Hello All,

Merry Christmas! I’m writing all the way from Las Vegas, and in this last email for 2022, I’ve:

• 30+ maxims and stories - I reviewed my (very detailed!) years of book and article notes, sharing here some of the best. I promise it’s good!
• The (short!) conclusions from my Annual Review and main theme I chose moving into 2023

Update on Denmark, investing, houses, etc. next time. But I promise this one is interesting 😀!

AND ⚽️ We’re WORLD CHAMPIONS 🇦🇷. Now, moving on…

Video On Quick Wins:

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31 Maxims for 2023

I spent a few days reviewing my book and article highlights. I copy below some of the most interesting ones. They’re focused (this time, at least) on four themes. Note, I might miss attribution in some places:

On Strategy & Success

To Start…

• In every situation, life is asking us a question, and our actions are the answer. Our job is simply to answer well. - You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.

Next - A Warning:

• Personalizing successes sets people up for disastrous failure. They begin to treat the successes totally as a personal reflection of their abilities rather than the result of capitalizing on a good opportunity, being at the right place at the right time, or even being just plain lucky.(Via “What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars”)
• Understand that timing is often the biggest component of success. And since timing is often hard to get right unless you are psychic, it makes sense to try different things until you get the timing right by luck. (Via Scott Adams)

So, In That Context:

• It doesn’t matter how many opportunities you miss, what matters are how many opportunities you take advantage of - (for example) it doesn’t matter how many people don’t get the podcast, it matters how many do. (Via Peter Thiel, paraphrased)
• In all cases, use leverage - per Naval, the four ways to use leverage are labor, capital, code and content. Think: how can I use people, money, apps and systems, etc. to power up whatever you’re doing.

AND - Remember, life is short. So, be BOLD. Take this case from The 48 Laws of Power:

• “The Columbus Strategy” (Named for Christopher Colombus): Always make a bold demand. Set your price high and do not waver. … It is up to you to set your own price. Ask for less and that is just what you will get. Ask for more, however, and you send a signal that you are worth a king’s ransom. Even those who turn you down respect you for your confidence, and that respect will eventually pay off in ways you cannot imagine.
• Columbus had an amazing power to charm the nobility, and it all came from the way he carried himself. He projected a sense of confidence that was completely out of proportion to his means. Nor was his confidence the aggressive, ugly self-promotion of an upstart—it was a quiet and calm self-assurance. In fact it was the same confidence usually shown by the nobility themselves. The powerful in the old-style aristocracies felt no need to prove or assert themselves; being noble, they knew they always deserved more, and asked for it. With Columbus, then, they felt an instant affinity, for he carried himself just the way they did—elevated above the crowd, destined for greatness.

To Finish Up: What matters is eventually hitting a home run, and the way to do that is training hard and a lot of at-bats. You only have to be right once, and it’s ok to be wrong a lot of times. Be bold. Move fast. Work hard. Ignore haters. Keep swinging.

And - Once you succeed, to whatever it is you set yourself to, remember:

• We all think some external accomplishment is going to change everything, but it never seems to. It doesn’t change how you see yourself, it doesn’t change how you go through the world, it doesn’t change what you feel like when you wake up in the morning. (Via Ryan Holiday)

On Parenthood

Must Remember - via Paul Graham: One great thing about having small children is that they make you spend time on things that matter: them. They grab your sleeve as you’re staring at your phone and say “will you play with me?” And odds are that is in fact the bullshit-minimizing option.

Developing Creativity and Teaching:

• Instead of drilling your kids on historical dates, take them somewhere where they can understand that history is a thing that actually happened, that has an actual physical footprint. Don’t pester them about their homework, do math with them as you pay bills, or calculate the tip on the dinner check, or work on a project in the garage. Show them the why and the how, because they are more important than any what. Skills matter of course, but there’s always a reason we are trying to attain them. That reason is the context necessary for comprehension. Depriving your kid of that context is not just silly—it’s cruel. It forces them to try to learn in a vacuum. (Via Daily Dad)
• Curiosity consumes and develops the child; he would touch and taste everything from his rattle to the moon. For the rest he learns by imitation, though his parents think he learns by sermons. They teach him gentleness, and beat him; they teach him mildness of speech, and shout at him; they teach him a Stoic apathy to finance, and quarrel before him about the division of their income; they teach him honesty, and answer his most profound questions with lies. Our children bring us up by showing us, through imitation, what we really are. (Via Will Durant)

Also…

• The harder you try to force your kids to do things, the less likely they are to do those things. Whatever it is you want them to do, you gotta figure out how to get them to think it’s their idea.
• If parents are astronauts, kids will find being an astronaut normal. If you’re an entrepreneur or build a business, kids will find that also natural. What would you like them to think it’s normal too?

On Productivity

The MOST Important Productivity Advice (via Sam Altman):

• It doesn’t matter how fast you move if it’s in a worthless direction. Picking the right thing to work on is the most important element of productivity.
• Many people spend too much time thinking about how to perfectly optimize their system, and not nearly enough asking if they’re working on the right problems. It doesn’t matter what system you use or if you squeeze out every second if you’re working on the wrong thing.

What to focus, then?

• It’s better to do as Hamilton did, as Seinfeld did, and as Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, reminds his employees: “Focus on the things that don’t change.”
• Plus, remember: The entire global economy ticks on people waking up each morning and trying to buy a version of their desired self.

People are frugal guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy ― Seneca

If you come up with a list of many reasons to do something, Nassim Nicholas Taleb once wrote, you are trying to convince yourself—if there isn’t one clear reason, don’t do it.

• Also Via Taleb - Even the Nobel, with all its ills of inducing competition in something as holy as science, is not granted for a collection of papers but rarely for more than a single, but major, contribution.

My Latest Productivity Video - 20+ Mins on My System:

On Money & Friends

Friends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better.

The 5 People Rule: “The people you spend the most time with will change you in ways you cannot anticipate or ever fully understand after the fact. The most important choice of all is who you choose to surround yourself with”. In that line: -

• Show me your calendar and I will tell you your priorities. Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you where you’re going.
• Jim Watson, who’s famous for co-discovering DNA, famously said: “Avoid Boring People.” (Flip it, and say “Be Insteresting”)

Then…

• Compliment people behind their back. It’ll come back to you.
• Even people who say they don’t want or need flattery sometimes still need flattery.
• When someone tells you something is wrong, they’re usually right. When someone tells you how to fix it, they’re usually wrong.

And Remember…

Nobody is thinking about you. They’re too busy thinking about themselves.

Last, on Human Psychology - via Plutarch, writing 2000 years ago:

• In Lacedaemon (Sparta), when a certain licentious person made an acceptable proposal, the people rejected it, and so the ephors selected one of the elders by lot and ordered him to make the same proposal, thus pouring the proposal, so to speak, from a dirty vessel into a clean one, so that it would be well received by the multitude. Thus, trust in a person’s character and a lack of trust both have great influence in politics.

Plus, two must-reads every year are the short articles The Tail End and Life is Short. If you haven’t read them yet, it’s going to be a useful ten minutes 😉.

​I use Readwise to read books and articles and then keep in track of all my highlights and notes - across articles, books, tweets, etc. It’s one of my favorite services. Completely recommended.

My Annual Review Thoughts

I’ve done an Annual Review for 15 (!) years now. This time, it was earlier than normal - I used our family cruise through West Central America (with no internet) as the perfect opportunity to sit down and think.

I’ll keep my conclusions here short:

2022 was alright - a mixed bag. It was phenomenal in many ways, but I didn’t reach my career, business nor travel goals . (They were absurdly ambitious in some cases, but still.) Lots of progress though, but no bang-bang.

Lots of actions coming from this, but the main one is that I’ll be asking for help. Specifically, I’ll get:

• An accountability coach to help me “close” some of the key projects/ideas I’ve procrastinated on,
• A therapist to help me with optimism and self-belief (to activate that Colombus Strategy, you could say) - as I used to be absurdly confident until not that long ago, and I think over-corrected and became too humble the last years, and
• An Executive Assistant / Helper to help me scale parts of my online business.

This is a huge mindset shift for me as for long I thought I didn’t need therapists or coaches (beyond skill-specific ones) - so looking forward to try.

Beyond that:

• I’m very (very!) happy with my “frictionless” YouTube/video production setup. I got a lot of gear at home, but - looping back to leverage (see maxims), it’s a pitch-perfect example of using capital and code to scale. (With the three people I want to hire, I’ll use the “labor” leverage as well)
• The year went fast. It’s a bit more hectic with two kids 🙈.

I used AI to fully script this video (!):

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Courses Updates

I’ve been traveling for now close to two months, and - again - two kids full-time parenting made it almost impossible for me to work much on my projects. But I’ve three things cooking:

1- Investing in Denmark Course Update. I’m doing a version 2.0 of the course: all new videos, new content, more deep dives, more on money/investing psychology, exercises, etc. Everyone who bought (and buys) the current course will get access to the updated course for free. (The new one will be more expensive too.) I’ll also add some live/cohort setup to it in 2023 as well.

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​2- Annual Review Workshop. I would love to do this workshop again. But I don’t want to do it from the road. So let’s do like this: you can buy the recordings/materials from last year here to reflect at your own pace. I’ll then follow up with everyone who signs up when I’m back home in mid January. Bit ad-hoc but it’s the best I can manage now.

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​3- Course on Entrepreneurship. I got a lot of positive feedback for this one the last email. I’ll explore.

Parting Message

I’m still traveling for two more weeks (lol) - now in Vegas for some fireworks, and then finishing in the sunny shores of Punta Cana.

I wish you all my readers a Happy New Year, Merry Christmas, great health, amazing energy, and that we all make 2023 the best year ever.

I remember starting 2022 with fear - lockdown, nobody knew how bad Omicron would be, the war in Ukraine was brewing… Moving into 2023, there’s still covid, there’s still war, the world is still crazy, but I’m optimistic that there are better times to come.

Hugs, and thank you for reading.

Mario