Cohort 29: Building a Portfolio of Small Bets

☂️  Making the unpredictable, predictable: Understanding the role of randomness in business. Taming uncertainty when working for yourself. How everything you have learned about succeeding in your career is invalid when randomness plays a big role. And how there's only one viable strategy for dealing with highly random payoffs. 🌲  Acquiring information under uncertainty: Probabilistic learning. Learning everything you need to know about a business, without actually knowing anything for certain. Identifying what business ideas are likely to work. Why you can succeed without knowing how you're succeeding. And why that's not a problem. 🏕️  Bias for survival: To thrive, you must first survive. Understanding the difference between survivorship bias and a bias for survival. How to avoid going bust. Learning how to succeed by not failing. 🏆  Learning from small wins: Why small wins teach you a lot more than any failure. Why you should start with the lowest hanging fruit. How to find your own low hanging fruit. And how success brings with it other success. 🍸  Recognizing luck: Exposing yourself to randomness. Making randomness your friend, not your enemy. The cocktail party approach to serendipity. Being able to recognize good luck when it happens. And how your best ideas are often the ones you can't even imagine yet. 🤩  Emerging from the unknown: How to build credibility on the internet. Going where people already hang out. Free market research. Why you should make yourself known. How people prefer doing business with other people they like. And how to be top-of-mind. 💰  Making money: How to insert yourself into money-making opportunities. How to persuade others to give you their hard-earned money, and not regret it. Why you should charge less. And why you should monetize your hobbies. 🎢  Dealing with variable income: Why variable income makes you smarter. How to activate a new part of your brain. Why small stressors breed creativity. How to avoid overworking. And why variable income gives you more peace of mind than stable income. 🏹  Lessons from hunter-gatherers: How the world you live in is completely different from the world you evolved fitness for. What your ancestors can teach you about life, work, and satisfaction. Why procrastination is a feature, not a bug. And why it would be foolish to ignore your gut feeling, even in the modern world. ❤️  True preferences: Understanding dose–response relationships, and how they apply to everything you do. Change the dose and frequency of something you like doing, and you’ll almost certainly start disliking it. Why you might be chasing the preferences of others without knowing it. And how to discover yours. 🏖️  Lifestyle design: From a life built around your work, to a work arrangement built around your life. How to incrementally move toward a lifestyle designed to match your true preferences. And how to live a life you're proud of.