1. The Growth Mindset is the belief that your basic qualities can be cultivated with focused effort. Growth minded people never plan to make it to the top — they got there by doing what they love, regardless of the outcome.

2. The Fixed Mindset is the belief that your qualities are carved in stone. People with the fixed mindset believe their skills are static and crumble when faced with a challenge.

The funny thing about the mindsets is that you can exemplify both during different seasons of life.

As a teenager, I was obsessed with setting my high school’s shot put record. After achieving it, I felt a fleeting moment of elation, which taught me that achievement doesn’t make you fulfilled.

During a different phase of my teenage throwing career, I was focused on iterative improvement. This taught me that improvement is a better goal than achievement. It all depends on your mindset.1

Ability and Accomplishment

Benjamin Bloom spent forty years studying why made high achievers tick. He concluded that:

“What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn, if provided with the appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.”

Any level of expertise is available to anyone. It all depends on your mindset.

This principle can work for or against you.

1. If you’re a beginner committed to improving, you will eventually pass the less committed experts in your field.

2. If you’re an expert, you need to keep improving, or you’ll get passed by a beginners that are committed to improvement.

I. In Sports

Many of the GOATs (greatest-of-all-time) in sports started out as the WOAT (worst-of-all-time).

• Michael Jordan was cut from his freshman basketball team. Later he said, “The mental toughness and the heart are a lot stronger than some of the physical advantages you might have.”

• Tom Brady split playing time with Drew Henson at Michigan. Then Brady was picked 199th overall by the Patriots. Only to be seventh on the QB depth chart, struggling to get playing time.

The mark of a champion is the ability to quickly recover from setbacks.

II. In Business

At work, growth minded people surround themselves with strong teammates. They’re capable of evaluating their own mistakes and constantly ask what skills are needed for their team’s success.

• Growth minded bosses are open to learning, feedback, and confronting obstacles with clear eyes.

• Fixed minded bosses make everyone worried about their performance and bring down the overall team’s performance.

Growth minded companies are focused retention and unlocking the potential of their employees. They don’t look for people who “have it in their DNA”.

Instead, they recruit for learning ability.

Employees in a growth culture believe that risk taking, creativity, and innovation is supported. Even if they fail.

III. In Relationships

Romantic relationships can be hard for high achievers.

In virtually every facet of life, if you fail, the blame is all on you. But when a relationship fails, there’s three things at play:

1. You.

2. Your partner.

3. Your relationship.

   (Was it meant to be? Can this relationship improve?)

Growth minded people believe relationships take effort. Compromise, communication, and conflict resolution are required to work through inevitable differences.

• Problems can be a vehicle for developing greater intimacy. Don’t dilute yourself into thinking your relationship will be all sunshine and roses.

• Get better at communicating and understanding each other’s thoughts, needs, and feelings. Don’t fall prey to the low effort belief that your partner should be able to read your mind.

IV. In Coaching

Legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden was famously obsessed with growth.

“You have to apply yourself each day to becoming a little better. By applying yourself to becoming a little better every day over a period of time, you will become a lot better.”

Equilibrium doesn’t exist in the physics of continuous improvement. The iterative process of improving leads to success. It includes hard work, trying new strategies, and seeking input from others.

Your process dictates your outcomes. If your hard work isn’t getting result, ask yourself why your efforts aren’t effective.

And above all, be weary of success. Just because you’re successful once, doesn’t mean you will be again. Instead, ask yourself, “Did I give my best effort?” If you did, you’ve already won regardless of the outcome.

How To Change Your Mindset

The growth mindset is based on a belief in your ability to change.

You subconsciously (and consciously) keep mental track of what’s happened to you, what that means, and what you should do. Frequently audit your thoughts. Keep them if they’re serving you well. If your thought aren’t serving you, update them.

The growth minded person recognizes that people stand out because of commitment, effort, and (a little) luck.

By combining effort, strategy, and time, you’ll probably have similar results. If you aspire for results bigger than you’re seeing now, realize that you’re in a necessary period of learning. Fall in love with putting in effort and results will come with time.

Once a problem improves, it’s easy to stop doing what led to the solution.

Change doesn’t work that way. Improvements have to be supported or they’ll go away faster than they appear. One way to avoid this is by asking yourself every day, “What are my opportunities to learn and grow today?“

Change is hard. But you’ll never regret changing your life for the better.

You’re capable of doing incredible things. Go forth: Change your mindset and change your life!

Thanks for reading.

Being world-class acquiring specific knowledge will set you apart from AI. Doing so will make you valuable and irreplaceable.

A 1981 study in The American Economic Review coined the term “Superstars”, or a small number of people who earn disproportionately more.

There’s a steep demand curve for the best. Everybody wants to hire the best. Few want to hire average.

II. The Automation Of Entry Level Jobs

Failing to get really good at one thing means bouncing from one cookie cutter role to the next as AI repeatedly replaces your job.

Last May, I wrote How To Not Lose Your Job To AI, in which I detailed how:

“Specific knowledge is information that cannot be taught at scale. Pick up and capitalize on specific knowledge because this is what AI cannot spit out answers for.”

Ironically, the examples of specific knowledge I used in that essay have already been automated with AI.

As a result, you need to be at the bleeding edge of technology and creativity.

III. The Growing Importance Of Social Skills In The Labor Market

I’m nerding out over a working paper by David J. Deming called “The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market” (emphasize mine):

“The labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force. Math-intensive but less social jobs — including many STEM occupations — shrank by 3.3 percentage points over the same period.

Employment and wage growth was particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and social skill. To understand these patterns, I develop a model of team production where workers “trade tasks” to exploit their comparative advantage.

In the model, social skills reduce coordination costs, allowing workers to specialize and work together more efficiently… Using a comparable set of skill measures and covariates across survey waves, I find that the labor market return to social skills was much greater in the 2000s than in the mid 1980s and 1990s.”

---

Most of the knowledge I use in my job at Salesforce, I learned on the job. Social skills is the lubricant that helps workers more freely trade information to win as a team.1

Workers that will excel in the decade ahead will be have the following skills:

1. Social Skills: Being a likable, high EQ person makes you an easy partner to “trade” knowledge with.

2. Specialist Skills: Having some unique, useful knowledge that you can “trade” to others.

By working well with others, you and your colleagues win as a team. 1 + 1 = 3. A rising tide does indeed lift all ships.

While she yapped about how the Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, I’d zone out. And day dream about football, girls, and what was for lunch.

What struck me is everything underneath the tip of the iceberg. I was equally amused as I was skeptical. Did success really require hard work, persistence, late nights, and rejections?

At 12, I had no idea. I hadn’t done anything impressive yet. My idea of “success” was running up a kill streak a in Halo: Reach.

A decade and a half later, I’ve come to realize that success does require all those things under the iceberg.

There’s a joke among tech sellers that the best salespeople can never turn it off. They’re always selling.

Whether it’s trying to convince their novice buddy to snowboard at a bachelor party (true story). Or negotiating a flippin’ sweet Valentine’s date to the Field Museum followed by China Town.

I even see it in myself. I’m a Solution Engineer. Which means I’m solutioning all the time, even when I don’t mean to.

There’s a great Mediterranean spot near us called Pita Inn, with a great Kofta Kebab sandwich. Whenever I order it with added potatoes + tabbouleh on the phone, they take the order, and I’m on my merry way to Flavor Town. But when I order in-person, Jerusalem-style isn’t an option.

I spent a full 30 minutes on the way home from church convincing my wife that their Point-Of-Sale (POS) system was the issue. And how they could potentially fix it, resulting in a better customer experience, and heightened loyalty.

See what I mean?

Holding all else equal, the more hours you dedicate to your craft, the better you are. And the better you are at your craft, the more money you will make.

This chart may over simplify the concept. But all else held equal, the more you work, the more money you’ll make.

Mastery is one path to higher earnings. Just like the corny iceberg of success poster from 7th grade, mastery requires a lot more beneath the surface. You’d never know how hard the best sellers work when you see them in action because they make it seem so… smooth.

To the outside observer (me), it’d seem like they’re naturally born to sell. And maybe they are. But reason why they’re so good is they’ve spent hours perfecting their craft. Even when they’re not “working”.

And their earnings show it.

It’s best to combine multiple skills into a combination that’s so uniquely you that you’ll be irreplaceable.

The late Scott Adams advised his blog readers to become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. By being very good (though not necessarily great), you will be successful.

Decide what you want to get better at — which is often a moving target over time. And pursue mastery of those things with dogged persistence. Like an olympic athlete competing for a gold medal.

Newton’s First Law of Motion (inertia) states that an object at rest stays at rest. And an object in motion remains in motion, unless acted upon by an external force. Your career is subject to Newton’s First Law.

Inertia works for you when decades of hard work in a specific career path make you highly employable. It works against you when it’s wildly challenging to break into a new industry.

The beauty of work ethic is that it pays compounding results in the future. By working your ass off and parlaying your early wins today into bigger wins tomorrow, your career will compound over time.

With time, all your hard work behind the scenes will pay off.

I’m 29. I’m early in my journey of growing my career, building wealth, and finding joy through it all. I often forget that hard work is the greatest asset to accomplishing all three.

If my 12 year old me could give 29 year old me some advice, while staring at the iceberg of success, it’d be this:

Success is the tip of the iceberg. It’s the result of all the things you don’t see. Stick with it. Keep working hard.

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner

You combine hard work, discipline, and strategy to create a life of abundance for yourself, your loved ones, and your community.

Grant’s Story

1) Financial Mutants combine hard work with strategy to increase their earning power.

You recognize that the most valuable asset is you. And that the acquisition of specific knowledge increases your earning power.

You’re also aware of the premium that soft skills like creativity, curiosity, and lifelong learning have in the global economy. You actively strive to improve your soft skills to be an in-demand employee.

You also recognize that of all the soft skills, focus is the most valuable in the 21st century. Thinking strategically and focusing on the right things will set you apart in the long term. Having the ability to focus deeply on one thing at a time will make you unstoppable with.

2) Financial Mutants know the value of a dollar and spend their money well.

Rather than pinching nickels, eating beans and rice, and clipping coupons, you find ways to get the most out of life. You know how to ball on a budget. Especially in your first leg of the journey to $1M. You know how to get that proverbial financial snowball rolling. And create moments you’ll feel nostalgia for later in life at the same time.

You also know when to splurge. For your expensive tastes, you know exactly what you like, why you like it, and what’s worth spending a little more or a little less on. You have the financial self-knowledge to know that grilling the $20 Costco steak at home is better than buying the $60 ribeye from the steakhouse downtown. And that the $30 sushi buffet is light years better than the $6 sushi from the grocery store.

You’ve figured out your “enough”. Which could be $10M living in a beach house in Seabrook Island. Or $600K living in a trailer next to Barton Creek in Austin.

Whatever your definition of “enough”, you have the cajones to define it and get it.

3) The Financial Mutant applies timeless financial advice to the new economy.

You’re aware that with enough time, the path to $1M at retirement is a mathematical certainty. But the cost of living is higher than ever before. And $1M at 35 is jaw droppingly more useful than having $1M at 65.

The faster you become financially free (without missing out on life), the longer you get choose how to spend your time, give back to others, and pursue meaningful things — whether it’s reading every American classic novel on the beach in Milos, Greece. Or continuing to work the same high paying job without regard for the paycheck. It’s entirely your choice. Money gives you the option to choose.

You use brute force to reach the mathematical halfway point to $1M ($250K invested). And let the snowball roll, baby, roll. You have the patience to allow it to keep rolling. And toss on more snow as it crashes down the hill until it’s the right size for you.

Above all, you recognize that money is a tool. It’s neither good nor evil. It’s a reflection of your character, so you the luckier you get, the more generous you become.

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How To Do Hard Things

The fact that you’re aspiring for a role like this tells me you’re already on track to do great things in your career. But this recurring question is also an indication of a knowledge gap that I hope I can fill for you.

Even if you aren’t dead set on becoming a Solution Engineer at Salesforce, this roadmap can help you become a sought after candidate for any position in tech.

P.S. Feel free to share this resource with others.

1. Don’t immediately focus on applying; instead start learning.

Sign up for a Trailhead account. And download the Trailhead iPhone app. Complete Trails, rack up points, and get badges.

Rather than wondering what you should learn, go out and learn what genuinely tickles your curiosity. That will take you far in this job search and in your career.

Get at least Ranger status (100 Badges/50,000 Points). This is typically the minimum threshold for Hiring Managers of entry-level SE jobs to take you seriously.

Next, get Salesforce certified. Start with the Salesforce Foundations exams. They cost $75 each and there’s six of them.

Buy a practice test and study guide from Focus On Force, and get studying!

I got hired with Salesforce Sales Foundations (an easy cert) and Agentforce Specialist (a hard cert).

Because the role requires continuous learning, you need to commit to continual learning and certifications.

2. Let others know what you’re learning.

I learned firsthand that getting a tech job is hard in this brutal market. A VP Sales at my last job told me how to get noticed.

Since you’re actively doing Trailheads, write about what you’re learning on LinkedIn.

This will build trust with hiring managers at scale and help you get noticed faster.

If you’re not sure what to write about, you can:

1. Write about the topics on job descriptions for roles you want.

2. Summarize the Trailheads you’re learning. Look at my profile if you want some examples.

3. Publish your Ranger status and certifications on LinkedIn.

3. Go to in-person networking events.

Going to an in-person networking event?! It sounds old school. But it works.

Join your local Salesforce groups by looking in the Community section of Trailhead.

If you live in a dense city, like Chicago, where I live, there will be a lot. If you don’t live in a dense city, find the nearest city to you.

Go to the events. Learn. Get to know the partners. Exchange LinkedIn profiles. And post about what you learned on LinkedIn.

Follow the Salesforce Marketing Managers on LinkedIn (Kyren Wong, Kaela Altman, Joel Primack). They will post about virtual Community Meet Ups, which you should attend.

4. Talk to hiring managers because they make hiring decisions.

Don’t waste your time on informational interviews (including talking to me). I don’t make hiring decisions. Hiring managers make hiring decisions.

Don’t waste your time reaching out to recruiters, either. If a hiring manager wants to hire you, you’ll breeze through the phone screen anyways.

Do you see a theme? Get in front of managers by sending LinkedIn DM’s with your new Salesforce-optimized profile.

Diversity is a guiding principle at Salesforce. There are managers of many backgrounds and walks of life. Find someone whose background is similar to yours and reach out.

Here’s an example of a good cold networking message:

Don’t reach out to 2nd line and 3rd line managers, either. Hiring managers aren’t as keen about new hires that have been passed along to them by their boss or their boss’s boss.

Measure your success by how many coffee chats you set up with hiring managers.

5. Interview like a pro.

The pinnacle of Salesforce’s SE interview process is a 60-minute panel demo presentation. It’s meant to condense the entire SE role into a concise evaluation of your ability to demo.

This was the slide deck I used for mine.

You’ll also get paired with a current employee on the team you’re interviewing for.

Meet with them daily to validate your thinking, course correct you, and ensure that you’re on the right track. They will steer you the right way.

The panel demo presentation is how they decide whether you’re a “yes” or “no” decision, so make it count.

6. You can do it.

When it comes to tech sales, it’s less a matter of “if” you’ll get a job, but more so a matter of “when” you’ll get a job.

Once you’ve proven you have the hard qualifications by posting your learnings on LinkedIn, you have enough to get your foot in the door.

Now you have to prove it by selling the best product out there: you.

How To Connect With Me

Thanks for reading. If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to reach out.

— Grant Varner

Connect With Me On LinkedIn

John Krasinski, also known as “Jim” from The Office, delivered Brown University’s 2019 Baccalaureate address. I remember the speech well because I graduated this year. I was sitting in the back row.

In a way, I felt like the speech spoke directly to me. You’ll find the lessons within it as useful as I did.

Speech Transcript

(Picks up at 6:22)

Believe it or not, they asked me to come up with a title for this speech. The name I came up with was: “What do I know?”

Funny enough, that line went from being a jokey device I used to deflect my own fears of being up here on stage to a genuine challenge to myself:

What do I know that I tell you about that can possibly illuminate the future that stands in front of you?

I know that tomorrow you’ll receive a paper that says you’ve received one of the best educations there is. I also know that that education didn’t necessarily happen in the classroom.

I didn’t feel like I deserved to get into Brown. So I made it my mission to deserve to graduate from Brown.

I was admitted as a mid-year. Which means that I was one of 32 students who started in January. Cold, alone, and afraid.

I remember immediately trying to find my place. To find my group. My people.

There was a moment I tried walking on to the Brown basketball team. My brother, Paul, was team captain so I communicated with the coach about walking on. It was January, mid-season, so I walked up to meet with the coach. I opened up the door. As the door swung open, by the time it reached the end and was coming back I said, “Nope. No way.”

These guys were too big.

Too good.

And it was just after lunch and they were on their second practice!? No thank you.

So I turned around, walked straight through campus, when something caught my eye. I saw a flyer for a sketch comedy group called Out Of Bounds. I remember the flyer catching my eye because it nailed to… a tree? I thought:

“I hadn’t been at Brown long, but I thought protecting trees was your thing?”

So I went in for the audition. And my entire life changed. Not because I got in. Not because I started acting. It was through that group that I found my way into this community. It was through that group that I met my people. And all of a sudden I was surrounded by the most inspiring peers. Every single one of them seemed way cooler than me. And way more interesting.

One of the best decisions I ever made was to lean all the way in. Not to acting. I really wasn’t good enough to act here. The only parts I’d ever gotten in a play was Armed Guard #4 and Terrified Hostage Guest #2…

That’s right. When I was at Brown we did Die Hard: The Musical. You guys really missed out.

No, I didn’t get to throw everything into acting. But I did throw everything I had into this unparalleled pool of brilliant people.

People often ask me how I got into acting. But the truth is I didn’t get into acting.

I got into everything.

Believe it or not, when I got to Brown, I hadn’t listened to any music that wasn’t in the radio. I’d never seen any movie that wasn’t in the multiplex.

One day, I asked a small group of friends to each give me one of their favorite movies, favorite albums, and they did.

Every week. For four years.

It was the experience of my life. One of the most mind blowing, mind expanding experiences.

And no drugs were necessary.

It was, without a doubt the beginning of everything. For the next four years, I wanted to be part of it all. I formed a new way of thinking. A new way of executing those thoughts.

I leapt out of my comfort zone. Then stayed there. Then leapt again.

I experienced the powerful shift in doing something out of love, rather than out of necessity. I learned what it meant to believe. I took chances. I failed. And I took more chances.

So yes, in the classroom I received one of the greatest educations one can possibly get. But the piece of paper I got at graduation also represents that education.

The piece of paper I got not only says where I was educated, but who I was educated with. And it declares that I am a member of a community of people to be relied upon to take risks. To provoke thought. And to be committed participants in this world.

The piece of paper I got represented every facet of my experience. The piece of paper I got is the exact same piece of paper you’re going to get tomorrow. The piece of paper I got, I lived my life by every single day.

Because when looking at this sense of nervous that you’re feeling now upon graduating, ask yourself:

“What’s it based in?”

Is it based in the unknown? Because if so, my question to you is:

“Up until now, how else have you approached each new tomorrow?”

And if your nerves are based on a fear of failure, my question to you is:

“Up until now, how have you defined success?”

Because in this community, without the presence of financial gain, isn’t the definition of success simply defined as you being onto something? Taking an idea farther than it had ever been before? Why does it ever need to change? It doesn’t.

Or if your nerves are based on something bigger. The fear of the world at large. Well, to that I say, “Yes it’s true. They’re right.”

The future does indeed belong to you.

But the abstract weight of the responsibility to change it over night does not. Real change is organic. The only responsibility you have is to hold fast to everything you’ve lived right here. To not conform. To realize that when you’re out in the world, you’ve done all this before. Right in here.

Remember fondly the discomfort when you were asked to push farther than you were ever sure you would go. And the wash of elation when you finally got there.

Remember to be scared. You’ve been scared before. You’ll be scared again.

Find more of your people. Lean all the way in. Take chances. Fail big. And take chances again.

Listen to music. Remember to believe in something. And fall in love as many times as it takes.

And remember: Before you do something special. Just do something.

The truth can almost seem too simple. But the simple truth is the program you ran here is the same program. Just run it again. And again. And again.

That’s what I know.

Thank you to this class. To this institution. It’s my honor. Thank you.

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner

One good idea for work, life, and writing is to communicate minimally.

• Communicating minimally makes it easier for the listener to follow your direction.

• Writing minimally makes it easier for the reader to act on your advice.

This is what minimalist writing looks like. Last year I wrote a quick, 600 word essay about wealth.1

Initially, I was embarrassed because it read more like a Tweet thread than a blog post. But the advice was actionable.

To this day it’s still in my top 5 most read posts.

This is not what minimalist writing looks like. I recently spent weeks writing a 4,000 word blog about how LLMs work.2

Upon hitting ‘publish’ it was one of my least read newsletters in a long time.

Since then, I deleted over 2,000 words, and now it’s actually picking up traction.

The lesson (to me) is that people (including me) don’t want to read a dissertation.

They want short, actionable advice. So they can get on with their day.

When I played college football, my defensive line coach was adamant about brevity during in-game communication.

During a night home game vs. Harvard my sophomore year, Daryle, my Nose Tackle and I were discussing the backfield before a crucial play on 3rd down.

In the middle of our discussion, the center snapped the football. We both got our noses smashed by a wave of Crimson offensive linemen!

The next morning while breaking down game film, our D-Line coach circled his laser pointer around Daryle and I during our heated discussion.

He rightfully said, “When you communicate, you don’t need to give a dissertation! Get to the f***ing point!”

He was right. Get to the point.

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — Arthur C. Clarke (1962)

The Wizard of Oz used smoke, fire, and a booming voice to create the illusion of power. Every munchkin in the land of Oz was convinced of the wizard’s wonderful powers.

But his facade was foiled when Dorothy and her dog Toto, go to meet him. Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal Oz’s true nature: a regular, ordinarily sized man with a larger than life imagination.

With all the hype around LLMs, it feels timely to pull a Toto, by yanking back the curtain, to reveal the magic of Chat GPT. And why we’re headed for a third AI Winter.

Modern LLMs (GPT-3)

Chat GPT is a generative AI system that uses large language models to simulate conversation. The illusion hiding behind Chat GPT’s Ozian curtain can be summed up with a simple equation: Web Scale Data + Transformer Architecture.

Web Scale Data

OpenAI’s GPT-3 was trained on 500 billion tokens — the equivalent of 5,000 books. This is what it was trained on:1

Common Crawl makes up 60% of the training weight. It’s a corpus of 9+ petabytes of data collected every month since 2008 — for nearly two decades. The data is similar to the Google Indexed Page Search database, except that it includes history, meaning it includes snapshots of web pages that were once online but have since been deleted.

If you want the juicy details on WebText2, here’s OpenAI’s original paper that announced its predecessor, WebText, the training dataset used for GPT-2.2

WebText2 made up 22% of the training data for GPT-3. It consists of the filtered text of all web pages from Reddit posts that got 3 or more upvotes. The goal of this data source is to train on human-generated content. But there’s an unfortunate downside to capturing human-made content (even with filters):

Content made by humans can be inappropriate, divisive, and outright vicious.3 Harmful output from LLMs is a mirror image of the fallen nature of humanity.

Another 16% came from two datasets of internet-based books corpora — with a random sample of a small subset of all public domain books available online. The final 3% comes from Wikipedia.

As the saying goes, “you are what you read”. Chat GPT is extremely well read, with training data from over 5,000 books. Therefore it’s book smart. But it doesn’t have any sensory data to have a practical knowledge of the real world. While useful, LLMs lack the street smarts and common sense to be a realistic pathway to Artificial General Intelligence.4

Transformer Architecture

In 2017, eight AI researchers from Google published “Attention Is All You Need” — an influential paper that introduced the transformer architecture to the world.5 Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” This paper is one of those giants. Nearly every major breakthrough in the last decade of AI was built on its shoulders.

The transformer architecture is so influential because it introduced the ability to parallelize (or break something down into smaller parts). Quick story to explain what that actually means.

When I was learning how to read when I was little, I struggled. My eyes would leap around the page, reading the words out of order — it was frustrating because I didn’t understand what I was reading!

Until one day I was reading Magic Tree House at my sister’s gymnastics practice, and something just… clicked. By scanning the words on the page sequentially, I cracked the code of reading. It was like a watching a movie with my mind!

Compared to human brains, computers can read a lot more information at once. But it still has a limit to the amount it can process. So what does it do? It uses a transformer architecture to read entire blocks of text simultaneously using parallelization.

So how does Chat GPT gobble up 5,000 books during pre-training? It reads in parallel, processing many tokens of text at once. But when it writes, it puts one token at a time (sequentially) with each token getting computed with tons of parallel math under the hood.

LLMs can provide plausible (though often hallucinated) answers based on linguistic patterns. But they cannot make claims about truth, judgment, or pattern recognition. The human brain is the superior pattern processing machine. LLM’s are a lower quality imitation. Under the hood, GPT-3 is an illusion of intelligence.

Isaac Newton is also credited with saying “what goes up must come down” in reference to the law of gravity. Today, it refers to the irrational, predictable, and cyclical exuberance of AI followed by a unmet expectations, as we’ll soon see with AI.

AI Winters

On May 9, 1973, at the Royal Institution in London, a debate ensured. Sir James Lighthill, a British mathematician, and critic of AI engaged in a heated debate against John McCarthy and two of his colleagues.

The debate was sparked by a damning report published in 1973, titled “Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey”, to evaluate the state of AI research.

The outcome of the debate resulted in a catastrophic loss of funding for AI in the United Kingdom and helped trigger the first “AI Winter”. A term to describe when the delta between expectations and reality trigger a loss of funding towards AI research.

The First AI Winter (1974-’80)

Roger Schank and Marvin Minsky — two leading researchers warned the AI community of the first AI Winter.

They described a chain reaction, similar to a nuclear winter, that would begin with pessimism in the AI community, followed by pessimism in the press, a severe cutback in funding, and the end of serious research.

Thankfully, the 1970s AI hype was isolated to academic and defense-driven investment (via DARPA). As a result, it didn’t crash the stock market. But the results of the 1973 Lighthill Report did cause DARPA to cut funding to AI research.

The Second AI Winter (1987-’93)

The second AI Winter was triggered by a collapse of the AI hardware market. As a result, over 300 companies were bankrupted or acquired, and it paved the way for Apple and IBM to become market leaders.

The Third AI Winter

Since the early 50’s, there’s been a repeating hype cycle. A new computer technology gets invented. It gets dubbed “AI”. There’s a swell of enthusiasm, research, and investment.

Eventually it reaches a point of diminishing returns and stalls. Enthusiasm for AI dies down. And the groundbreaking technology goes back to being called its technical term.

It happened to bayesian networks. It happened to Markov chains. And (maybe) it’ll happen to large language models.

Lacking Enthusiasm for AI

Overall, Americans are expressing concern, rather than excitement for AI. Specifically on the fear that we’ll become too dependent on AI and our humans skills will erode as a result. I share this fear as well.

A handful of Americans provided interview responses to a handful of questions from this Pew Research Center survey.

“I think a sizable portion of humanity is inclined to seek the path of least resistance. As annoying and troublesome as hardships and obstacles can be, I believe the experience of encountering these things and overcoming them is essential to forming our character.” – Woman, age 30-39

A teacher had concerns about he students developing skills because of AI:

“As a school teacher, I understand how important it is for children to develop and grow their own curiosity, problem-solving skills, critical thinking skills and creativity, to name just a few human traits that I believe AI is slowly taking over from us. Since children are digital natives, the adults who understand a world without AI need to still pass the torch to children for developing these human qualities with our own human brains, instead of relying on the difficulty to be passed on to AI so that humans don’t have to feel the struggle of what real learning is.” – Woman, age 40-49

Even teens nowadays are skeptical about the benefits of AI (specifically LLMs like Chat GPT). They’re either not using it entirely, or limiting their use to specific use-cases.

If the perception of AI progress takes a nose dive, that could cause the AI house of cards to topple, like it did in the AI Winters of the 70’s and late ‘90s.6 That’s why the best thing OpenAI can do is what it’s already been doing. Investing in storytelling. Shaping the narrative. Playing Pokemon Red.7

Humans Strength Over AI

The difference between you and Chat GPT is a God-given human ability to make aesthetic judgements. Chat GPT is trained on 5,000+ books worth of text - more than a human is capable of reading. But only a human like you has the taste to discern what’s quality and what’s not in the little (compared to an LLM) you do read.

The human brain has a secret sauce that experts of cognitive research still don’t understand. You are capable of connecting your life experiences, observations, and information into a story that AI could never.

That’s the beauty of being human. It’s why I love being human.

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner

1

As a quick note, GPT-3 is the latest model I was able to find pre-training weight data online. It’s now common practice to withhold AI training weight data, for a variety of reasons (to protect intellectual property, maintain a competitive advantage, and reduce legal liability). I guess OpenAI isn’t so “open” anymore.

It’s also worth calling out that this isn’t the only data that LLMs use. Depending on the model, there’s different sources of data. Once again, and unfortunately, OpenAI and the other leading AI labs are quiet about how they’re training newer models.

7

Given that at 6 years old, I beat Pokemon Silver with an overpowered Typhlosion, poor reading ability, and a helpful big sister — I’d hope AI can do the same. Update 3/23/26: Well, Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.5 are getting pretty damn close.

Buy The Wealth Ladder on Amazon

Earning Up The Wealth Ladder

As your income increases, so does your wealth. Your income today is the bedrock upon which all your future wealth will be built tomorrow. In a word, get your money up, not your funny up. But beyond W-2 income, there’s four kinds of leverage to make more money:

1. Labor: Paying someone to work for you is one of the oldest forms of leverage. It requires you to rely on your workers.

2. Capital: Using your own (or someone else’s) money to increase your wealth.

3. Content: Anyone can share content at scale (that’s what I’m doing with this blog). But because everyone can easily share information, competition is fierce. It requires (i) excellence and (ii) consistency to stand out.

4. Code: Like content, anyone can sell code. But it requires a highly technical skill, and is highly competitive.

The .01% Rule

Sharp income drops are more likely among high earners.1 Consuming based solely on your income puts you on unsteady ground. Personally, this opened my eyes. My household earnings are higher than average for the typical American my age, but it’s a good reminder that layoffs are frequent, so it’s important to live below my means, save, and invest.

When it comes to spending, it’s better to spend based on your liquid net worth using the .01% rule: You can spend .01% of your liquid net worth without worry. If you have $200,000 in cash, you can spend $20 worry free. The distinction here is liquid net worth. If your money is tied up in your 401(k) like mine is — it’s better to spend care free based on what’s in cash.

Level 2 ($10K-100K): Grocery Freedom

You can buy what you want at the grocery store without worrying about your finances. At this stage I started buying ribeye steaks from Costco.

To ascend past $100K net worth, find work at the intersection of:

1. What you’re good at.

2. What you’re interested in.

3. What people will pay for.

And whenever you’re in doubt about your career, work harder — especially at sub-$100K net worth. Per Sam Altman:

“Working hard early in your career to get the leverage and compounding effects is underrated and one of the most valuable pieces of advice that I ever got.”

Level 3 ($100K-$1M): Restaurant Freedom

You can eat what you want at restaurants. At this stage I tried buying steaks at restaurants, only to find out that steaks I grill at home taste much better.

To get to your first $1M, it’s best to start fast, then coast later. If you invest more earlier, and stop contributing later, you’ll be just fine. Just don’t overdo it though — in either direction.

Save your money, but still be willing to spend your money on fun things. Otherwise you might come to regret it when you do reach the $1M milestone. I’m going skiing for one of my college friends’ bachelor party — along with one of my buddy’s who I played college football with at Brown.

Since we both have never snowboarded before, we each dropped $600 on lessons. My knee jerk reaction was to think this is an absurd amount of money. But at the same time, it’s gonna be so much fun — and a memory I’ll have forever.

On the other side of the same coin, avoid overspending. Homeowners with $100k-$1M tend to have 65% of their assets in their home. In most cases, your primary residents is a use asset — just like a car. Try not to stretch yourself too thin by buying something above your means so that you can keep the snowball rolling to fund the life you want in the future.

If you avoid overspending, increase your income, and invest consistently, Level 4 ($1M+) will come in a jiffy.

Level 4 ($1M-$10M): Travel Freedom

You travel when and where you want.

Your 9-5 job that got you to $1M won’t get you to $10M. Equity is how you get there.

“To become rich, every single percentage point of anything you own is crucial. It is worth fighting for, tooth and claw. It is worth suing for. It is worth shouting and banging the table for. It is worth begging for and groveling for. In extremis, it is even worth negotiating for. Never, never, never, never hand over a single share of anything you have acquired or creating if you can help it.” — Felix Dennis

Level 5 ($1M-$10M) households have 31% of their assets in businesses. Start a business. Buy a business. Get equity. I’m not at $1M+, so my focus isn’t here yet. But one day it will be.

Level 5 ($10M-$100M): House Freedom

You can afford your dream home with little impact on your overall finance.

The characteristics that got someone to $10M are likely the same ones that will prevent them from stopping when they do get there. Being money-driven has advantages, but beyond being able to pay for the basic necessities, no amount of money will ever satisfy. In fact, there’s convincing evidence that going beyond $10M+ net worth might actually be a downgrade to your life.

Loss of trust: Wealth can change your relationship with others because you don’t know if they are interested in you or your money. This is why the friends you had before you’re wealthy are so important. Because you know they liked you for who you are and not because of the wealth you have today.

Increased stress: One study found that the relationship between wealth and mental health an inverted U shape. In other words, more wealth is associated with better mental health… to a point. Beyond the peak, more wealth led to decreased mental health. William Vanderbilt echoed this sentiment when comparing his life to a less wealthy neighbor:

“He isn’t worth a hundredth part as much as I am, but he has more of the real pleasures of life than I have. His house is as comfortable as mine, even if it didn’t cost so much; his team is about as good as mine; his opera box is next to mine; his health is better than mine, and he will probably outlive me.

And he can trust his friends.”

Altered family dynamics: Moving up the Wealth Ladder often requires sacrifices from you and from your loved ones — no matter how you ascend the Wealth Ladder. If you have a demanding job, this could lead to long hours and time away from your family. If you run a business, that might also take time from family, and doing other things that you love.

Level 6 ($100M+): Philanthropic Impact Freedom

You can use money to have a profound impact on the lives of others (e.g., engage in large-scale philanthropy, buy businesses, etc.).

One problem some face while ascending the Wealth Ladder is that the higher you climb, the more wealthy people you meet — many of whom will be wealthier than you. Misha Saul explains relative deprivation:

“The more of an outlier you are in any respect (money, intelligence, beauty, chess, archery, whatever), the larger the gaps between you and the next best above and below. If you are median wealth, well, so are many others (by definition).”

As a result, you can feel like you need to catch up to those wealthier than you. Wealth can morph your perceptions past the point of necessity.

Does Money Buy Happiness?

As Kahneman and Deaton found in their 2010 paper, “Unhappiness decreases with increasing income, but there is no further decline beyond ~$75,000.” No one is immune to unhappiness, no matter how much money they have.

Money itself doesn’t make people happier. But what money allows you to do, can make you happier. The comedian Bill Hicks once said, “Money can't buy happiness. But it can buy a jet ski and have you ever seen someone frown while riding a jet ski?”

All this being said, the ideal strategy for maximizing happiness seems to be having enough money to alleviate struggle and worry, then focus on things other than money. As the saying goes, “Money can’t buy happiness, but poverty can’t buy anything.” Felix Dennis has a net worth of $750 million. Regarding wealth, he once said:

“If I had my time again, knowing what I know today, I would dedicate myself to making just enough to live comfortably (say $60 or $80 million), as quickly as I could — hopefully by the time I was thirty-five years old. I would then cash out immediately and retire to write poetry and plant trees.”

The Great Enhancer

In the same way that salt enhances the existing flavor already in your food, money elevates the experiences you have in life. My wife and I love sushi. Spending $30 on all-you-can eat at a spot near us is light years better than buying the $6 sushi from the grocery store. It’s still sushi. Just better.

Eventually comes the question: I already have enough money. How do I get more “flavor” out of life? Sahil Bloom lays it out in The 5 Types of Wealth:

Social Wealth: Dr. Matthew Lieberman found that seeing a friend on most days was worth making an extra $100,000/year. Being married was worth an additional $100,000. Seeing your neighbor regularly was worth $60,000. What’s more, leaving a toxic relationship, or changing jobs due to a bad boss will dramatically improve your life.

Mental Wealth: According to a 2021 report by Pew Research Center, work was one of the biggest sources of meaning for people across seventeen advanced economies. If you don’t love your work right now, that’s OK — but that should be your goal. Because work can be a great source of fulfillment. To quote Richard Nixon:

“The unhappiest people of the world are those in the international watering places like the south coast of France, Newport, Palm Springs, and Palm Beach. Going to parties every night. Playing golf every afternoon, then bridge. Drinking too much. Talking too much. Thinking too little. Retired. No purpose. As so, while I know there are those who would totally disagree with this and say, ‘Gee, if I could just be a millionaire that would be the most wonderful thing. If I could just not have to work every day. If I could just be out fishing or hunting or playing golf or traveling, that would be the most wonderful life in the world’, they don’t know life. Because what makes life mean something is purpose. A goal. The battle. The struggle. Even if you don’t win it.”

If you want mental wealth, don’t avoid work, embrace it. And if you believe that your work has purpose, you’ll have greater meaning in your life.

Physical Wealth: The Roman poet Virgil once wrote, “The greatest wealth is health.” Over two thousand years later, the rapper Pusha T said, “Ask Steve Jobs, wealth don’t buy health.” The earlier research from Dr. Matthew Lieberman also found that health was “by far the most valuable non-monetary asset researchers examined. To be maximally healthy, there’s two metrics worth pursuing: (i) Physical strength. In a study of active male firefighters, those who are stronger had a 96% reduction in heart attacks. (ii) Cardio strength. Having a VO2 max in the top 2.5% for your age drops your risk of death by 80%. Even going from the bottom 25% to the 50th-75th percentile reduces your risk of death by 50%. For context, a non-smoker only has a 29% lower chance of death compared to a smoker.

Time Wealth: I take after Charlie Munger who said, “The first $100,000 is a b****, but you’ve gotta do it.” I’ve written about how starting fast, then coasting is the best route for a wealth building journey.

My (Grant Varner’s) Journey Up The Wealth Ladder

Currently, I’m at Level 3 ($100K-$1M). Here’s what I’ve learned along the way.

Start fast, then coast. Because of the power of compound interest, it’s easier to start fast, and coast through the finish than is to start slow, and rush to the finish to make time. So far, this principle has served me well in building wealth. It taught me that when it comes to wealth-building, it’s far easier to sprint out of the gates. By intensely focusing on maximizing income, minimizing expenses (without overdoing it), and investing the rest, I got the snowball of compounding interest started.

I don’t know how it feels to be playing catch-up on your financial life at age 50, but I can tell you that I never felt like I was missing out on anything. Even though I was financially disciplined, I was able to backpack through Europe, take two trips to Big Bend National Park, eat out often with friends — mostly at Juan in a Million or Terry Black’s BBQ — visit Egypt and Greece, try and fail at starting a hot sauce business, and pay for a wedding.

If you’re young and trying to sprint out of the gate ASAP, then you’re in luck because time is on your side. The first step is to get your income up.

On August 12, 2023, I invested my first $100,000 — a big financial milestone. Last month, I hit another financial milestone: $200,000 invested. That day, I wrote in my journal, “When I hit $100k, I thought my life would change. It didn’t. Now I’m at $200k and my life still hasn’t changed.”

In retrospect, that wasn’t 100% accurate — my life did change a lot during the time I grew my net worth from $100k to $200k. But it had nothing to do with money, and everything to do with relationships. I married the love of my life. I went to the weddings of some of my best buddies from High School and College. I went on vacation to South Carolina with my family. I don’t have enough money. Because I never will. But I still have more than enough.

The Wealth Ladder is the exact book that I needed at this moment in my life. If you’ve read this far, it’s likely that it’s the exact book you need, too. Like Nick, my goal is to build wealth my own way — the Grant Varner way.

Buy The Wealth Ladder on Amazon

Whew… you made it! 2,500 words later. As always…

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner

Perched on top of a hill in Kentucky sits a white monastery. Here, an order of Trappist monks are hard at work weaving baskets.1 Monks like Thomas — who lived there from 1941 until his death — support themselves by selling their hand woven baskets.

The work is deliberately humble and repetitive. The purpose of their work is spiritual formation.

Machines can weave baskets better, faster, and more cheaply. But the monks weave by hand because it sanctifies them in the eyes of the Lord.

Today AI has the ability to do the work that humans used to. What happens when we outsource physical and mental labor to computers?

The morality of AI use depends on human choices. There’s nothing wrong with AI. But the ends for which you use it matter.

Human creativity is a gift from God. Using it glorifies Him by reflecting His perfection in a small way. A note from the Catholic Church on AI put it succinctly:

“God ‘gave skill to human beings, that he might be glorified in his marvelous works’ (Sirach 38:6). Human abilities and creativity come from God and, when used rightly, glorify God by reflecting his wisdom and goodness.”

RECURSIVE AI SYSTEMS

In January 2026, artificial intelligence researchers Arend Hintze, Frida Proschinger Åström and Jory Schossau published a study showing what happens when generative AI systems are allowed to run autonomously – generating and interpreting their own outputs without human intervention.

The researchers linked a text-to-image system with an image-to-text system and let them iterate – image, caption, image, caption – over and over and over.

Regardless of how diverse the starting prompts were – and regardless of how much randomness the systems were allowed – the outputs quickly converged onto a narrow set of generic, familiar visual themes: atmospheric cityscapes, grandiose buildings and pastoral landscapes. Even more striking, the system quickly “forgot” its starting prompt.

The researchers called the outcomes “visual elevator music” – pleasant and polished, yet devoid of any real meaning.

For example, they started with the image prompt, “The Prime Minister pored over strategy documents, trying to sell the public on a fragile peace deal while juggling the weight of his job amidst impending military action.” The resulting image was then captioned by AI. This caption was used as a prompt to generate the next image.

After repeating this loop, the researchers ended up with a bland image of a formal interior space.

This happens because:

Without the creative touch of a human, AI-generated output predictably regress to the same generic looking text, images, and video. Hardly a representation of God’s wisdom and goodness.

Today, you can write an essay in seconds with AI. But that doesn’t mean it’ll be aesthetically beautiful — or have a human touch. Well written essays require two uniquely human skills:

• (i) A taste for aesthetics to identify good ideas across subject matter domains.

• (ii) A mental model of the world (and your human experience) to synthesize these ideas through.

If you’re interested in how to acquire these skills, read this essay:

Writing, to me, is like free-style building Legos without the instructions.

If you’re good at Lego (writing), and someone handed you a cluster of haphazardly connected Lego pieces (AI-generated text), the first thing you’d do is dissemble the pieces to their raw parts (cherry pick the few meaningfully AI-generated sentences).

What does creative expression look like through the medium of AI?

HUMAN x AI CREATIVE EXPRESSION

Zach London uses AI to create post-apocalyptic storytelling like this.

Despite producing his videos with AI, Zach’s process is painstaking — and clearly only possible with a discerning human.

During an interview with Dear Future, he describes his process:

“Every video starts with a script. For a single set of characters, I run probably 400 prompts and 1600 images. And that’s just to get the faces right. That level of iteration doesn’t show up in the final video. You only feel the polish, not the mountain of attempts behind it.”

His art — despite using AI — still contains the criteria for a uniquely human creative act:

• (i) A taste for aesthetics to identify good AI-video output for his stories.

• (ii) A mental model of where the world is headed as the basis for his futuristic stories.

The Proverb Of The Farmer

There’s a Taoist proverb from the 4th century B.C. about a farmer who dug an irrigation ditch on top of a hill. The farmer would routinely descend the hill to a well, fetch water, and pour it into the ditch.

His efforts were excruciatingly difficult. And his results were painfully meager.

A passing traveler — trying to be helpful — suggested:

“There’s a way you can irrigate a hundred ditches in one day with less effort. All you have to do make a draw well. Take a wooden lever, wighted at the back and light in the front. With this, you can bring up water so quickly that it gushes out.”

Angrily, the old farmer responded:

“When you use machines, you work like a machine. When you work like a machine, you grow a heart like a machine. With the heart of a machine, you lose touch with your soul. I refuse to lose touch with my soul. It’s not that I have no knowledge of how to make a draw well. I refuse to lose what makes me human.”

There’s dignity in doing work — whether it’s carrying buckets of water, writing essays, or making videos.

Receiving the fullest Grace of human labor is possible from anywhere. Whether your work place is a monastery, high rise office building, or standing desk in your bedroom.

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner

1

The Trappists are an order of Catholic monks. They’re monastic, which means they renounce worldly pursuits to fully devote themselves to spiritual activities. Think of it like the Christian version of a Tibetan monk.

One weekend after Apple hit a 3-year record low stock price, Steve Jobs went to Macy’s in Palo Alto to study kitchen appliances.

The following Monday, Steve bounded straight to the iMac team, and said:

“Buy a Cuisinart. Study its lines, curves, and bevels. Then write a new draft of product design changes. The first iMac should have a friendly appearance.”1

After launching, the iMac became the best-selling computer. Apple eventually rebounded, becoming the first $1 trillion company.

II. Contrarian Thinking

Terry Oyama, who worked on the original iMac team credits Steve for teaching him what it meant for a computer to be “friendly”.

”Even though Steve didn’t draw any of the links, his ideas and inspiration made the design what it is. To be honest, we didn’t know what it meant for a computer to be ‘friendly’ until Steve told us.”

Steve had the foresight to know the aesthetic value of a computer, insisting that it should look friendly — like your grandma’s Cuisinart kitchen appliance.

This was a contrarian idea.

Microsoft was the market leader. But they lacked the ability to make valid judgements about aesthetic value.

In Steve Jobs’ view, that’s why Microsoft builds third rate products.

“The only problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste. Absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way — I mean that in a big way. They don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.”

Fonts, for example, come from old books. Had Steve not seen the aesthetic value of different typefaces, and programmed that into the iMac, this essay’s font might be in plain Times New Roman rather than Slab.

III. How To Have Taste

Taste is the ability to recognize what is aesthetically excellent. There’s three ways to develop aesthetic taste:

1. Read old books that have been around for centuries. If an idea has stood the test of time, it’s worth reading.

2. Strive to write something high quality (like I’m trying to do with this essay).

3. Make aesthetic judgements yourself. The amount of ‘likes’ on social media has replaced independent judgement of aesthetic value — keep ‘flexing’ your knack for taste by asking yourself ‘what is quality?’.

In doing so, you refine your taste, broaden your understanding of what is truly good, leading to more tasteful work in the future.

That’s how you develop a taste for aesthetics. Just like Steve Jobs.

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner

High performance will get you more of what you value—whether that’s flexibility, pay, or recognition. Companies work hard to please high performers because they deliver 100%-500% more output than average- or below-average colleagues.

In a word, it’s better to be a high performer.

What Is A High Performer?

A high performer is someone who consistently delivers better results relative to 75% of their peers.

• “Consistently” means you regularly do those things—it’s not just an occasional flash of brilliance.

• “Relative” means your performance is better than others’—not just the goal.1

This book shows you how in 8 steps:

1. Set Big Goals

Goal-setters outperform non-goal-setters. But too many goals are distracting. Doing three things extremely well is better than struggling to achieve many. Set fewer goals.2

2. Behave To Perform

How you’re perceived at work influences your performance, network, image, and ultimately, your success. You need to:

1. Understand how you’re naturally wired to behave. I, for example, am an INTP Myers Briggs. I have a tendency to dive deep into the weeds of work.

2. Identify which behaviors are most important for success at work. At my work, being social & collaborative is rewarded.

3. Develop an action plan to quickly adapt to those behaviors. I’m treating socializing as part of the job—not just an optional activity.

Remember: Your greatest strength—turned up to an extreme—can become a weakness and hold you back.

3. Grow Yourself Faster

Think of growth as a cycle—perform, get feedback, perform again better.

The faster and more frequently you move through that cycle, the faster you’ll develop.

With time, you’ll acquire many skills that help you perform better at your job.

4. Connect

Your immediate manager is your most critical working relationship.

• Poorly performing employees with strong relationships with their managers get higher performance ratings.

• Employees get promoted faster when their manager gets promoted faster.3

• But the more you benefit from a relationship with your manager, the more risk your behaviors pose to your reputation with your peers.

5. Maximize Your Fit

When your capabilities match what your company needs, you’ll be better positioned to succeed.

Great performers can become average performers (and vice versa) overnight when their company changes their definition of “great”. Ask your manager what behaviors are needed today.

6. Fake It

Don’t become fixated with showing up as the “real you” at work. Instead, show up as a stylized version, aligned to the behaviors that are rewarded on your team.

There are three behaviors you should “fake” to get noticed as a high performer:

1. Self Promotion: Vocalize your good ideas and appear self-confident while doing so.

2. Making Friends: The best way to make friends at work is through sincere flattery.4

3. Showing Ambition: The best way to show your manager that you have a competitive edge is by (i) delivering high quality work, and (ii) calling out others who aren’t performing to the standard of the team.

7. Commit Your Body

Being physically fit won’t automatically help you be a high performer. But it can help.

• Sleep: With less sleep, your creative problem solving will decrease, you’re less innovative, and more moody. Get quality sleep.

• Exercise: People who are physically fit have a strong ability to plan, manage yourself, and pursue goals.

• Diet: Caffeine provides consistent, proven, work performance benefits. Drink your coffee.

8. Avoid Distractions

Focusing on your strengths will help you be better at the exact thing you’re good at today. But it won’t help you be good at anything else—what got you here won’t get you there.

A young Kobe Bryant used this strategy to become a complete basketball player. By incrementally focusing on different skills, he eventually became an expert.

Conclusion

High performance is a choice. Focus on what’s in your control, and ignore the rest!

Thanks for reading.

— GV

Good writing is almost always ancient wisdom, repackaged for the present moment. That’s why most self-help books (to me) feel like a derivative of “The Art Of Living” by Epictetus.

High-output writers don’t invent new ideas every week. They repeat the same ideas—slightly differently—over and over again.

Technology changes.

Language changes.

But good advice rarely changes.

No one embodied that mindset more than Jason Zweig, long time writer of the Intelligent Investor column for The Wall Street Journal.

In an essay worth bookmarking, he writes:

Zweig articulated a truth about writing that I had an inkling about, but never been able to fully articulate until now:

Great writers repeat the same (good) advice many times.

Becoming An Idea Machine

Ben Thompson, founder of Stratechery, publishes an insane volume of high-quality analysis every week.

He opened up about his writing process in an interview with on How I Write:

1. Have an overall view of the world and how it works.

2. Process news and information as it happens.

3. Feed that information into your ‘worldview machine’. The output is your content.

Great writers operate like Henry Ford’s Model T assembly line.

Use the same components (your worldview), in different configurations (your essays), to create a high volume of output (your body of work).

How My Writing System Is Changing

Here’s how I’m putting these principles into practice:

1. Defining my worldview. The handful of truths I have high conviction in.1

2. Being unafraid to revisit the same old advice in different ways.

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner

The first lesson of history is modesty. At any moment a comet could destroy Earth in an instant.

“When the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing.”—Blaise Pascal (1654)

History is subject to geology. Generations of men before us have established a growing mastery over the earth. But the influence of geographic factors diminish as technology grows. Man, not the earth, create civilizations.

But in the end, we’re all still destined to become fossils in the soil.

II. Technology

Science & technology has changed more in the last 200 years than in the previous 10,000 years. To quote Charles Péguy:

“The world changed less since Jesus Christ than in the last thirty years.”

Technology moves faster than man has time to evolve. As a result, all technological advances are merely new means of achieving old ends.

Further, technology is powerful—but neutral.

• (i) It can kill more quickly than it can heal.

• (ii) It can destroy more quickly than it can build.

Today, we can consume information from anyone across the globe via the internet. Yet sometimes we envy our ancestors, whose peace was only disturbed by the news of their small village.1

III. Morality

A universally accepted moral code is necessary for civilization. Religion and Communism are like two buckets in a well. When one goes down the other goes up.

• Religion prevails during periods when the law is weak and morals must bear the burden of maintaining social order.

• Communism prevails as the rising power of the law permits the decline of the church, the family, and morality without endangering the stability of the state.

There is no significant example in human history (before now) of a society successfully maintaining moral life without religion.

IV. How Civilizations Collapse

Civilizations begin, flourish, decline, and disappear.

• What are the causes of growth? The agency of creative individuals with clarity of mind and energy of will—capable of responding to new situations with good ideas to progress civilization forward.

• What are the causes of decay? A failure of leadership may allow a state to weaken itself with internal strife. A decisive defeat in war typically brings the final blow.

V. War

Every year some new invention, method, or situation compels a fresh adjustment of behavior and ideas.

War accelerates this trend.

In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only have 268 have seen no war. Peace is rare.

When a nation dies from war, man picks up and moves on. With it, he brings his memories with him, and he establishes a new home elsewhere.

VI. Population Growth

War is one way Mother Nature restores balance to a growing population. The other two ways are famine and pestilence. In his Essay on Population (1798), Thomas Malthus explained that:

“Without these periodic checks, the birth rate would so far exceed the death rate that the multiplication of mouths would nullify any increase in the production of food.”

It’s ironic that the greatest thinkers in 1798 worried about whether the food supply could keep up with population.

Today we know that food supply did keep up, and the current fear is how the declining birth rate in developed nations will affect the economy.

VII. Economics

Every economic system must rely upon some form of the profit motive to stir individuals to productivity.

More complex economies put a premium on superior ability—thus intensifying the concentration of wealth.2 We’re seeing this today with our K-Shaped economy.

VIII. How Civilizations Progress

Civilization is inherited. Because of the work done by generations before us, we are born into a richer heritage—on a higher level thanks to the accumulation of knowledge and art which elevates man.

To paraphrase Walter Isaacson from “Ben Franklin: An American Life”:

The central theme of Ben Franklin’s life was progress: the idea that individuals and humanity improve based on a steady increase of knowledge.

I share this opinion. I have a responsibility to contribute in some way to make my small part of the world better.

Hopefully you learned something new from this summary of The Lessons Of History.

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner

Back in the 1970’s, my late grandpa sold computer hardware for IBM.

He used to tell my sisters and I stories about closing multi-million dollar deals—back when a 1 GB hard drive deal was enough memory to support all of Ohio State University’s IT infrastructure.

Things are much different today.

1 GB of memory can fit on a memory stick for $5, not millions of dollars. As a sales professional—who’s staked his entire career on software—it makes me wonder: Is software the next cost in technology to collapse?

Moore’s Law

Back in 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, predicted that computing power would double every two years, for the next decade.

He was wrong.

Computing power actually doubled every two years for six decades—50 years more than he originally predicted.

As computing power increased, so did the cost of computing power. To put just how much in perspective, the memory you’d find on a modern laptop at Walmart used to cost $20 billion in 1950.

The Devaluation of Software

Jury’s still out on the productivity gains to be had with AI. Some say AI is improving productivity.1 Others say it’s the opposite—that AI actually hurting productivity.

What we can say with absolute certainty is that AI will increase the supply of simple software. A 101 understanding of supply and demand tells us that:

• When simple software gets easier to make, the price goes down.2

• If complex software remains difficult to make, it stays expensive.

The real question is will complex software remain difficult to make?

This is changing the economics of SaaS for buyers — and the ‘ole IT question of “should we build or buy?” Before AI, engineering time was expensive ($200k/year) and SaaS was cheap ($50/seat). It made zero sense to build your own CRM, SMS, or Email platform. Today, that equation is flipped.

With Agentic Engineering, the cost to build is collapsing. A lean team of engineers (or even one “Forward Deployed” architect) can spin up fully custom, enterprise-grade workflows in a weekend. Why pay $10k/year for your SMS platform when a developer can Claude Code one for $200 in AWS compute?

Here’s the reality: the cost of building the alternative is the moat for SaaS. The next 5 years might look less like “which SaaS tool should we buy?” And more like “why are we buying this at all?”

All this doesn’t mean companies like Salesforce will go away. But I am afraid that because it’ll become increasingly difficult for early-stage tech startups to break in because buyers can easily build themselves. While it’ll be great because so much innovation will be happening within IT departments with AI. But not great for any fledgling software startup trying to find their niche in the market.

Tech Innovation Isn’t New

In a 2014 Stanford guest lecture, Peter Thiel explains why some businesses thrive, and others become obsolete.3

“The dynamism of new monopolies itself explains why old monopolies don’t strangle innovation. With Apple’s iOS at the forefront, the rise of mobile computing has dramatically reduced Microsoft’s decades long operating system dominance.

Before that, IBM’s hardware monopoly of the 1960s and ‘70s was overtaken by Microsoft’s software monopoly.

…the history of progress is a history of better monopoly businesses replacing incumbents. Monopolies drive progress because the promise of years or even decades of monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate.”

As technology evolves, businesses create new value with something different.

For example, Google invented PageRank algorithm, an entirely new way to index web pages. For years, it was the easiest way to search for information on the web.4

They reaped the benefits for years with monopoly profits.

Creativity Is Always Valuable

I’ve staked my livelihood on selling software—just like my grandpa Ken did with hardware. Each wave of new technology raise the bar for what’s possible—and make other technologies obsolete.

If you solve expensive problems that are difficult to solve, you’ll have a competitive moat.

Same as it ever was. Before AI and always will be.

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner

1

Applications like Waii make it easier for business users to generate code with natural language, like this example of converting natural text into SQL.

During a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting in 1998, the late Charlie Munger said, “The first $100,000 is a b****, but you’ve gotta do it.”

With a net worth of $2.6 billion when he was laid to rest, he knew the power of compound interest. And that getting the snowball rolling in the first place is harder than letting gravity run its course.

The challenge is getting the snowball ball big enough to get rolling—so you can lay off the gas.

Start Fast, Then Coast

When I ran track & field in high school, I often had to do cross fields. These were long repeat sprints diagonally across the football field.

Our sprint coach timed us so you couldn’t dog it. It was an all out burst for 110m+.

In May, as we entered post-season the humid, muggy, Ohio days made these horrible to do. But I learned a valuable lesson that’d serve me well in high school track, college football, and now building wealth.

It’s easier to start fast, and coast through the finish than it is to start slow, and rush to the finish.

Inspired by Munger, I set out to ‘pack on the snow’ as fast as humanly possible—like I did in high school track.

But is $100k in 2026 the same worthy wealth building goal it was in 1998? Hardly.

One hundred grand back in 1998 is worth $198,847.85 in 2026.1 It’d take a high paying job to get there.

After soliciting the advice of some people who are smarter and more successful than me, I landed upon a potential path: tech sales.

The Payoff

From 2019-2024 I made $535,374.57 in W2 earnings. It worked. Most importantly, I managed to save a lot of that.

As of December 26, 2025 (28 years old), I finally have my proverbial snowball Munger talked about—adjusted for inflation.

I currently have $200,000 in tax-advantaged retirement accounts, invested in low cost index funds. Better yet, $55,470.84 (over 25% of my portfolio) was from growth—early signs of the rolling snowball.

Assuming a conservative 6% interest rate—and assuming I don’t contribute another cent for the rest of my life (other than reinvesting the interest), I’ll have $1,363,976.45 to retire on by 60.

But here’s the rub: I’ll never actually have enough money. But that’s OK because I already have everything I need in life.

I Already Have Enough

Paradoxically, two things are true about money and happiness.

1. No one has enough money. If you asked anyone—of any amount of wealth—they’d think they need more money to be happy.

2. I already have enough money because I don’t need any more money. I already have what I need to be happy: God, family, and friends.

On August 12, 2023, I invested my first $100,000–a big financial milestone.

This past week, I hit another financial milestone: $200,000 invested. That day, I wrote in my journal.

“When I hit $100k, I thought my life would change. It didn’t. Now I’m at $200k and my life still hasn’t changed.”

In retrospect, that wasn’t 100% accurate—my life did change a lot during the time I grew my net worth from $100k to $200k.

But it had nothing to do with money, and everything to do with relationships.

I married the love of my life. I went to the weddings of some of my best buddies from High School and College. I went on vacation with my family.

I don’t have enough money. Because I never will. But I still have more than enough.

Thanks for reading.

— GV

Gonzalo García-Pelayo became a millionaire playing the roulette wheel.

In the early 1990’s, he gathered & analyzed roulette wheel data at the Casino Gran Madrid.

With enough data, he figured out how small imperfections in each roulette wheel tilted the odds in favor of landing on a few specific spots. Whereas a spot on a typical roulette wheel has a 1-in-37 chance of hitting, he found that some had up to a 1-in-30 chance of hitting.

He used this strategy to win over $1.5 million. Gonzalo monetized on specific knowledge he had acquired.

II. Specific Knowledge

Specific knowledge is a unique, personal expertise that can’t be taught. It’s built through passion, innate talent, and curiosity — the type of stuff they don’t teach you in school. It’s important to understand specific knowledge because it can help your market value reach astronomical heights. But first, where’d that term even come from?

Frederick Hayek popularized the idea of ‘specific knowledge’ in 1945 with his article The Use Of Knowledge In Society. His thesis is that many types of knowledge are fragmented, local, and impossible to centralize.

“Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge.

But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place.

It is with respect to this that practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active cooperation.

We need to remember only how much we have to learn in any occupation after we have completed our theoretical training, how big a part of our working life we spend learning particular jobs, and how valuable an asset in all walks of life is knowledge of people, of local conditions, and of special circumstances.

To know of and put to use a machine not fully employed, or somebody’s skill which could be better utilized, or to be aware of a surplus stock which can be drawn upon during an interruption of supplies, is socially quite as useful as the knowledge of better alternative techniques.

And the shipper who earns his living from using otherwise empty or half-filled journeys of tramp-steamers, or the estate agent whose whole knowledge is almost exclusively one of temporary opportunities, or the arbitrageur who gains from local differences of commodity prices, are all performing eminently useful functions based on special knowledge of circumstances of the fleeting moment not known to others.”

Hayek is saying that there’s highly unique forms of knowledge. On a supply and demand curve, these kinds of knowledge are in low supply. If that unique knowledge also happens to be in high demand, then you have a niche you can capitalize on to increase your earnings.

If you have deep & rare knowledge in something that’s not commercially in demand — like knowledge of Pokemon cards, your market value won’t be that high. Likewise, if you have expertise in something saturated — like a bachelors degree — your market value likely won’t be as high, either. The sweet spot is having expertise in area that’s both high demand and low in supply. That’s where the price for your time (your salary) will be highest.

Because everyone has different backgrounds, experiences, and hobbies, everyone has specific knowledge that’s unique to them. The acquisition of knowledge is straightforward — by pursuing your hobbies and genuine interests. For example, when I was a kid I loved building LEGOs. Today, there are YouTubers who document their LEGO builds. There are also authorized LEGO resellers who’ve built businesses that combine their passion for LEGO with a profession.

If a young Grant Varner wanted to start a project like this, I’d have to combine multiple forms of specific knowledge to be successful. Like how to start a brick (pun intended) and mortar retailer. Or how to edit videos. Here lies a valuable lesson:

Combine multiple forms of specific knowledge to increase your market value.

And I’m not talking about getting another masters degree. I mean specific knowledge, the kind you acquire by going down rabbit roles by your own volition.

The AI boom in tech is a great example of the commercial opportunity of specific knowledge.

III. Market Value in Tech

I’ve worked through several innovation cycles within the tech industry: First, it was IoT (Internet of things). Next, it was CDP (Customer data platform). Today, AI (not gonna define that) is all the rage. It can pay really well if you can find a genuine interest for long enough to develop legitimate experience.

Many companies have a desire to use AI to become ‘agentic enterprises’. But tech talent for people who actually understand enterprise AI is scarce. As a result, Forward Deployed Engineering jobs are up 1,165% because AI Agent deployment is hard to do. There’s a lot of money out there for anyone willing to put in the time to learn.

Just look around. Tech companies are dropping millions to hire AI native grads. Which is bananas — but hey, that’s supply & demand. Some AI researchers are even negotiating $250 million pay packages, as if they were pro baseball players. There’s a ton of opportunity in agentic AI. Merely being in an AI exposed role can accelerate your earnings.

This knowledge on the bleeding edge of new technology is just one example of the vast sum of information floating around out there, that’d be highly profitable to have. By acquiring nuanced knowledge in specific areas you can increase your earning potential. Many of the skills needed in AI today are new. Just about anyone with a laptop and the desire can land a lucrative role.

So there’s a lot of money to be made in the ‘AI gold rush’. How do you get in on the game? The 2025 Future of Jobs Report by the World Economic Forum suggests that while hard technical skills are useful, marketable, and lucrative — so are a growing number of soft skills.

This report has been my North Star for how I’m thinking about the future of skills. Tech hiring managers are seeking the ability to learn new technology fast, rather than actually knowing those technologies right now. Having an aptitude for curiosity and lifelong learning (which also happens to be the #8 on the 2025 future If Jobs Report) is also a top priority, too. 1

And it makes sense. AI’s made it possible for big tech companies to shorten their release cycles, making it more important than ever to learn new tech fast.

To my surprise, creative thinking is also an in-demand skill on the report. Tech is evolving so fast that you need technically fluent people good at communicating a story both orally and in the written form. What’s more, the emergence of AI writing suggests that being capable of writing convincingly about technology will become more rare with time.

IV. To Sum It All Up: Work Hard

Career advice today is harder than ever. Some parents who work in tech are encouraging their kids to go into the arts. Others think the trades might be a path that’s safe from AI. Regardless of path, Thomas Jefferson was spot on when he said, “I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have”. When in doubt, working hard will yield opportunities in the long run.

Even without a clear game plan, if you work hard, you’ll learn new skills and acquire specific knowledge.

Gonzalo García-Pelayo, the roulette winner from earlier, used the information he acquired to become a millionaire. Though unconventional, that’s how it works. Acquire information. Use that information to earn. Rinse and repeat.

It reminds me of that scene from Ocean’s Eleven, where Rusty (played by Brad Pitt) asks Danny Ocean (played by George Clooney) why he’s targeting a particular casino for a Las Vegas heist.

Rusty: …I need the reason. Don’t say money. Why do this?

Danny: Why not do it? ... Because the house always wins. Play long enough, you never change the stakes, the house takes you. Unless, when that perfect hand comes along, you bet big, and then you take the house.

V. Going All In

Roulette is a gamble. So is life. The more information you have, the better your bets will be.

The Venture Capital model relies on a few massive winners. 1, maybe 2 startups out of 20 will generate most (or all) of a fund’s returns. Life works the same way. A select few key bets during your life produce asymmetric returns.

When you get that high conviction feeling about something, put all your chips on the table and go all in. Because that’s when you get outsize returns.

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner

In 47 B.C., the Library of Alexandria held most of the world’s knowledge at the time.1 One can only imagine how much more knowledge was lost when it burned down.

Today—with the emergence of AI—I fear the supply of human knowledge might be on track for a similar fate. And why creating is the best way to preserve the long-tails of human knowledge on the internet.

II. AI and the Problem of Knowledge Collapse

Unlike the Library of Alexandria, the greatest threat to humanity’s collective intelligence isn’t to a burst of flames—but to a slow decay known as “knowledge collapse”—where over time, our increasing dependence on large language models reduce the need for the production of human generated content.

The LLM’s that AI Engineers build feed on the accuracy, clarity, and structure of human-created content. When you replace technical writers, editors, and subject matter experts with AI, the human layer of the feedback loop erodes. Over time, the models begin to feed on itself, creating an echo chamber of decaying truths.

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Before AI, all text and art was produced by humans— in some cases aided by computers. The fact that large language models are capable of generating text, images, audio, and video with virtually zero human effort, suggests that we’re increasingly exposed to AI-generated content.

A commonly held, optimistic view, is that knowledge will continue improve over time. But if you look at the course of human history, as Andrew Peterson, Ph.D. did in a recent research paper (2024), you’ll see plenty of examples where knowledge was lost.

In addition to hard facts—like recipes for concrete or steel—the distribution of knowledge across humankind also vary over time.

For instance, in 10,000 B.C., the average hunter-gatherer probably knew the difference between a blueberry and a poison berry. By contrast, I have to ask my wife what a Kumquat is at Trader Joe’s. Today it’s less useful to be an expert at identifying poisonous plants than it was for our ancestors.

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That’s not to say that no one can identify poisonous plants today—many can. But just because knowledge exists doesn’t necessarily make it useful. The relative utility of specific knowledge ebbs and flows over time.

The “knowledge collapse” facing the human race today is triggered by the possibility of AI models being trained on the output of other AI models, possibly leading to a reduction in the long-tails of specific human knowledge. In Andrew Peterson’s view (2024), we can mitigate some of the harm from knowledge collapse. As long as:

1. We’re aware of the possible value of niche, specialized, and eccentric perspectives that may be neglected by AI-generated data.

2. AI-systems are not recursively interdependent. In other words, AI shouldn’t train on AI.

3. AI-generated content is as representative as possible of the full distribution of knowledge.

If all we need to do to avoid knowledge collapse is to produce more niche, long tail content, why don’t we just do that? One reason is an incentive problem.

III. No Incentives

When Google’s PageRank algorithm dominated search, it incentivized SEO-optimization techniques to rank higher. This sometimes led to annoying trends like link farming, keyword optimization, and spamdexing.

Today, the strength of LLM’s—being great at locating, synthesizing, and connecting information—have made it possible to locate information in ways that could cannibalize the stock of knowledge online. Greg Ip, Chief Economics Commentator for the Wall Street Journal speculates what could be lost as a result of AI.

“If LLMs come to dominate the business of answering questions, those incentives shrivel. There is little reward to creating knowledge that then gets puréed in a large language blender.”

Greg Ip, Will AI Choke Off The Supply Of Knowledge? (WSJ)

Despite being fantastic at blending text into a word smoothie, LLM’s have an ugly downside. They don’t add anything to the stock of knowledge.

Nowadays, ChatGPT has become the go-to for getting questions answered. That’s a problem because it’s reducing the amount of human-to-human dialogue happening online to find the answers to niche questions.

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Stack Overflow, a Q&A website for software developers is a great case study. Back in Google’s hay day, it was harder to search for the specific knowledge needed to solve hard coding problems. Today ChatGPT is capable of answering many of the questions that used to happen online. In fact, shortly after ChatGPT’s release, activity on Stack Overflow reduced by 25%, which creates an interesting problem that you might’ve already seen coming.

In other words, AI trains itself on the knowledge contained on Stack Overflow. AI provides great answers, thus reducing the need to engage in dialogue, taking away the stock of knowledge that future AI models can train on. Fast forward a decade from now, where’s the stock of knowledge that future AI models can train on? Like a snake eating its own tail, the human knowledge reduces itself to nothing—a regression to the mean. But this problem might’ve been hinted at for some time now, thanks to dead internet theory.

IV. Dead Internet Theory

Dead internet theory says that since about 2016, the internet’s consisted of bot activity and automatically generated content. You might not even realize it, but when you engage with or read the conversations on social media, many of the amplifying ‘voices’ actually belong to bots. Elon Musk recognized it circa 2022 during his takeover and privatization of Twitter (now X).

Regardless of how you feel about Elon, he had a point. Though bots make up a tiny fraction of accounts engaging in social media discussions, it’s worth being aware of the role they play in our online conversations—and now in the long form articles we (and AI) consume.

Perhaps the most startling canary in the coal mine for the collapse of knowledge is the fact that the number of AI-generated articles recently surpassed those written by humans. Because large language models can autocomplete faster than humans can write, I don’t forsee this trend reversing anytime soon. Once again, the incentives for the production of the long-tails of human knowledge gets tossed aside.

Despite it being a more economical decision to write this particular essay with AI, I wrote it the ‘old fashioned way’. I picked up my phone, and wrote it line by line. Why? Because creativity brings me joy.

V. The Joy Of Creation

Synthesizing sources, connecting ideas, and putting together a cohesive argument brings me real joy. I’d rather spend my Sunday afternoon researching for an essay than doom scrolling YouTube. In fact, I’m beginning to rethink my entire relationship with social media.

Today, social media feeds are a potent cocktail of dopamine, rage, and bots. Simply taking away social media can yield similar effects as going through therapy. And yet the default path is falling into deep rabbit holes of online consumption. As I write this, I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole, but one of euphoria because I’m enthralled by the act of creation.2

Two buddies from Austin, Texas ( and ) and I write online on Substack. We don’t make any money from it, but we choose to create because it’s a form of self-expression that we’re passionate about. John Keating, played by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, said it best:

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion.”

— John Keating, Dead Poets Society (1989)

As humans, we should write poetry, prose, and our lived humans experience. It’s one way to stop the stock of human knowledge on the internet from suffering the same fate as the Library of Alexandria.

And for the record, I’d be honored if Chat GPT trained on my essays. At least I could rest assured knowing that AI trained on the voice from a human mind.

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner

2

While not the focus of this essay, I’m referring to the state of “flow” theorized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, wherein you find that perfect balance between challenge and skill, and is often accompanied by losing track of time. Wrote a bit more about that here: “How To Get Asymmetric Outcomes with Your Time”.

Ultra learning is a strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge to advance your career and make more money.

Meta Learning (Learning How To Learn)

Expert Interview Method: The best way to research your learning goal is to talk to people who’ve already achieved what you want to achieve. If that person doesn’t think your learning project will help you accomplish your goal, your motivation and project might be misaligned.

10 Percent Rule: Generally, you should spend 10% of your learning project time on pre-research. Taking this time up front will save you from a lot of wasted time later on.

Directness (Doing The Thing!)

Learn By Doing: Tie your learning as closely as possible to the context you’ll use it in. There are many indirect forms of learning—like learning theories of programming. To learn directly, spend a lot of time doing the thing you want to get better at. If you want to learn to write, write. If you want to master programming, then code.

Project-Based Learning: One of the best ways to learn by doing is taking on a project. Unlike classes, where you spend a lot of time on theory, building is a great way to validate your learning. Two students at Pitt cheaply built an AI-powered communication solution using a serverless tech stack with AWS.1 It’s open source, so their Python code base, bill of material, process, and everything is on GitHub. I plan to rebuild it as my starting point to learn to code.

Drills (Improve Your Weaknesses)

In chemistry, the rate limiting step is the slowest part of a chain of reactions, forming a bottleneck for the rest of the chain. Ultimately, the speed of the rate determining step decides how long a chemical reaction takes. Learning works similarly, with certain aspects forming a bottleneck.

Direct-Then-Drill Approach: Figure out where and how the skill will be used. Then match that situation when practicing. For example, write software. Then analyze the results to isolate the parts that are holding you back.

Time Slicing: Repeatedly practice the most challenging thing until it’s perfect. Then integrate it back into the broader context.

Prerequisite Chaining: Start with a skill you don’t have all the prerequisites for. When you inevitably struggle, go back a step, learn that foundational topic, and repeat.

Types Of Feedback

Outcome Feedback: The most common type of feedback (and in some cases, the only type of feedback available). It tells how you’ve done overall, but no indication as to what you’re doing good or bad.

Informational Feedback: Tells you what you’re doing wrong—but not necessarily how to fix it.

Corrective Feedback: The rarest but best kind of feedback because it shows you not only what you’re doing wrong—but how to fix it, too. This feedback is only available with a coach or mentor.

Signal vs. Noise: When receiving feedback there’s (i) signal—the useful info you want to process, and (ii) noise—random factors you shouldn’t pay attention to. When writing online, most articles won’t attract attention. But when one does, it could be because of factors outside your control like someone with a lot of followers reposting it on LinkedIn.

Retention (How To Not Forget What You’ve Learned)

The forgetting curve, discovered by Hermann Ebbinghaus, shows that we tend to forget things quickly after learning them. Thankfully, there’s a few ways to beat the forgetting curve:

• Spaced Repetition: Rather than grinding for 7 hours in one day, spread your learning evenly over 7 days.

• Over Learning: Going one level above a certain set of skills. Moving to more advanced skills—like from Algebra to Calculus—enables earlier skills to be reinforced, thus preventing forgetting.

Intuition (Developing a Mental Model)

When asked a question, beginners tend to look at superficial features of the problem. Experts use a mental model they’ve developed after seeing a large volume of similar problems to categorize, and solve the problem. A strong mental model is developed by:

• Grapple With Hard Problems: Even if you can’t solve a problem right now, struggling with for a while primes you for handling it better next time.

• Ask “Dumb” Questions: Avoiding asking questions is a vain attempt to be knowledgeable. Instead, ask “dumb” questions.

• Explain It!: Write how you’d explain a concept to someone who knows nothing about it.2 If you struggle with this, go back to fill your knowledge gaps.

Experimentation (Breaking Through To New Levels Of Expertise)

At the start of your ultra learning journey, it’s often sufficient to follow the example of someone who’s further along than you—a process called meta learning. Eventually, following someone no longer helps and you need to experiment on your own.

• Introduce Artificial Constraints: Initially, the challenge of learning is that you don’t know what to do. Eventually, the challenge of learning is that you think you already know what to do. Introducing artificial constraints can help you break through to new levels of expertise.

• Skill Stacking: Combining two skills that don’t necessarily overlap can be a great strategy for creative fields. For example, Paul Graham is great at painting and computer programming.3 Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, combined his background in an office job with drawing comics.

• Push To New Extremes: As a painter, Van Gough broke many conventions. His colors were bold. His paint application was thick. Compared to other painters, his art took many techniques to an extreme. Playing it safe reduces the number of possible approaches. For many skills, the best option takes something to an extreme.

How To Start Your First Ultra Learning Project

It’s better to start narrow, then go wide as time goes on. “Learn how to execute a Python script” is more constrained than “Learn how to code.” As you learn and develop new interests, dive into those rabbit holes as you desire. Once your learning project is complete you have three options:

1. Maintenance: If you don’t use it you lose it. A great way to maintain a new skill is to slowly taper your practice. For example, I write a blog post about every month now, to keep myself sharp for where I’m ready to reinvest time into writing.

2. Relearning: For many skills, the cost of relearning it later are smaller than the costs of keeping it continuously sharp. Doing a refresher course can often be enough to reactivate a previously developed, but dormant, skill.

3. Mastery: Continually improving in subtopics as an extension to your original learning plan.

Some Ultra Learning Advice

• Create An Inspirational Goal: Rather than starting a project based on what would be most useful, build a project around an inspirational goal. For example, I want to learn to code. Initially, I looked at the technical skills for dream jobs of mine. That said, I’d love to have an app that helps me maintain and grow my professional network. That would be a more exciting project than learning new programming languages to check boxes on a resume.

• Do Something Brand New: If you’re learning a skill in a domain that’s new to you, make your project unique. That way, instead of comparing yourself to others (potentially getting discouraged), you can measure progress against your past self.

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner

I’ve been writing consistently since December 2024. I write for the joy of writing itself and to develop my ideas. I’m constantly searching for good advice on how to write better. And yet the advice I find is often ChatGPT slop or a sales pitch disguised as an essay.

In an effort to scratch my own itch, I cold DM’ed some writers I look up to and did my own research to answer the question:

How do writers find other people who care about the same stuff you do?

Start with an Atomic Network

Being new to writing publicly, I’m starting with is what Andrew Chen, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, calls an Atomic Network. From his book The Cold Start Problem:1

“Every successful network starts with a small, densely connected group — an atomic network — that can sustain itself before it scales... [An atomic network] is the smallest possible network that can grow itself.”

Andrew Chen

When you build a small atomic network that resonates with your message, you can build another. Just replicate the same message for more similarly minded people.

He theorizes that the copy-and-pasting of that original atomic network compounds over time - reaching escape velocity he calls the “tipping point,” where continued exponential growth is inevitable until you hit your ceiling.

If you just started writing, write about the things you genuinely care about. With each published post, you’ll get a firmer grasp on where your genuine interests overlap with what other people care about too.

Do Remarkable Things, Write Remarkably

To quote Ben Franklin, who gave timeless advice on how to make a lasting impression in the world:

“Either write something worth reading, or do something worth writing [about].”

Ben Franklin

• Write something worth reading.

• Do something worth writing about.

• Better yet, do something remarkable - and write about it in a way worth reading.

In the words of the philosopher and WWF wrestler Macho Man Randy Savage: you’ll be the cream that rises to the top.

How do you write something worth reading? Read my essay on How To Write Well.

How do you do something worth writing about? Here’s a simple framework via Cal Newport on how to live a remarkable life:

1. Do something you love.

2. Have a flexible schedule you can control.

3. Earn recognition and good (enough) compensation.

Just Keep Writing

In a few cold DMs - with someone who has a remarkable story himself, from going abroad in Hong Kong to quitting his job at Business Insider to write full-time on Substack - I asked him for advice.

He said:

1. Just keep writing.

2. Post your work on LinkedIn consistently.

Had Dory from Finding Nemo been a writer - she’s sign off on this advice.

I’ve stuck to his first piece of advice - I kept writing. Albeit, some weeks more consistently than others.

Your Writing Is The Product

Steve Jobs had a fantastic take on why product quality can beat marketing, using Japanese-made goods as an example:

“Customers don’t form their opinions on quality from marketing. They form their own opinions on quality from their own experience with the product. Start improving your product. Go back to the basics and improve your product.”

— Steve Jobs

To Jobs’ point, Japanese companies don’t obsess over promoting their quality. They just make great products.

Your writing is your product. Improve the quality and let your readers be the judge.

The foundation is the same:

1. Do things worthy of remark.

2. Write about them in a remarkable way.

—Grant Varner