🏴 On impulses, ambition, and consumption. Ten Bullets.

To the obsessed,

Here are your weekly Ten Bullets.

Ten ideas to help you build companies, make art, and fuel your obsession.

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1. On courage:

I remember not knowing what ‘agency’ meant a few years ago. Here’s a definition I like:

agency (noun):
action or intervention, especially such as to produce a particular effect.
"canals carved by the agency of running water"

I think ‘actions of extreme agency’ are what shape our lives- and serve as the first domino pushed- into a string of dominoes that change everything.

Most spend their entire lives without realizing the dominoes are even there, and that all they had to do was stick out a finger and push one down.

Examples of these actions:

• leaving a relationship

• quitting a job

• dropping out

• moving away from home

• chasing a new obsession later in life

• shaving your head (is a small example)

It’s the ability and willingness to change everything overnight.

When you have that courage, and act on it, the world becomes yours.

2. On Kobe’s obsession with stories, after basketball:

“Obsessiveness just comes from something that you love. If you really love it, you’ll go through fire for it. You’ll go through the ups and downs with it. And you’ll just keep at it, because you love it so much.”

“Stories are the driving force- whether they’re inspirational or informational- that really change society.”

— Kobe Byrant on Jay Shetty Podcast

3. On surfing and music (flow and creativity):

“Surfing is like music. It's infinite. You will never assess it or encompass it because the movement of water and waveform is so infinite and so nuanced and so beautiful and so changeable that, just like a musician, all you're trying to do is get yourself inside the pocket of that flow and have the ephemeral moment of getting in sync with that energy. And it doesn't matter how many times you do it; there's no guarantee you're going to get it right the next time.”

— Edward Norton on Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

This is what obsession feels like. It’s an infinite flow state that you enter, and you never know exactly what you find. There are levels to it- sometimes you’re on the surface, and sometimes you’re 1000 feet down a rabbit hole that never ends.

4. On giving in to your impulses:

“For me, which is probably a bad thing, but giving into my impulses and doing what they tell me to do, has worked well. And when I try to have a regimented and structured lifestyle, it’s just not fun. You have to have some level of enjoyment if you’re going to grind every single day, for 20 years straight.”

— MrBeast on How to Take Over The World Podcast

Great related story from this pod- on how even when giving into impulses- Mr. Beast re-focuses on work:

“For whatever reason, work always pulls me back. When I first played Catan, I played for 36 hours straight. I cycled through 16 different people until I finally crashed. When I want to do something, I just want to do it. I try to get it all out of my system, and just burn myself out on it. And then when I wake up the next day, I'm like 'Okay, back to work.'“

5. On the game:

“My favorite people take their work seriously, but don't take life seriously. They play their game, obsessively, relentlessly. But they never forget exactly that- that it's all one game.”

[Share on Twitter]

All that matters is picking the right game to play, and remembering that that’s what it is. A game.

6. On content strategy:

I genuinely believe this with all my heart.

In the last 10 years, creators built followings through all sorts of strategies, all sorts of clickbait.

In the next 10 years, especially with the noise/madness to come with AI video, and everything else..

Only two things will matter:

Individuals

IP (Brand/Stories)

If you are not ‘someone,’ and you don’t stand for ‘something,’ you will disappear into irrelevancy faster than you can blink.

Good example on IG right now is Davis Clarke.

8 days ago I tweeted about him, and how he’s doing this exactly right. Sticking a phone in his face, and being truly himself.

In those 8 days he went from 100k→257k followers.

7. On living your product:

“I’m not trying to sell something that we don’t live. We live our products.”

— George Heaton

8. On ambition:

No one is more anxious than an ultra-ambitious person with nowhere to go.

9. On consumption:

When you think about it- it’s wild how ‘consumption’ is the default state.

My favorite people have the opposite default state— or at least, consume in a way that is focused on high leverage output.

10. On experimenting:

“I became a writer when I was thirty years old, and I started running when I was thirty-two or thirty-three. I decided to start running every day because I wanted to see what would happen. I think life is a kind of laboratory where you can try anything. And in the end I think it was good for me, because I became tough.”

— Haruki Murakami, The New Yorker Interview

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