December 17, 2018
North Star Podcast – Dreams and Determination with Daniel Gross
The North Star Podcast Website
This is a conversation between host David Perell and guest Daniel Gross on what drives entrepreneurial startups and how to improve oneself to help others
Key Takeaways
- “Invest in yourself, so that you can invest in others”
- Habits are things you do, without having to think about it
- It gets harder as you get older to acquire newer habits
- Pick smaller steps, write down the version of yourself that doesn’t accomplish goals
- Use the negative and positive versions to propel yourself
- The advancements of society are attributed to individuals rather than groups
- When you try to predict the future, make sure you look at the past
Introduction
- Daniel Gross is a young entrepreneur who co-founded Cue, which was bought by Apple, where he led the machine learning efforts, until joining Y Combinator as a partner in early 2017
Life and Video Games
- There are boring and exciting ways to learn
- School is associated with boredom
Gamification
- Gamification of life – everything in life is in some form of a video game, all humans regardless of IQ, are seeking novelty
- Videos Games are interesting ways of interpreting the world
- Equal parts interesting and fun
- Videos Games are interesting ways of interpreting the world
- Win too much and it’s boring, win too little and it’s too hard
- Games match you up with people at your level only
- Life doesn’t
Motivation
- How can you find the motivation to learn a new skill?
- Force function – Tell your friends you will do something before a particular date, they won’t care, but you will work really hard to get that goal done, building a force function
Feedback
- If you are doing something and your friends tell you it is bad, that is helpful information
- Doesn’t matter what the mass thinks of you, but a select few
- Getting the approval of people around us is healthy
- It becoming a powerful motivating factor
Artificial Intelligence
- AI is brilliant at operations
- People are waiting around for computers to do human work
Innovation
- Take the current reality and project it forward,
- You don’t think of Game of Thrones when TV screens are barely coming out
- Analogies are very satisfying to think of
- It feels good to describe them to others, that way it permeates through society.
- Feels good to learn and teach others in that way
Individual vs. Group Think
- Groupthink – Wanting to impress the boss
- You want to increase diverse thinking, not group think
- Computers don’t do “transfer learning” very well (Cross Domain Analogy)
- AI does not instinctively, like humans, know that a ping pong ball thrown up in the air will come back due to gravity
Three Ways to Help Start-Up Companies
- Hold office hours
- Have mentors that can answer difficult questions
- Resources
- Computing power
- Datasets
- Working with different companies to offer data sets
Short-Term v Long-Term Learning
- You’ve got to build a plan – A vision where you want to be.
- Think about the why of your vision too
- Think less about the goal, and more about what would keep you from getting there
- Crystallize the vision
- Reverse engineer your vision into a plan
- Reward yourself after accomplishments
The Environment Effect
- Cultivate an environment that will help you
- If you can, environments are like cheat codes
- If you can surround yourself with builders, you will have a higher chance of becoming a builder
- The physical environment that you are in, can affect your motivation, effort, and success
- Are the relationships you build online as effective?
- First Step: Podcasts, books
- Second step: find a digital community
- Third step: Physically locating near them
- Find a city that has a reputation that you want
- New York whispers money, LA whispers popularity
Israel’s Environment
- Isreal’s greatness stemmed from having to be great
- Harshness in Isreal creates hard-working individuals
- Pressure to be great, that doesn’t exist in countries that have plenty
- Scarcity creates the greatest
- The northern part of the US is more developed than Mexico
- True Bonding, sense of the same enemy (Suffering) (challenges)
- Why places are so different, but so close, the culture of adversity and scarcity, creates solid structure systems, creates degrees of trust,
- Everyone in Israel goes to the military and the military chooses the best
- Check out the book – Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
- Will China be next?
American Enthusiasm
- What is about America that makes it exceptional?
- High degree of optimism about the future, high degrees of trust and bonding
- Optimism can cause situations similar to the 2008 market crash, too much hype
- People generally trust you, and assume you will do your job right
- Critical strategic thinking, taking something with no value and making it valuable
- Great things start small
- Facebook started off as a small directory at Harvard, Google started as a small project at Stanford
- Great things start small
