MWB 35 - Free Education and The Art of Becoming Something
...How to be successful
Hello friends,
All I have for you today is a reminder.
A reminder that free education is abundant all over the internet. It's the discipline to learn that's lacking.
You can literally get an MIT-grade education free online. But you won't get it because the discipline is not there. There is no focus.
Elon Musk once said,
“Give yourself 6 months. If you are serious about changing your life, do something consistently for 6 months. I guarantee you’ll see results. If you give up, you don’t want it bad enough."
And it may a bold statement to say that you are okay with where you are now and that's why you are there. However bold it may be though, it is more true than it is false.
Reading Ben Carson as a young man gave me good perspectives about a lot of things. The importance and centrality of knowledge were at the core of those perspectives. In a chapter, he asked a question that has made my heart consistently pant after knowledge. “What makes a Doctor a Doctor? Or an Engineer an Engineer? Simple, it's what they know.”
To become something, you have to know that thing. What do you know?
Best of What I Read
I read this article by Sam Altman again. Actually, I read it first in 2019 when he first wrote it, then many times in 2020 and I picked it up again to read just yesterday. You are probably wondering why the obsession?
Here’s the why:
It is not all things that you read once and you assume you've gotten it all. Return back to that old article/essay/chapter, read it all over and get fresh insight.
I am fond of doing that and very often, I used to get fresh insight. So the following are what I quoted out of the article.
“You don't want to be in a career where people who have been doing it for two years can be as effective as people who have been doing it for twenty.”
“I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing. But I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote.”
“In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do.
Trust the exponential, be patient, and be pleasantly surprised.”
Self-belief must be balanced with self-awareness.I used to hate criticism of any sort and actively avoided it.
Now I try to always listen to it with the assumption that it’s true, and then decide if I want to act on it or not. Truth-seeking is hard and often painful, but it is what separates self-belief from self-delusion.
“I will fail many times, and I will be really right once” is the entrepreneurs’ way. You have to give yourself a lot of chances to get lucky.
Now if you find all that quotes interesting, here’s the link to the article.
This is enough for a week.
Go and be successful.
See you next week.