The Best of Daniel Vassallo

Beware, not every itch is worth scratching…

• Not every opportunity is worth taking
• Not every dangled carrot is worth chasing
• (You might be caught in a rat race)

To break free, recognize you’re in a race…

• Consider your obligations
• Imagine an alternative universe
• And ask yourself, “Why not?”

It’s hard, but it doesn’t take much (and almost anyone can do it)…

• 140 views at 5 percent conversion = seven sales
• Seven sales a day of a $39 product = $275 per day
• Seven sales a day of a $39 product = $100,000 per year

Here’s the formula: start with the hardest part…

• Be willing to jump off the wrong train
• Be willing to write off past ambitions
• Be willing to detach your identity from your accomplishments
• Otherwise you might get stuck enduring an existence full of wrong stops

Take stock of your means…

• Time
• Skills
• Location
• Interests
• Strengths
• Resources
• Experience
• Perspective
• Connections
• Cash at hand

Work backwards from your constraints…

• Start with your reality
• Fit ideas to that reality
• (This is more effective than trying to “make your idea a reality”)

Curb your ambitions…

• Keep reducing scope
• Keep moving the finish line closer
• Keep giving yourself free energy
• Keep the complexity of what you do within your means

Figure out what you don’t like…

• Procrastinate on purpose to find what demotivates you
• (What you’re putting off is what you don’t like)
• Learn from your internal resistance to find your true preferences

Slowly evolve your lifestyle to better match your true preferences…

• Do things for their own sake
• Do what no one’s forcing you to do
• Do what you’re intrinsically motivated to do
• Gradually do fewer things you’d rather not do
• (Only intrinsic motivation lasts)

Set a direction instead of a goal…

• You can’t predict what will work
• You can’t predict what will last
• You won’t know if a great idea is really great until it survives the impact with reality
• (Goals tend to get in the way of letting you do what you should be doing, and directions are easier to correct)

You don’t need a big vision to succeed…

• There’s no need to change the world
• There’s no need to conquer the competition
• There’s no need to dominate the market
• There’s no need to disrupt anything
• Just throw yourself into random tasks until inspiration meets opportunity

Make time your friend…

• Cut costs
• Make do with less
• Reconsider your needs
• Don’t spend more than you earn
• Make your worst-case scenario a slow success

To thrive, survive…

• Sit on cash
• Avoid risk of ruin
• Never risk more than you’re willing to lose
• Make sure you always get a second chance
• Persist long enough to stumble on good luck
• (Time has a way to make unpredictable setbacks happen eventually)

Work hard to earn credibility…

• Do something interesting in real life
• Prove yourself by making something interesting
• Without credibility, nobody will listen to what you have to say

Avoid low probability bets…

• Stack odds in your favor
• Choose your projects carefully
• Study your opportunities carefully
• Business is a conjecture that an idea will work out
• Avoid spending time on things with low chance of success
• Don’t ignore uncertainty in a randomness-laden venture

Make many small bets (and keep them small)…

• Don’t be greedy
• Control the amount wagered
• Go for the low hanging fruit first
• Keep investments tiny and bounded
• Try many things in parallel or almost in parallel
• You’ll learn more this way than any other way
• (If you start killing it with low hanging fruit, it becomes easier to go after harder to reach fruit)

Build something imperfect that works…

• Start with a very small product
• Pick something you can finish in two weeks
• Charge ten dollars for it
• (Perfecting something that won't work will never make it work)
• (Perfectionism is fine, as long as you realize you're doing it only for your own amusement)

Don’t optimize or polish your products…

• Focus on substance, not optimizations
• Let the scrappiness be part of the charm
• The returns on polishing and optimizing are small
• A book can be your life's work, presented as a beautiful masterpiece.
• Or it can be a scrappy brain dump in a Word doc, saved as PDF.
• Doing a brain dump on video is a lot easier than writing an ebook

Keep idle time in your system…

• Idle time is slack
• Slack lets you immediately explore and pounce on opportunities
• By not optimizing to the limit, you can deal with randomness without breaking down

Stop forcing yourself to build good habits…

• Just start building something
• If the habits don't follow automatically, you don't really want it
• And if you don't really want it, it won't last anyway

Just focus on behavior…

• Study what’s repeatable
• Study what’s working for you
• Study what’s going okay but can be improved

Remember, growth is not linear…

• Progress comes from random, high impact lucky events
• Realize a fraction of the effort gets most of the results
• Recognize which fraction to focus on
• Use the time you bought back to do whatever you want

Skip theory…

• Study successful practitioners
• Become a practitioner yourself
• (Unsuccessful practitioners don’t practice for very long)

Do a lot when inspiration strikes…

• Take long breaks in between
• Most things require intensity over consistency
• Consistency works, but it's unpleasant (you're constantly fighting yourself)
• What can be done with consistency is often more enjoyable when done with intensity instead

If there’s no one around, go where people already hang out…

• Make yourself useful
• Share what you’ve done
• Share what you’re learning
• Let yourself be opinionated
• Go behind the scenes and share how your product is doing
• Teach what you already know (it took you a lifetime to acquire!)
• If others show interest in something you know, chances are thousands of other people will too

When you promote yourself…

• You promote your product
• You have automatic authority
• You find people who want to learn from you specifically
• You create an uncontested market space (competition becomes irrelevant because nobody can copy you)

Strive to be an artisan…

• Be creative
• Don’t follow others
• Make your work a business
• Don’t cut corners for efficiency
• Say no to things you’d rather not do
• Do the best work you can, for its own sake
• Never sell something you know is defective

Protect your independent lifestyle…

• Be risk averse
• Don’t try to maximize profits
• Avoid having your lifestyle taken away from you

A good life is a story you're proud of…

• Pride comes from the story we tell ourselves about how we created something in the circumstances we were in

Thank you for reading!    

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