One of the best ideas I picked up was the importance of knowing your bottlenecks. After World War II, Walt funded a series of nature documentaries called The True-Life Adventures. To film them, he recruited a team of nature photographers to venture into the wild and film animal life.
Walt said: “The biggest problem was getting [the photographers] to keep shooting. They would be too conservative with film because when they were working on their own they had to buy that film. They would cut the camera just as an animal would do something. I had to pound: Shoot, shoot! I had to sell them on the idea that the film was the cheapest thing [in our operation], and if they missed something-it got to the point that they never dared come in to tell me something they saw that they didn’t photograph because I would raise heck with them. Also, they would quit too early in the day. I said, Keep shooting!”
Owners usually think about cash differently than employees. Since owners tend to think about cash in positive-sum investments, things that seem expensive to an employee can actually be a reasonable expense so long as the work generates a positive return. If so, it’s an owner’s job to push the employee to spend more than they would on their own when it’ll generate a positive return on investment. (View Highlight)
Mistakes Page
A few years ago, I had a page in my notes where I wrote down all my mistakes. Every time I made one, I’d answer three questions:
What was the mistake?
What was I thinking at the time?
How can I prevent the same mistake from happening again?
To my surprise, more than 50% of my mistakes came from the same thing: making a commitment, not writing it down, and forgetting about it. (View Highlight)
Building an Audience
One of the best ways to gain momentum as an online writer is to find a relatively undiscovered person who doesn’t write much and put their best ideas on paper.
In my own life, Peter Thiel’s Religionis one of my most popular essays, and Farnam Street was originally the ultimate hub for ideas about Charlie Munger. If you’re looking for somebody to write about, look for people who give a lot of speeches but don’t write very much. Then, give them credit for the original ideas.
By doing so, you’re tapping into an inefficient market for ideas. The existing supply will live outside the written word, usually in podcasts or YouTube videos. Since they’re already popular, you know there’s demand. Also, you’ll often develop an unseen angle on somebody else’s work whenever you translate them into a new medium. (View Highlight)
Note: Write about someone’s ideas that has a large audience but hasn’t published them in writing.
