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
  • Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn

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
• 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

North Star Podcast : America, analogies, boredom, business, control, degree, emotions, environment, force function, game of thrones, gamification, goals, google, great, group, individual, innovation, leadership, long term, motivation, optimism, predict, risks, school, short term, skill, small, society, strategic, thinking, value, video games
Notes By Shevchenko David