2021 Annual Review

Centralizing what I learned in the last year that can benefit you

Me last year, clueless of everything I was going to learn

Favorite Stuff — Most Foundational Ideas

We are Making Progress

I genuinely believe with all my heart the most important 4 words in the English Language is “We are making progress.” The reason I believe that is I have come across many people that have described that they feel stagnant, falling into old habits of watching Netflix (for 20 hours a week), getting distracted.

Something I have found over time, this leads to people diminishing the times they do make progress because they feel it is so insignificant. What most people don’t realize is they put so much judgment on themselves to do work. “I’m not being productive enough.” What does being productive actually mean? What is the standard? What is the metric you are using to measure productivity? I’m often met with silence. People want to strive to be productive, to do amazing things in the world, but people don’t know what they are aiming for. They don’t know what success looks like. University is the north star for many people, but they don’t clearly define how that translates into what they care about doing.

Now whenever I hear about even the slightest progress, I positively reinforce by saying “We are making progress.” The word “we” is intentionally used to make it sound like a group, even if I didn’t do anything about what they are working on. This leads to the other person associating a social reward with making progress. Making progress = you feel better about yourself. It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle to make more progress, becoming your main variable for individual success.

What are you going to do different?

When I asked people about their biggest challenges in life, it could be anything, work, relationships, health, fitness, etc. An interesting observation was most people know what their problems are and the next time we would talk they would mention a similar problem. It looks like that the initial problem was never fixed. Every time someone has a realization or an insight, I always ask “What are you gonna do differently.” This question is bounded by the belief that if you continue doing the same actions you will get the same results. This suggests if you do something different then you would get different results and this leads to hypothesis-based thinking.

Little snippets

The Only Belief That Matters — If I put time and effort into something I will l get better over time. If you did not believe this then why do anything because you can’t improve. When you conceptualize that your life is just a system of cause and effect you can’t ever be the victim because you are usually the cause of the success and failure you have.

Humans are adaptation machines — Our survival was based on our ability to adapt to our environment. In the same sense, if you have a goal you can adapt yourself to be the person with the skills to execute on the goal. You do this with Identity statements (next section)

Identity Statements — identity is how you view yourself when you are by yourself. If you believe you are capable, then you will be no matter the circumstances. If you believe you are not capable, you will never start trying (the only belief that matter isn’t there). Even if you are you are not capable yet (yet is a very important word because you imply that you can do it in the future) you can put in the time and effort to build the skills needed to hit your goal. How you make yourself believe anything about yourself is telling a narrative. I’m the type of person that [insert what you want to be true about yourself]. Here are the stories I tell myself daily.

• I’m the type of person who does the thing even when it gets boring or hard — the reason I for specifying boring or hard is that is when you are most likely to quit. If you think about flow state, you only get in flow if the work is slightly higher than your current knowledge. If it is too hard, you don’t think you can do it when it is boring, that means it is too easy (so why do the same thing you already know?). I have drilled this narrative into myself for the past 9 months and I can safely say I don’t even perceive something as hard or boring. I just do. If I don’t know something that I find out how to learn it, if there are pre-requisites then I go learn that knowledge first.

• I’m the type of person who does what I said I would do — this is a more recent one I have adopted. This is linked with time blocking in your calendar (talked about in the next section). When I put it in my calendar I will spend 1 hour working on X task. It doesn’t matter how much I get done. My goal is to sit there for 1 hour without getting distracted — going through Instagram DMs, watching Netflix, checking Twitter. Now I have prided myself on me not getting distracted and spending the time input for the work, not the outcome. Over time this reinforces the idea that when I say I will work, I should be working without distraction. Overtime if you work without distraction you are bound to do more work

Identity statements as they become part of who you are rewire your brain to receive the reward when you act in alignment with them.

How to Have Better Time Management

I know many people who use a to-do list and something I constantly see is “I’m not feeling productive.” If you measure your life by how many boxes you check off you are making a big mistake because I have never met anybody who finishes everything on their to-do list and people still use this technique. From the perspective of identity, you are at a point where you don’t always do what you said you would do (completing the tasks on the to-do list).

Here is why time blocks what you want to be doing. Time blocking is allocating a certain amount of time (ex. 1 hour) to a task. When you would time block, you would want to fill up your day. It does not need to be all work, you should schedule a time to eat, hang out with friends, watch Netflix. When you are measuring success in your time block it should be am I doing what I said I would do. Did I spend 1 hour doing X task? Assuming you can work for 1 hour and not be distracted, now you can tell yourself the story I’m the type of person who does what I said I would do. According to Nir Eyal, a behavioral science researcher, and New York Best-selling author, the literature shows that when people measure themselves on their ability to simply work without distraction, whatever it is that they do, get more done than the people who keep the to-do lists.

Positive Reinforcement/rewiring reward system of yourself

Positive reinforcement is celebrating behavior you want yourself or others to continue. If you congratulate someone on how fast they do something, then you are planting a seed that suggests that everything should be done fast. Over time as you plant more of the same seed of behavior you want to see, the more the other person’s brain gets rewired to receive a positive reward (dopamine) every time they act out the behavior that gets the praise. Very powerful for positively influencing people in behavior that would make their life better.

Pattern Interrupt

For those of you who have negative thoughts about yourself and can’t get them out of your head. “Not good enough” or “I feel like an imposter” or “Don’t know if I can do it.” Here is an effective way to handle it. In cognitive-behavioral therapy, there is something called a pattern interrupt. When you have a negative, you interrupt the pattern of thought (which means you need to be aware of the negative thought in the first place). Replace it with what you with a better message “I’m the type of person that {insert behavior}.” Over time you start catching the negative thought faster to the point where every single time you are thinking a negative thought you just pull out your identity statement.

Power of Neutral thinking

If positive thinking does not work for you (in the pattern interrupt section) then neutral thinking might be your thing. According to research from Christine Porath showed saying something out loud makes it 10 times more powerful than if you just kept it in your head. If you are ever doubting yourself, you don’t need to be positive, you just shouldn’t say it out loud.

Some Story Examples of why you shouldn’t say negative stuff out loud

Exhibit A: Billy Buckner, a player for the Boston Red Sox where he made a mistake in sports that would be one of the biggest sports bloopers in history. In 1986 he let the game-winning runs score on a ground ball through his legs that ultimately would give the Mets the world series. An interview resurfaced of him 12 days before that game and he said you know the dreams are to win you know to win the World Series. It would be a nightmare would be for me to let the game-winning run score on a ground ball through my legs you know and then ultimately that’s exactly what would happen.

Exhibit B: Pete Maravich, was interviewed at 26 years old and he said you know I don’t want to play 10 years of pro basketball and died at the age of 40 of a heart attack well he played 10 years of pro basketball in Pasadena California died of a heart attack at 40

Exhibit C: In 1973 a guy was hired to fix a refrigerated boxcar in the back of a train. He goes into the train he panics gets himself locked inside the boxcar so now he’s pounding on the door, there’s nothing to do he starts to panic and thinks he’s gonna freeze to death.

He finds a pen he starts writing down what’s going through his mind and he writes down “I’m becoming colder” as isn’t going well we observe a report still colder now he writes “nothing to do but wait half asleep I could hardly write, these may be my last words.”

They opened up the boxcar many hours later and they find him he’s dead but the temperature inside the boxcar was 56 degrees °F (13°C) the freezing apparatus was broken there was plenty of air in the boxcar there was no physical reason for his death. The best the doctors could say is he somehow talked himself into dying.

A Different Way to Perceive Failure

We all get that failure is an opportunity to learn. We say the thing, but our actions don’t exactly align with it. To put failure into a different perspective, for you to succeed at doing anything, say you are making rocket ships or making a basketball hoop where you never miss, you need to how to do it. If you are trying to do something you have not done before it’s pretty hard to know how to do something on. For you to know how to do something you need more information, you can read books, talk to people, and you can also fail. Failing is the most information-rich data stream there is. When you fail, the problem is easily identified because it is right in front of you, the problem is personalized to your actions, and what to improve for next time is usually clear. Failure is going to hurt no doubt about that. When I spent 5 weeks looking into biochar (the longest project I have worked on) all to end up invalidating it. I was frustrated for 20 mins and then I moved on. I identified the new information so I don’t make the same mistakes with the new project (algae).

Why I was a hypocrite

For a good 9 months of last year, I prided myself on being a problem solver. In the last year, I got an opportunity to work on consulting challenges (through a human accelerator called TKS) where I got the chance to work with Acadium (multi-million dollar tech company), United Nations, Benchsci ($44.6M raised). The issue was outside of that I never really worked on solving any problems. In the past couple of months, I have changed that and I am working on a problem: Climate Change

What is my understanding of Climate and My Thesis

High level: climate change is bad. Why? Droughts, floods, wildfires ware. The world goal is to get to net-zero by 2050, if you were to look at all the industries that emit you probably need somewhere around 5–30 solutions/companies that correctly solve the problem and can scale (which most aren’t doing). Producing another 10 to 15 Elons that are willing to work on these problems I think is very unlikely — most will end up coming from The Knowledge Society (TKS) if it does happen.

Even if we got to net-zero by 2050, one thing that is glanced upon is that CO2 lasts in the atmosphere for 300 to 1000 years so whatever negative effects are still happening right now they are still likely to continue. With CO2 being 70 to 80% of the problem, it leads me to believe that the solution is carbon capture. If I get this right I just create 80% of the impact with 20% of the effort (80/20 rule) which is what I think we should be optimizing for.

Carbon capture is broken down into 2 general categories: Reduction capture and Direct Air Capture.

The reduction includes pre and post-combustion carbon capture which removes about 90 to 95% of CO2 from flue gas. In the best case, if deployed on all oil and gas plants they will reduce CO2 emissions by 5.8%.

Direct Air Capture is directly capturing CO2 from the air. Getting this technology right is what I think can get us to net zero + reverse problems with climate in the next 20 to 30 years.

The important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for climate companies (based on where most are going wrong).

1. Cost Per Machine (with its capture capacity) — This is one that I think often gets overlooked. Carbon Engineering (leading direct air capture company). 1 carbon capture plant is $500M with a capture capacity of 1M tons of CO2. If you were to scale enough to capture all of the world’s CO2 (38B tons) you would need 19 trillion dollars to do that. To put that into context if you take the 100 richest people in the entire world and take their entire net worth they would contribute less than 25% of that cost.

2. Cost Per Ton of CO2 capture — The best that I have seen so far is $48.55 per ton of CO2 from Carbfix. To capture all of the world’s CO2 you need about $1.845 trillion, about 40% of the network of the 100 richest people. What most people miss is this is a yearly reoccurring cost, draining any money you have as a company.

3. Energy — In Direct Air Capture you need to capture air (with a Co2 concentration of 0.04%), then separate the air and CO2. Usually using a solid sorbent or liquid solvent. For example, Climeworks, need 2000kwh to capture 1 ton of CO2. To capture all of the world’s CO2 they need more than 3 times the world’s energy consumption.

4. How they monetize/business model — with high cost for machine and capturing tons of CO2, you need a way to monetize the CO2 to offset your cost or make a profit. There are different methods that companies use.

Carbfix and Climeworks put the CO2 in the ground and turned it into stone — which to my knowledge doesn’t make them any money.

Carbon Engineering uses enhanced oil recovery. Which is putting CO2 into the ground, this helps extract oil that was initially too deep reach. Oil, once burned can release more carbon than was captured.

Twelve. co — they take CO2 and turn them into products. Twelve makes products for Tide, Mercedes, NASA, and more.

Carbon Cure, Carbon Upcycling — create concrete additives with waste from manufacturing, decreasing the amount of cement construction companies use while making the concrete stronger.

In my opinion, it makes the most sense to capture carbon then make a useful product with it.

Side note: Something that I have seen with carbon capture companies in the fewer numbers and metrics they have on their website the less developed they are. If they don’t mention their cost per ton, cost per machine, how much energy they use, and business model isn’t obvious from looking at their website, then they still have some work to do.

My General Hypotheses on Solutions for Climate

1. Mass grow a plant to capture carbon (looking into Chlorella Vulgaris — a species of algae now)

2. Create a material/device (not large machines, smaller ones like twelve.co ) that replicate photosynthesis to capture carbon — then make the carbon useful by making products like graphene and carbon fiber.

What have I done/doing to make a climate solution?

Project 1: Looked into biochar (charcoal). In week 5 found that it can only reduce emissions not directly captured from the air. Even though, I could’ve used biochar as a construction material for homes, for roads, use it to filter water, use it to increase plant yield. I realized all of that did not matter unless it captured a lot of CO2. Learning 1 was to prioritize the capture mechanism. The reason it took me till week 5 is that pretty much all the papers I read said it sequesters carbon, but none of them explained how. I did eventually find it, the week I looked for it (in week 5). Learning 2 was talking to more researchers to validate your understanding. In the 5 weeks, I talked to 0 researchers. Even though I probably had a decent enough understanding to not be an idiot by week 1 or 2.

Project 2: Looking into Algae since it has the highest capture potential out of any plants, more specifically looking into Chlorella Vulgaris which has the highest capture potential out of algae plants. In week 1, prioritized finding how it captures carbon. Spent week 1 looking into photosynthesis. Now finishing up week 2, where I identified all of the main variables in the growth of algae (which means more CO2 capture) — CO2 concentration, culture medium, photobioreactor design, photon flux density, pH, temperature, Aeration, light intensity — and how to create optimal growth — measured by optical density, biomass, protein, and lipid production. In week 3, I would want to talk to researchers to validate my understanding of variables and how to make them optimal.

What I learned About Problem Solving with Consulting Challenges

Here is what I learned about identifying and solving problems from working with Acadium (multi-million dollar tech company), the United Nations, and Benchsci ($44.6M raised). I will mostly be referring to the UN challenge since it you were trying to solve a world problem, not doing marketing or operational work (like with Acadium and Benchsci)

1. Problem Needs to be specific, quantifiable, and geographically bound

The general mission statement for the UN challenge was “Increase the number of women and girls in the IT industry.” Where most people go wrong is they try to solve the problem for the entire world. The solution will be different in the U.S when compared to India. Being geographically bound refers to picking a location. The reason why this is valuable is imagined you were starting a pilot for your solution. If you solved it for the entire world, where would you start? The direction isn’t clear. With a geographically bound problem statement, you have direction on where to initially deploy your solution.

Quantifiable refers to the impact of this problem (with a number). This could be done with the number of people affected, how much money is lost.

Specific, usually written with the number you quantified to explain what is the outcome of the problem.

Our problem statement for this challenge was. In Vietnam (geographically bound), 96% (quantified) of students are unprepared to enter the digital economy (specific — the outcome of the problem).

How we picked Vietnam
Before you start working on understanding the problem/solving it does the magic book exercise. The question is what has to be true for this project work. First thing was to identify which country to work in. For this, we needed criteria of what a good country looks like. The country needed to have a low poverty rate (<15%), have electricity (90%+), have reasonable political stability (have 0.00 on the index-linked), low employment of women in IT (<10%).

Poverty and electricity to asses that they have the basics for living. If they don’t then their priorities don’t align with what we are trying to create (more women and girls in the IT industry).

Political stability, kinda tough to create any change if your country doesn’t allow for outside support/is fighting through civil war or a dictatorship regime.

Low employment of women, suggests that there is clear room for improvement. If it was 43% women in IT, you almost have a cap on how much improvement you can have.

We went through all the countries in the world and ended up with 14 different countries that fit the criteria. Looking back I don’t think it would’ve mattered what country we picked, we would have had similar success with this project. We picked Vietnam off of a teammate’s intuition.

2. Magic Book Exercise (Thanks Harrison)
Imagine you had a magic book that you could give you an answer to any question, what would you ask it? (In the context of Vietnam). The question was about what do we need to know about Vietnam to make this work.

We broke it down into categories of Access (who mobile, computer, internet, etc.), culture (gender landscape, values, religion, cultural norms), Country breakdown (Age, employment, economic sectors), education (literacy rates, school completion, what their education looks like), finances (average income, % with banking institutions, employment by gender), Geography (how different regions are classified), Government (political system, policies, parties in charge), current solutions for IT initiatives. Based on what we found over the next couple of days, we went into hypothesis based thinking

3. Hypothesis based thinking

Hypothesis-based thinking. If you have a question that you don’t have the answer to, you need a hypothesis. The hypothesis provides you with a starting point. If your hypothesis is correct then you continue iterating on it. If your hypothesis is wrong then based on the new information that you got you have the direction to continue. Your biggest hindrance in solving a problem is your lack of action to get the unknown information in the first place. Also, you could have a hypothesis based on very limited to no information, the reason you want to guess even if you know nothing because it requires you to think, and as you find out more information you find out what was wrong with your thinking process to make it better for the next time you have a hypothesis.

When working on the UN challenge where the goal was to increase the number of women and girls in the IT industry. Since none of us (the team) were from Vietnam, we had close to 0 contexts in the country. My team focused on the education of kids from 14 to 18 years old. We just started listing out potential problems that students would face under the 3 categories of lack of education and knowledge in the digital field, lack of device access, lack of time. You can see our entire mind map here. Even though the entire thing was full of assumptions, it provided us with direction on what to ask students when we talked to them. In a day we completely removed the lack of time because according to the students they had hours per day to be on Facebook so that wasn’t the problem.

Under the umbrella of lack of education and knowledge, the breakdown was mostly about lack of digital literacy from teachers and kids not speaking which turned out to be correct. Which is a problem we solved in our solution. Another hypothesis for problems was Vietnamese students could not read English well, which is important for understanding coding syntax which turned out to be false. We also said that their education does not teach anything relevant skills to get coding jobs, which turned out to be true. The most advanced thing they learned was scratch a preliminary visual block-based platform used for creating animations but is not practical in the programming industry.

Under the umbrella of lack of devices, we had low internet which was wrong. Over 90% of people in Vietnam had internet. We said it could that it was “not appropriate” for girls to use tech, we were wrong. Schools did not provide devices to teach them that were fit for coding, which was correct. These were the computers they were using.

All to say we had tons of hypotheses to test, which gave us direction of where to look. When we talk to students we would find out whether we were right or wrong. Helping us identify the problems faster than if we were just doing “research.”

From talking to the students we understood that over 90% of the people were interested in learning how to code, they just didn’t know how in both rural and urban communities. We also found that they were being taught old, non-applicable content. We also found that teachers in public schools are interested in learning new things to give their students better education, they just need a manual or a learning guide. So guess what our solution was. An education program that taught teachers the basics of programming so they could teach it to other kids. (Obviously there is more to it, this is just high level.)

TLDR: Having hypotheses on the potential problems helped us know the real problems when we talked to people, which is quicker and more effective than just doing “research.”

4. How to Manage Teams — Playbook
When identifying and solving problems, it is helpful having teammates that you can bounce ideas off of. 1 big problem I have found is people don’t usually have a project manager or the manager isn’t very good at creating clarity for tasks, structure for meetings, having people hit deadlines, and avoiding bad performance. The playbook link above is mostly from experience and partly me theorizing on the potential to help optimize the team.

How To Have Better Conversations

One thing that people tell me often is “you ask good questions” or “I really like the way you ask questions.” I would attribute my ability to 2 things: curiosity and improvement.

For curiosity, I really interested in learning about you as a person. What are the experiences you have gone through (good or bad)? What ideas do you have that I don’t? Just always been found to out those things whenever I talk to somebody new.

For improving thinking, it might be something that isn’t obvious, but how you ask questions is reflective of your ability to think. When you ask a question you are typically looking for an answer. The better your ability to think, the clear of an outcome you are looking for, the better directed your questions are.

Here is my model to help structure better questions.

1. Stop Asking Binary Questions

From listening to hundreds of hours of podcasts I noticed a very common mistake that most people do (thanks Nadeem pointing out this one to me). People always ask binary questions.

For example, in an episode with Ester Perel (leading psychotherapist on couples counseling) and Tim Ferriss asked “Does trust or vulnerability come first?” First time has an assumption of what trust meant, which Ester Perel somewhat pointed out later there are different theories on trust. By the way, he phrased the question he limited the potential output of the guest because she can say 1 of the 2 options.

If he asked “What is trust” to have a definition good enough for conversation and then said, “How does trust happen.” The question is open-ended without any restrictions on the guest and now you can find out what you don’t know, you don’t know.

A potential outcome could have been similar to when Marie Forleo interviewed Bernie Brown (who spent over 20 years trying to understand shame and vulnerability — and by association trust). Bernie Brown created her model for trust called B.RA.V.I.N.G.

BOUNDARIES: Setting boundaries is making clear what’s okay and what’s not okay, and why.

RELIABILITY: You do what you say you’ll do. At work, this means staying aware of your competencies and limitations so you don’t overpromise and can deliver on commitments and balance competing priorities. ACCOUNTABILITY: You own your mistakes, apologize, and make amends. VAULT: You don’t share information or experiences that are not yours to share. I need to know that my confidence is kept and that you’re not sharing with me any information about other people that should be confidential.

INTEGRITY: Choosing courage over comfort; choosing what’s right over what’s fun, fast, or easy; and practicing your values, not just professing them.

NONJUDGMENT: I can ask for what I need, and you can ask for what you need. We can talk about how we feel without judgment.

GENEROSITY: Extending the most generous interpretation to the intentions, words, and actions of others.

Even if you don’t agree with every single point, now you just got exposed to new information that was very unlikely to be found unless you asked an open-end question.

2. Exclusively Ask “What” and “How” and Avoid Why

Chris Voss (Ex. Lead FBI hostage negotiator) describes negotiating as gathering information. When you are in a conversation your goal is to avoid high-level conversation and start building a relationship. This starts by asking calibrated questions

These are questions that start with “What” and “How.” Chris avoids Why, Can, Is, Are, Do, Does (any first word that creates binary thinking) Questions.

When you ask “What” and “How” questions they are usually prompt more elaboration on the other person’s side. The obvious exception is “How are You?” The problem with this question is most people have a scripted answer: Good. Which doesn’t exactly get you anywhere. When you ask “What was on your mind” or “How are you thinking about approaching this problem?” You don’t have a 1-word answer for that. When you phrase your questions this way you get an insight into their thinking and how they process information, and their thinking patterns. Again when you are asking your questions are meant to be optimized for what you don’t know you don’t know.

On the other side if you look at Why, Can, Is, Are, Do, Does Questions. They usually prompt 1-word answers.

Can you do this? No.

Is that the reason you became excited? Probably.

Can get this done by Sunday? No.

Do you like soccer? Yes.

Does it make sense to take this decision? Nope.

Even though these questions have their place when you are just trying to coordinate between people and create certainty that something will happen like a deadline and specific thing for each task or some logistics for hanging out.

These questions are not the best ways to gather information about other people. You could ask “Don’t you think that Person A is a total jerk?” vs “What do you think of person A?”

The first encouraged a 1-word answer and you are implying what you think is the right answer by your question. The second didn’t try to influence your opinion. It just asking for your thoughts.

The one that I conveniently left out is “Why”. “Why did you include the word “Why” in bad questions starters.” Yes, asking “Why” prompts the person to provide you information similar to “What” and “How” questions. The issue is no matter what language that you speak asking “Why” puts other people in a slightly defensive, they have to defend their perspective or idea to you. It creates them vs you situation and it is really hard to build rapport.

What you can do to replace Why is asking “What is the reason.” You go from “Why are you doing this” to “What is the reason that you are doing this?” Note: you need to have an out of curiosity tone because you are trying to understand their perspective rather than try and question their ideas/abilities. You want to avoid people being defensive when you are trying to build a relationship.

3. Questions I like to Ask in Conversations

Question 1: What is in your mind? A 2010 study showed that we always have something on our minds. We are using energy to reduce our mental capacity. It is hard to have a half-decent conversation when people are thinking about something else.

When you ask this “What’s on your mind” you do 3 things:

1. You help others release their cognition drainer.

2. You create a natural segue into a conversation

3. You avoid high-level topics like weather, what their pet was up to today, etc.

Question 2: What’s the real challenge here for you? The word “real” implies that the challenge has to have a significant impact. The word “challenge” is asking for what is blocking progress. According to a 1997 study, the words “for you” limit the person being asked to just problems for themselves. Not high-level abstract problems that have nothing to do with them. When following up it seems people tend to have an answer for the cause and solution of the problem. This leads me to believe that most people don’t spend enough time thinking about problems they have to fix it.

Side benefit: you sometimes are the person who “solves” your problem.

Question 3: What was most useful for you? Humans on average forgot 70% of new knowledge in 24 hours. Learning that lasts long term happens as a result of trying to remember the information. Asking this question creates 2 things

1. Prompts the other person to think about something useful promoting longer retention of information.

2. Gives you feedback on ideas/ways of communication that are most effective for people.

Assumption: The conversation was useful for the other person in some way.

Question 4: And What Else? This question can be applied to all 3 above and practically anything else. “And what else is on your mind?” or “And what else is the real challenge for you?” or “And what else was most useful for you?” And what else makes the other person think of more possibilities. Which allows for a larger range of possible conversations. Without you having to come with conversation topics.

How to Make Better Action Items

Common learnings/action items I see “Question everything” or “Ask better questions” or “Be more disciplined”

RE: Question everything — are you really going to question how a microwave works? think about how your shoes are made, why couches have their shape? Of course, I’m taking it out of context what is more important questioning everything makes no sense. The direction for what you should actually do isn’t clear.

RE: Ask better questions — When you ask “How do you ask better questions” most people don’t have an answer. Again direction of what to actually do isn’t clear

RE: Be more disciplined — How? no clear direction.

My rule of thumb: Can you check the box of your action item? It works. It doesn’t ask “How do I act on [insert high-level action item like ask better questions]”

Big Questions To Answer

1. What game are you playing?

The game you are playing refers to what you are optimizing for. You could be optimizing for thrill, good relationships, helping your community, making a world impact, being happy, making money, etc. The game that I am playing is moving the needle on climate (50+% of emissions removed)

2. What does success look like in this game?

Success is the metric that lets you know you are making progress. For me, this is how many tons of CO2 I have captured which at the very moment is 0 (a lot of progress to be made).

3. Are you playing a game that you want to win?

The point behind this question is sometimes people optimize to win at games that don’t care too much. The game could be I want a more expensive home than my co-workers, have better pictures on Instagram, or have more followers on Twitter. Now if you have a more expensive home are fulfilled? If the answer is yes, then do your thing. If it is not, play a different game that you care about.

4. What is your driver to get to the success?

What is your why or how do you know that you won’t quit? The goal of this question is to identify if this is something that you are good with doing for the next 5+ years. It doesn’t mean you have, you just shouldn’t dread the possibility of that being true. For why my goal is to capture all of the world’s carbon. This is for 2 reasons:

1. I’m the type of person who does the thing even when it gets boring or hard. At this point, I don’t have a conception of boring, hard, or anything else meaning I can work on whatever I want for as long as I want. Why Climate and not any other problem? it’s a hard problem to solve and I have an inclination towards it (nothing more).

2. My worst-case scenario is not bad. My real worst-case scenario isn’t living on the streets. It is probably working at some startup. That’s it. I already know enough people that could give me a job if I asked for it. Because I have pretty much no downside, might as well try to push my limits.

Understanding Potential

What I’ve realized is that kids are full of potential and ideas about what they could be. Kids wanna be astronauts, solve cancer (because Grandma is having a tough time fighting it), want to be trillionaires (because no one has done it before). They grow up and work in a cubical working a government job. The issue isn’t the job they have, but it is about the potential that was not harnessed well.

In physics, there is potential energy and kinetic energy. Potential energy is all the stored energy within you — let’s call it potential — kinetic energy is how much of the stored energy turns into real movement or motion — how much you execute on your potential.

This leads me to believe that teenagers and younger have very high potential because they have a lot of energy to do something. As they grow older, their potential decreases and it turns into executed potential. The problem is most people don’t execute very much on their potential.

Question for you: How much potential are you executing on? How can you execute more?

Create the Habits that Create action to get the results

The problem with new years resolutions is the goals are super general. Then you have no plan on how to do it. People have the goal of “Get More Fit.” How do you quantify that? What is the metric that you are looking at? You can’t improve what you don’t measure. People are thinking if I just sign up for the gym it will all work out. Just so you know 80% of January gym-joiners quit within five months. It does not seem to be working.

Most people are too focused on results that they never think about how they are going to achieve that result. For you to achieve the results you take the habits which lead to action, leading to results. In gym example, you would first want to time block it, signaling to yourself that nothing else is allowed to take him the gym block. All you need to do is show up and keep repeating to yourself I’m the type of person that does that I said I would do. Now when you show up to the gym 1 day per week like you said you would. You would enforce associate with going to the gym (the thing you said you would do) with a positive reward. Now it becomes normal behavior to go to the gym. Once you build that habit, over time you will get fitter over time (assuming you have good nutrition too).

Improving Your Life by Removing

Most people associate improving their life by doing more things. Another possible to remove what you shouldn’t be doing. If you look at athletes it is about what they are not willing to do, what they are willing not to eat, what they are willing not to consume (content-wise).

Question for you: What is 1 thing that you should not do to make your life better?

Fun vs Enjoyment

Over the last year, I felt like whenever I do “work” on consulting challenges or working on climate projects. I never had any fun, I always went off of the idea that work or reading a research paper isn’t fun (but I also didn’t hate it). Video games are fun because you enjoy them. Then I realized what I have been doing wrong. Raph Koster (big game designer) defines fun as “the act of mastering a problem mentally.” Fun is when you are in a focused state trying to learn or understand a problem.

The process of reading papers and writing memos on what I learned that week wasn’t enjoyable because that isn’t the purpose. The purpose is to learn, understand, then apply.

When you are watching Netflix you are enjoying your time because there isn’t much effort going to consume. When you are trying to make sense of papers (you don’t have the pre-requisite knowledge for) you are in a focused state that requires effort. Fun just describes the different mode of thinking you are in.

Getting yourself to do stuff that is uncomfortable

Now that is winter in Canada, whenever you try to take a cold shower, it is extra cold. As I was watching an Andrew Huberman podcast, he suggested something interesting for cold showers. “When you get in say Andrew Huberman said it was good from me.” The funny thing is it worked, it made me less jumpy in cold showers. My hypothesis for why this happened was because I kept repeating the words over and over where I started to focus on the world and less on the cold water sensation.

You can extrapolate this through the lens of doing anything that makes you uncomfortable where you could say “I’m the type of person who does uncomfortable things.” You keep repeating so it becomes part of your identity. Just putting the narrative in your head that doing uncomfortable things is normal changes how you act.

Why I Care so much about Thinking

Was talking to Ian, I asked him a question about sales and after he gave me the answer, I was like “That was so obvious how did not figure that out.” He told me “Your current figure it out mode runs on 2 or 3 [mental] models and if they don’t work you just ask Ian.” (not kidding Ian is like my google of how the world works).

From that day I started collecting models of how to think from different people a ton of the content above isn’t me, it is information I have found in the books I read and podcasts I listen to.

Mental models learned from People

1. “If it doesn’t change what you do, don’t ask it.” Of course, you can have curiosity questions, but be intentional about asking them. Very action-oriented approach. If 80% to 90% of questions you asked were action-oriented your trajectory changes a lot. Thanks Ian

2. Optimize for short-term action on new information. The short-term action breeds long-term results once you do it on a long enough time scale. Don’t ask questions that help you in 5 years, ask ones that would help you now because you will forget it in 5 years. Thanks Navid

3. Inversion as a thinking model. Sometimes you don’t have others around you to challenge your assumptions. For each question, you have to use the inverse to add more perspective to your thoughts. Some time ago I saw the founder of Snapchat is now getting on the board of KKR (a big private equity firm) and I was like “Why is Evan on the board? then Ian replied Why wouldn’t X person join the board? Then the answer becomes obvious he has money to give them, he gains influence by having access to KKR’s decision-making. Whenever you are thinking from 1 perspective, think about how the opposite can be true. It makes you less attached to your own opinion because of your awareness of the opposite. Thanks Ian

4. Hypothesis-based thinking. If you have a question that you don’t have the answer to, you need a hypothesis. The hypothesis provides you with a starting point. If your hypothesis is correct then you continue iterating on it. If your hypothesis is wrong then based on the new information that you got you to have direction to continue. Your biggest hindrance is your lack of action to get the unknown information in the first place. Also, you could have a hypothesis based on very limited to no information, the reason you want to guess even if you know nothing because it requires you to think, and as you find out more information you find out what was wrong with your thinking process to make it better for the next time you have a hypothesis. From Nadeem + Andrew

5. Scope down. While I was working on biochar (capture carbon and increase plant yield). What Michael had me do was pick a specific plant (I picked corn) then I created a geographical boundary in Iowa. That took me from “I don’t know how to deploy this biochar thing” to “I know which organizations and farmers I need to talk to.” If biochar did work out, then it would have been so helpful for deploying biochar because I have already done the validation that they want it. Thanks Michael.

6. “What do I need to know to make this work?” This question had been a break of all the different components for the project which gave me a good general outline of what to look for in research/talking to people (biochar mindmap). Thanks Brandon + Andrew

Most Needle Moving Things I learned About Myself

I’m low neurotic — I pretty much don’t worry about stuff. I’m so free from self-judgment. If I don’t do something today, it will happen tomorrow. My lack of stress about pretty much anything is what I attribute to any success I have ever had or will have. It is what allows me to go hard on a time crunch. I don’t perceive failure for the most part. I don’t care about the barriers in the way. I will go through it, under it, around, above. All I know is if I fail, I don’t have an issue with it. My not worrying free from pretty much any problem.