, Bullet Cannonball
Before firing their cannonballs, pirates on a ship will fire a few bullets to make sure they are aimed correctly. Once they know they're hitting the side of the enemy ship consistently, they fire their cannonball.
The same concept can be used to make decisions and take risks. When considering a new opportunity, start with calibration. Take a few small bets - fire your bullets - until you are highly convicted in your decision. Then, go all in - fire your cannonball.
2. George Mack on Modern Wisdom
This episode was my introduction to mental models. If you imagine that your mind is an operating system, mental models are the apps you install into it which improve your ability to effectively make decisions. Here are three mental models I use every day from this episode.
1. Inversion
Avoiding poor decisions is easier than making the right ones.
The inversion principle is simple: instead of thinking of what to do to solve the problem, ask how you could guarantee the problem persists.
Then avoid doing those things.
This has been so influential to me that I wrote an entire post on it.
2. Optimizing for time and energy
When measuring new opportunities, I start with a simple question: will this bring me more time and energy?
Our time and energy are our scarcest resources. Use them wisely.
The more decisions we make with this in mind, the more our time and energy can compound exponentially.
3. High-agency
I believe high agency is the number one indicator of future success.
It's a simple binary: do you believe you can influence your own outcomes or not. When you're told something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation? Or does that start a second dialogue in your mind, how to get around whoever it is that's just told you you can't do something?
High-agency people believe that stories given to them by other people are just that - stories. And they believe they have control over that story.
Low-agency people are more passive and accept the story that is told to them. They see their outcomes as immutable and feel they have little control over their lives.
Long story short - have high-agency.
3. Naval on The Knowledge Project
Naval is one of my favorite thinkers and modern-day philosophers. His thoughts on wealth and happiness resonate so heavily with me. This episode was my introduction to him and sent me down the rabbit hole of [his website.][0]
1. Happiness is a choice
People think happiness is something that happens to you. Instead, think about happiness as something you make happen, something you can control.
- Happiness is a skill.
- Happiness is a choice.
- Happiness takes practice.
- Happiness is a lack of desires.
- Happiness is consumption equilibrium.
2. Compounding
All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
The number one rule of compounding: don't interrupt it necessarily.
Everyone has their own thoughts on compounding, but they all have the same punchline: compounding is so big and so important we can't wrap our heads around it.
3. How to think about reading
This episode completely changed the way I think about reading books. Naval's framework for reading is simple
- The number of books you read is a vanity metric. Read for understanding and curiosity.
- Treat books as blog posts. Exit the ones that don't resonate.
- Read what you love until you love to read.
- Read Lindy books - books that have stood the test of time.
4. Tobi Lutke on The Tim Ferriss Show
Tobi Lutke is the CEO of Shopify and one the clearest thinkers I've ever listened to. Few people can distill ideas as concisely as he does in this episode. The three ideas that resonated most:
1. Raise your ground state
We are the sum of how we spend our time.
Your ground state is your baseline level of habits. When you have nothing to do, what do you do?
Successful people simply have elevated ground states. They spend their free time doing things that push them forward.
The best example: if given an hour of free time at the end of the day, are you reading or watching Netflix?
Raise your ground state <== data-preserve-html-node="true" data-preserve-html-node="true"> Raise your output.
2. Find your next box
Life is a series of moving from one box to the next.
Every step of the way you are breaking out of a narrow box to a relatively larger one.
Elementary school → middle school → high school → entry job → management job → ...
The corollary: focus on learning from people a box or two ahead of you. This means when you break into that box, you'll be at an advantage.
3. Craving feedback
The highest performers crave feedback and get it from different sources.
They see honest feedback as a gift.
They see failure as the discovery of something that did not work.
And most importantly, they seek a barbell of feedback from juniors and superiors.
5. Annie Duke on The Peter Attia Drive
This episode single-handedly changed the way I reflect on my process and audit my decision-making. Annie Duke is the author of Thinking in Bets and How to Decide, two of my favorite books on becoming a better thinker and decision maker.
1. Life lessons from poker
Learning to play poker will change the way you see the world. There are many lessons you can learn, but a few of the most important:
- Be mindful of table selection.
- Respect the law of large numbers
- Reflect on your decision-making process.
- Having skin in the game leads to better decisions.
- Keep a tight feedback loop - learn from every hand
2. Backcasting and Premortems
These two frameworks are part of my go-to reflection questions as a way to reverse engineer success and avoid mistakes.
Backcasting: reverse engineering your outcomes. Decide on an outcome, implement the system to achieve it.
Premortems: reverse engineering failures. Fast forward to a future failure. Think about what led to it. Avoid doing those things.
3. Process over outcome
Auditing your decision-making process is essential for long-run success.
Successful operators separate luck from skill and process from outcome.
Bad outcome, good process -> works in the long run.
Good outcome, bad process -> fails in the long run.
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