In our wide-ranging conversation, we explore the Cropsafe story, the balance of innovation and globalisation, and how to maximise serendipity in your life- among other things. I was really inspired by this conversation and I hope you will be too.

A few highlights:

Micheál and John’s Advice for Ambitious Young People 🚀

In short:

* Maximise the serendipity in your life by being active on Twitter, attending events and connecting with interesting people.

* The answer to most of your problems is only a Google Search or cold email away.

* Allow yourself to think big.

“the point where you say that there's no way I'm going to be the next Amazon or Facebook or Google is the point where that journey stops. So I think it's okay to be ambitious.”

On Reading 📚

In an interview with Tim Ferriss, Patrick Collison coined the term ‘person-book-fit’. That is to say, often a book resonates with a certain person at a particular time in their life as its precisely what they need at that time. Micheál strikes a similar keynote when reflecting on the role of books in his life.

“The thing with books is there there's always something to like take out of them. So it's just depends on what you’re going through, how you immerse yourself in the book and what you're thinking about (at the time).”

Both Micheál and John love to read and expound on the value of reading in the clip below.

What John Learned From Attending The Famously Grueling 42 Coding Bootcamp in Silicon Valley 🏔

42 is a free, teacherless coding bootcamp founded by eccentric French billionaire Xavier Niel. The program compresses into a month what many engineers learn over a number of years. As you might expect, it’s an intense few weeks. Niel elucidates:

“Then, we try out their motivation through La Piscine. This entails working at the school for 450 hours in a month, 15 hours a day, every day for 30 days. That’s how we test their motivation. What we have seen in France — I don’t know if it’s the same in the United States — is that soon, some of them say: “That’s really nice and all, but it’s not for me. It’s too much work, it’s too hard. I’d rather leave and do something else.”

Why put yourself through this? Well, like Frank Sinatra sang in the seventies, ‘if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere.’ Make it through the grueling 42 Piscine, and you’ll be well-equipped to handle the travails of building and scaling a startup.

John is one of the school’s many success stories. While he reflects on his time there as the most challenging month of his life, the lessons he learned in grit, self-reliance and ‘figuring things out for himself’ made it all worthwhile.

“The main thing… wasn’t the programming language. It wasn't really the main point. It was more that I learned how to figure out things for myself, because since there was no teachers, you had to figure out, okay, how am I going to write this piece of code?

So really just boils down to asking your peers or figuring it out on Google because you've pretty much the entire history of the world's knowledge within one click away. You just go into Google and you figure it out for yourself.”

I hope you enjoy and get as much inspiration from this conversation as I did.

Have a great week!

Will

In the ‘Zero To One’, the canonical book on building great companies, Peter Thiel describes four mindsets held by people and societies regarding the future: Definite Optimism, Indefinite Optimism, Indefinite Pessimism, and Definite Pessimism.

The optimism-pessimism spectrum denotes where people think society is going, the definite-indefinite spectrum how we’ll get there.

Peter’s contention is that the current milieu in the US and Europe is one of indeterminism. To borrow Steve Job’s famous quote, we used to believe we could put a dent in the universe, now we just know it will be dented. The problem with this line of thinking is that if nobody is actively creating the future we want to live in, it will never arrive. Elon Musk put it well:

"Technology does not automatically improve, it only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better."

Progress require both an optimistic vision for the future, and a sense of conviction as to how that vision will be instantiated.

The world needs more definite optimists- people with grand visions for the future backed by pragmatic plans and actions to bring them to life. This week’s guest, Jack O’ Connor is- I believe- one such individual. In our conversation, Jack shares a dictum by which he tries to live his life:

“I try to be an idealist in vision, and a pragmatist in execution”

This short sentence strikes on many of the keynotes previously touched on by Thiel, Musk and other great visionaries. Like all worthy ideals, it’s a challenging one to live up to- as Jack acknowledges in the episode- but it’s worth striving towards.

I hope you get as much inspiration, enjoyment, and actionable insight from my conversation with Jack as I did.

Thanks for reading.

Have a great week!

Will

In our wide-ranging conversation, Lory gives a first-principles explanation of what Blockchain actually is, describes the regret minimisation framework he used when deciding to leave the warm stable of consulting, and reflects on the importance of learning in his life.

Here are a few of my highlights:

Q: “You mentioned Amazon’s flywheel, does Lory Kehoe have a flywheel?”

A: “A Squeaking flywheel, perhaps… there's probably things that I'm always doing and that I think are helping to keep the flywheel moving, certainly at some pace. And I think a big cornerstone for me on that is to be constantly learning. So constant education- I try and do at least one course of some sort every year… that helps me understand what else is going on in different markets and helps me keep up with trends.”

The Topic of Lory’s PHD- Why Do The Mighty Fall? 📉

“I’m starting a PHD in a couple of weeks… looking at why, in the face of disruption and change, do some companies succeed? They take the bull by the horns and they create, they pivot, they create new business models and they flourish. Versus why do some companies, when they know change is either happening, has occurred, or is about to occur? Why do they struggle and fail to change and adapt?

I am very interested in why companies that were once so incredibly powerful and successful fail. It's not as if the executive teams suddenly woke up one morning and forgot how to do their job, or, you know, became stupid. That's not the case. So what happened that really led to the company sliding and disappearing versus other companies that, no matter what happens, seem to succeed?”

The Basics of Blockchain ⛓

“Blockchain has four key characteristics and I'll quickly run through those…”

* “The first thing that I'd say is that what's done on a blockchain, it's there forever... I won't say it's impossible, but it's extremely difficult… as far as we can see it so far… it can't be edited, amended or altered”

* “Point two are these things called smart contracts and smart contracts are self- executing contracts when certain criteria are met. If this event happens, trigger this payment and the applications of that are infinite…”

* “A third thing is around decentralization. Decentralization means that, if a bunch of companies are working together, no one single company has the data stores the data or owns the data. And in fact, really what it means is that if there are, let's say five companies, each company has a direct copy or instance of that dataset. And if company one experiences a hack… it can refer, when it goes back online, to any one of the four others for a copy of their information.”

* “The last thing is cryptography… cryptography is what makes it all work.”

Why’s it Called Blockchain?

“ What it all boils down to is that there is a block, a Genesis block. The first block with the stores and transactions are agreed effectively, captured and agreed into that first block. And they have to be approved by one entity, five entities, as the case may be, or by computer programs, figuring out puzzles, but all those transactions are stored in the first block. And then, when that block becomes full or it reaches its capacity, the second block is created and is linked to the first block and so on…”

I hope you enjoyed this conversation with the wildly impressive Lory Kehoe as much as I did.

Have a great week!

Best,

Will

Podcast 🎙

“Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they... can never be without some element of education.”

- Nicholas Negroponte, The One Laptop Per Child Project

This week I had the pleasure of sitting down with Alberto Arenaza- an entrepreneur and writer exploring the frontier of learning and work at Transcend Network. In our wide-ranging conversation, we explore the second-order effects of Covid-19 on education, the future of universities, corporate universities, the corporate development market, and much much more. Here are some of the highlights:

On The Direct Impact of Covid-19 on Education

“When a lot of us in Ireland and Spain and the U S think about the impact of COVID on education. We think about kids taking classes on zoom, and how difficult it's been… that's actually not the reality of most countries in the world. If you look at the access to online learning through these past few months in high income countries, 80% of students that have been able to access some type of remote learning… but when you look low income countries, that is only 20% and the overwhelming majority of that has been radio learning, TV learning, paper based learning, which are less effective than online.

… What this has meant for a lot of students and for a lot of countries as a whole has been six months of total inactivity. The Brookings Institute tried to estimate the impact of those six months, and they came up with $10 trillion that it will cost our generation in terms of lifetime earnings lost.

… one of the really interesting things that I found through this research was that even though 16% of students have access to an online connection worldwide, 97% of students have access to mobile networks. so all of a sudden the idea of text-based learning is a lot more interesting…”

On The University of The Future - A Combination of Timeless + Timely Skills

“…at the University Level… you complete maybe a few years of basic training around competencies that you're going to need in your life- learning how to learn, learning how to be with other people, how to communicate, all these soft skills. And then you can move on to do a bootcamp that will teach you whatever you need to do to land the next job. And then you'll go Back into a bunch of different boot camps throughout your lifetime… once you have that as a base, then you can access all these different training programs to upskill you into the next role.”

Can Ed-Tech Companies Reach Venture Scale?

“from a higher level perspective, I think Ed-Tech is changing fundamentally… from a market selling to schools- getting a product, and selling it to a district or to a specific school.

… to a market where we're integrating the world of work and the world of learning in more meaningful ways… I think the market as a whole is changing a lot. And, I think that is a very appealing vision for venture capital investors”

I really enjoyed this conversation with Alberto, and if you’ve any interest in the future of work and learning, I think you would too.

Thought I’m pondering 🤔

Could we re-vamp apprenticeships for the digital age?

In Context-Based Adult Learning, Catherine. A Hansman lays out the five phases of a traditional apprenticeship:

* Phase I: Modeling – "Modeling occurs in two parts: behavioral modeling allows learners to observe performance of an activity by experienced members to share "tricks of the trade" with new members"

* Phase II: Approximating – “In private or in non-critical scenarios, the observer begins to mimic the actions of the teacher. This phase allows the learner to try the activity and lets them think about what they plan to do and why they plan to do it. Then after the activity the learner reflects about the activity. They examine what they did in comparison to what the expert did.”

* Phase III: Fading – “The learner, still within the safety net, starts operating in a more detailed manner, playing within the structure that has been taught. The learner's capabilities are increased as the experts assistance decreases.”

* Phase IV: Self-directed Learning – “The learner attempts the actions within real society, limiting him/herself to the scope of actions in the field that are well understood. The learner is performing the actual task and only seeking assistance when needed from the expert.”

* Phase V: Generalizing – “The learner generalizes what has been learned, trying to apply those skills to multiple scenarios and continuing to grow in ability in the field. The learner uses discussion in this phase to relate what they have learned to other relevant situations.”

It doesn’t take much imagination to picture what this model would look like online. Here’s a rough sketch:

* Phase 0: Teacher sets pre-work for anyone who wishes to be mentored by them to complete.

* Phase I: Teacher provides live (or pre-recorded) video content of them practicing their craft, explaining what they’re doing and why they’re doing it at each stage.

* Phase II: Student- based on the videos- tries to emulate the teacher’s creation and submits it for feedback.

* Phase III: Teacher starts to give learner small paid tasks to complete for their clients, correcting and editing their work where necessary.

* Phase IV: Teacher helps student to get his own set of clients, and is available for assistance when needed.

* Phase V: Student- armed with network of peers who’ve gone through the same process, the recommendation of a well-established teacher, and a portfolio of work- goes forth into the professional world.

The tools needed for such a process- collaborative tools, video conferencing, tools for creators etc.- all already exist. What’s needed is a compelling business model to make it worthwhile for the teacher. More on that in future posts…

Tactic I’ve Come Across 🗝

Write down and track the principles you believe to be true

“Principles”, according to Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates (the world’s largest hedge fund), “are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life.”

Who we are and what we produce are downstream of our principles- those things we believe to be true that govern our behaviour. And yet, few of us take the time to identify and refine the self-created constructs under which we’re operating.

Inspired by Cameron Porter’s list of principles, and by Will Minshew’s personal constitution, I’ve decided to create my own. The experience has been of enormous value to me and I encourage you to try it for yourself.

Tools and Resources I’m Loving 🛠

A Great New Podcast I’ve Discovered - The Paradox Podcast

“We live in a paradoxical time... where we have more comfort but less peace, more connectivity but less connection, more information but less wisdom. The purpose of this podcast is to explore these natural tensions with independent voices across tech, culture and politics who will expand and challenge our thinking. This is the Paradox Podcast.”

* Favourite Episode: EP 13 with Balaji Srinivasan

My New Favourite Website Builder - Ghost

I recently re-designed my personal website using Ghost. The whole process (outlined here) can be done in about 90 minutes.

Scrimba- an online coding school that's as good as Stanford but as cheap as a gym membership.

The YC-Backed Scrimba is on a mission to create the best possible coding school at the lowest possible cost for students. I know what you’re thinking, aren’t there a million websites doing that already. Well, yes, but Scrimba has come up with a novel approach that- after playing around with for a while- I absolutely love. They use screencasts which enable you to edit the teacher’s code and provide a much more immersive experience than static video.

Thanks for reading this week’s edition of The Mental Athlete.

Have a great week!

Best,

Will

For most Irish teenagers, the end of their Junior Cert Exams is followed by a year of sloth (also known as ‘Transition Year’). Daniel Kyne was different. As soon as he walked out of the last exam, his mind switched to building his first startup- a music publishing platform. After 18 months of hammering away on the project with little success, Daniel reached out to Patrick Collison for guidance. Miraculously, Patrick responded within a few hours with the following sage advice: ‘You’re too young to be building a company- enjoy yourself, have a variety of experiences, and you can always start a company later’.

It was not the advice that Daniel had been seeking, but in time he came to understand that it was what he had needed. Now, six years since that email, Daniel is again building a company. This time, armed with the experience, network and expertise to turn his vision into reality.

In our wide-ranging discussion, Daniel shares a selection of his hard-earned wisdom for aspiring entrepreneurs. Here are some of the highlights:

College Students 🚨 Build Community and Credibility, Then Build a Company

“Build community, build credibility, then build a company. That was the approach that I took. When I came into college, I wanted to get involved as many things as possible. I started working at Dublin tech summit about a week before my Leaving Cert Results, and took on as much responsibility as I could really.

I went from intern to one of the department managers within two months. I just jumped in as much as possible. And I joined, maybe three societies, as well, and I was just flat out. I really embraced the idea that if I want to build something, I'm not going to be able to do it unless I actually know people who can help me along the way.

There's just this such a big presumption that people like Mark Zuckerberg were super talented with a great idea. And that's just not the case. It's like Mark Zuckerberg is super talented, had a great idea, and a whole support network that he built around him to enable him to flourish.”

On The Art and Science of Sending A Great Cold Email 📩

“Overall, just do not be worried about emailing people. Like you can email absolutely anyone in the world. It's so, so easy. People think that you're never going to get a response and you absolutely are. I mean, I've gotten responses for cold emails from people in the White House, people in Westminster, in NASA, like the CEO of Airbnb, like you can literally email anybody you want.And if you write a good email, you will get a response.

… the one thing you've got to have in your head is like what, it's not necessarily that you need to be giving them value because a lot of people are willing to give time on sort of a mentorship basis, especially when you're younger or a student, but you’ve got to know that you're not wasting this person's time at the same time that you're going to ask them questions that are going to impact your own decisions, because that's really what they want to see is that their advice impacted the actions you took afterwards.”

The Book That’s Had The Biggest Impact on Daniel’s Life 📚

The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. I've read it probably four or five times now.

And I tend to just keep reading it as many times as I can. Whenever I need to top up. For me, it was basically just like that lightning bolt moment. I think for me, it just made me realize how much conversations are just based on ego and wanting to get compliments about like, ‘Oh, you're really doing a great job’, or to get people to just validate what I want to hear.

Thanks for reading!

All the best,

Will

This week's guest is Devan Hughes, the co-founder and CEO of Buymie-  a company on a mission is to bridge the gap between convenience and online shopping, allowing customers to order from their favourite local stores and have the goods hand-delivered to their door in as little as one hour. Personally, I love any product that reduces friction in my day to day life and Buymie certainly does this. 

This episode is a topical one as e-commerce has been one of the few industries to flourish during the pandemic rather than be stymied by it- with a 300% surge in the volume of online orders. Buymie has been no different and is on track to grow its revenue by 500% this year after recently announcing $9 million in fresh funding to expand into the UK. Buymie certainly has a bright future, but in this podcast we delve into its more humble beginnings.

Despite his recent success, Devan's path has been far from straightforward. Indeed, Devan had 5 epic failures before starting Buymie. Including everything from importing golf carts from Asia to starting, and quickly shutting down, a biometric payments company (aptly named “Paymie”).

But it was this meandering path and unique breadth of experience that allowed Devan to see what others couldn't and take an orthogonal approach when founding Buymie. Rather ingeniously, he applied the principles he picked up while working in the commodities industry to pioneer a new approach in grocery delivery- one where retailers shared common delivery infrastructure rather than each of them building out their own.

If nothing else, Devan is an amazing storyteller and this episode is a really entertaining one 😅 Here are some of my highlights from our wide-ranging discussion:

note: this was recorded on the 4th of March in front of a live audience, so beware of the subpar sound quality and the lack of Covid-19 references

On nature Vs nurture 💪

“I don't ascribe to the fact that entrepreneurs are born, do not ascribe to that at all. It’s about all your experiences and the experiences you place yourself in. If you place yourself in entrepreneurial environments, you will develop entrepreneurial skills, tendencies and capabilities for sure”

On focus 🎯

“What's the most important KPI for you today? Just focus on solving that in whatever way you can. And if you have to step on toes, if you have to piss people off to do it, just f*****g do it because you’ve nothing to lose.”

The sentence that changed Devan’s life 🤯

A young Devan and his business partner Garrett Flower (then part-time employees at the Hard Rock Café) somehow found themselves at lunch with high-flyers Diego Belmonte and Farzad Dibachi in a snazzy New Mexico restaurant discussing their plans to build a revolutionary LED company. Just as Devan was tucking into his first appetizer, Farzad said the following words, which stuck with Devan throughout the meal and, since then, have served as a reminder to always think big: “a hundred million dollars a year business doesn't excite me anymore.”

Devan reflects, “I remember our tiny little 21 year old of minds being just like sponges. I actually believe that those types of conversations that Diego exposed us to were quite formative because it set our expectations in terms of what we could achieve in our career. And I think that's one thing that Ireland has suffered from in the past is this ability to think big, to have a big grand ambition. We have Catholic shame galore, we tend to feel a bit of shame if we think too big and talk too big. And I think our experience with Diego and in the US that week probably just caught us at the right time. I think that shaped us considering the fact that myself and Garrett have kind of gone off and done very similar stuff.”

Devan’s ‘Innovation Days’ 📚

“I started taking my annual days off and I called innovation days. I remember everyone in the office would laugh at me. And so I would take a day off. I would sit at home and I would just read industry reports, any type of industry, any type of vertical. I would just read the reports. And I'm trying to understand, like, where are the pain points in the markets? … I was trying to understand different areas, different industries. Where’s the opportunity?”

Devan’s ‘earned secret’ 🗝

Great businesses are built on what Ben Horowitz describes as ‘earned secrets’- ie. something you’ve figured out that nobody else knows. Brian Chesky’s earned secret was that people would feel safe allowing total strangers to sleep on their couch, something that would’ve seemed crazy at the time. Devan’s earned secret came from his time in the commodities business. The Irish Times reports, “He says he stumbled upon the grocery e-commerce market. “It is worth €9 billion annually in Britain and Ireland alone,” he points out. “But the retailers involved make €300 million in losses every year because they are subsidising the delivery infrastructure. The distribution model they were using could never work. We have heat and power in our homes because the different services share the same infrastructure. There are nine grocery delivery distribution networks across Britain and Ireland all doing the same thing with a very costly duplication of infrastructure. The principles used for hundreds of years for the distribution of commodities were being ignored.” Buymie was founded with this thesis in mind- providing the much-needed shared infrastructure for retailers to deliver groceries without losing money- and is now well-positioned to be the number one intelligent grocery delivery solution in the UK.

Doing Things That Don’t Scale (Extreme Version) 🚗

One of the most widely invoked pieces of advice in the start-up world is to ‘do things that don’t scale’. Devan, more than anyone else I have ever come across, embodies this mantra. In the early days of Buymie, he juggled his role as CEO with being their most prolific delivery driver and customer service representative.

The most bizarre example of Devan’s relentless resourcefulness was when, to prove that users loved the Buymie platform itself and not just the retailers on it, he purchased and photographed every single item from a discount German retailer, airbrushed out their logo and uploaded each one to the app. He was left with a bath full of raw fish, ice and dairy products but, aside from that, the experiment was a success and his hypothesis was validated.

These are just a selection of the wild war stories that Devan shared with the DCU students when he came to visit us in March. Be sure to check out the full conversation here.

All the best!

Til’ next time,

Will

This week I was honored to be joined by Chris Lauder, founder of The Dublin Academy of Education. I owe a great deal to Chris and his company personally, as they helped me to realise my potential in the leaving certificate last year.  The same can be said for the thousands of students who have been through the school's doors since its inception. 

In this wide-ranging conversation, Chris and I delve into the origins of The Academy and how he grew it into what it is today, among other things.

Here are a selection of my key takeaways from the conversation:

On The Power of Good Teaching

“That was really eye opening in that it just takes the right mentor, the right coach, the right teacher who can really help you realize your potential.... I think that is really strongly overlooked in society.

Teachers are kind of, in my opinion, not looked at seriously enough. And in terms of their importance for developing young people, teachers often give them glass ceilings over their head. They create limiting beliefs in there about what they're capable of, and that really can hold them back in life.

And I kind of look at how much potential is in all these kids in our school. I'm like the only thing that's holding them back in many cases is the limiting beliefs they have about themselves. And I think teachers are the key in many cases to unlocking it academically…

…the interesting thing about having a small success academically is it spills over into other areas of life. It kind of helped me ask the question: ‘If I could do that, what else am I capable of doing?’ You know, and that's a really powerful question.And that's really what we try to do with the Academy is you start with kids' academics and you start showing that they're capable of more than they think.”

The Origins of The Academy

“We couldn't be engineers- There were no jobs and we didn't want to be engineers anyway. And the backup plans to go into our family businesses were gone as well. So we kind of had nothing to do. We had a bit of a blank canvas, which in hindsight was probably the greatest thing that ever happened to us.

…we were racking our brains, trying to come up with an idea to start a business and Brian, all the way through college did one-on-one maths grinds and he was unbelievably popular. His phone was ringing off the hook and he did around 20 classes a week, travelling between them on his motorbike. And so I remember saying, rather than you doing them all one-on-one, would you just rent a room somewhere and conduct a class?…

…And he said, he taught about it, but he never got around to it. So I said, why don't we start doing that? And that’s literally how ‘The Dublin School of Maths’ was born.

The Academy’s Genius Freemium Model

“We were losing out on customers because we had no reputation. Nobody knew who we were… So Brian and I came up with this idea, let's give it away for free. Like, let's just let people come and see how good Brian is. And once they see how good he is, they'll pay for the classes…

…People couldn't understand how we were giving away free a free three day math course… people thought that was great! I remember 300 people turned up for the free three days and, out of the 300 people, like 150 of them just signed up when the three days were over…

…It worked really well. Because we had no reputation, people worried about paying for something... Whereas if you give it to them for free and show them value, show them how good it is, be transparent, what you're offering, and then they get the value, then they sign up. And so that really helped transform our growth from there.”

On The Benefits of Privatisation

“I think one of the issues with the public system on the issues with the world overall is that if you give someone a job that they cannot be fired from, that they're completely protected from losing, it breeds contentment on it breeds a lack of engagement in some people. And what happens is, you know, bad teachers are just kind of left to their own devices, in a lot of ways.

And principals can't get rid of them because they're protected… Unfortunately, students lose out because a bad teacher can have a massive impact on their life…

And if you're an amazing teacher in the public system, it's very hard to get those awards because you're on a scale, you're limited by what's around you.

You're constrained in that respect, whereas a place, a fully private institution or the sky's the limit, you know, the better you teach, the more impact you can make on the better you can do economically.”

How Chris Gets Better at What He Does

“One thing I want to try and get better at is my psychology. Tony Robbins, who's a big hero of mine, says, ‘success in life is 80% psychology and 20% mechanics.’

So what he means is it's 80% of success is what you think, what's going on in your head and 20% what you actually do mechanically. So the actions you take and so on and so forth. So my goal is to try on have the best psychology I possibly can. And the best way to have a good psychology is to feed your mind quality information.

The interesting thing about your brain is if you start spilling information into it, you know, more and more, every single day, good information starts coming back out. You'll start talking differently. You'll think differently. You'll act differently. And so every day, what I try and do is whether it's read and or listen to stuff, I'll try and consciously put at least 30 minutes a day into learning”

You can check out the full conversation here.

Thanks for reading.

Best,

Will

Hey friends,

This week I had the pleasure of sitting down for an hour with the prodigious Thomas Arnold- a 23 year-old content creator on a mission to help businesses scale their impact through the power of storytelling- to explore his personal journey and the rise of the creator economy.

It would be hard to talk about the internet without mentioning the burgeoning creator class.

Anyone can now build audiences at scale, create a personal monopoly and turn their passions into livelihoods, whether that’s playing video games or producing video content. This has huge implications for entrepreneurship and what we’ll think of as a “job” in the future.

This week's guest is at the forefront of this shift. Thomas Arnold, at the ripe age of 23, has amassed a loyal following of over 50,000 followers across a variety of platforms and is the CEO of a fast-growing video production startup- Fearless Media. His energy and ambition is infectious and I walked away from this conversation feeling energised and ready to take on the world. I hope you enjoy listening to this conversation as much as I enjoyed recording it 😁

Here are some of my favourite takeaways from our wide-ranging discussion:

On Appreciating Greatness

“I'm the type of guy who, when I see someone who isn't sicko at what they do and what I mean a sicko, I mean, someone who's just way beyond the average, you know, they, they go above and beyond. I immediately respect it because I definitely deep down, wants to be that guy as well in my field.And when I saw Brian teach math, I. No joke. I literally saw like an NFL football player or Phil the power of Taylor. I just saw someone who was just so good at what they do. And yeah, I really respected it. The lesson I took from Brian was that whatever you do, do it with the utmost professionalism. And , I guess I'm still, to this day, trying to fulfill that goal”

To Be The Genius, You Have To Risk Being The Fool

“It was terrible, but I never really judged myself as I make stuff… I just make stuff because the quickest way to get better is to do it… And you're never fully developed. I think the big thing is your ego is invested in this idea that people think you're something more than you actually are. But when you realize that people really don't care about you or they don't care what car you drive or where you live or any of that, but what they do care about is you making stuff that they find valuable.”

On Overcoming The Ego

“Anytime I make content. I'm always focusing on how did the end user get something from what I'm doing? And that's when you focus on that your ego is removed. Cause it's not about me anymore. It's about what the other person gets.”

On Hard Work

“But when you put in that groundwork, It really does pay off. Like, I'm a really big believer in that. And I think it's the only thing that I've had going for me my entire life is that I'm not going to be so arrogant as to say I'm the hardest worker in the room, but I try my best to work as hard as I possibly can.And I'm sure other people can work harder than me. And I'm sure there's ways I can get better, but yeah. I am genuinely just trying to work my hardest. And the thing you find out is that most people, they don't really work hard and they nor do they want to, they don't want to work hard. It's just not something that's in them.”

On Limiting Beliefs

“So many people our age say our generation, they're going to be the ones who rent and can't get a house.And, in my head, I'm like, F**k that like, I want an apartment in two years. Like that's so f*****g stupid. So I definitely try not to linger on what’s genuinely b******t. You know, sometimes people, unconsciously, they say stuff because other people have said it, but they haven't thought through it.”

Advice For College Students

“I think college students just need to be way more aggressive. It doesn't even matter that you're in college. Like just start doing s**t. You know what I mean? Don't sit there and think that the world comes into place when you finish college… I work with people who are way older than me and they don't give a s**t that I'm young. All they give a s**t about is that I'm trying to make s**t happen and I have expertise and I’d just say to college students that there's so much more out there that you could be doing, and there's so much more money you could make people you could meet and impact you could make. And it doesn't matter that you're a college student, like age is but a number you’ve just gotta make s**t happen.”

What Drives Thomas?

“Let's just go smash it because we don't have a lot of time and there’s so much opportunity now with the internet. Like stuff that my parents just didn't have. So I owe it to myself and to everybody else around me to just make s**t happen as best I can. Now, what I've learned is that very few people feel that way. Very few people have that same drive that I have to just make amazing s**t. Most people are very happy to build up their careers slowly but surely and, you know, get married and have a house and stuff. And that's fine. So I think it's just finding out who you are and I've definitely always felt I just wanted to create amazing stuff. I don't know how that is going to manifest itself, but I'm trying my best to make it happen.”

What Would Thomas Put on a Billboard?

“Be brave and back yourself”

Thanks for reading, and be sure to check out the full episode

All the best,

Will

Hello friends, and welcome to this week's edition of beyond signal 😄

The protagonist in Neal Stephenson’s bildungsroman ‘The Diamond Age’ is assisted and guided by a fascinating educational technology called "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" (See diagram below).

The primer is an interactive book that can answer a learner's questions, presents contextual just-in-time information, and follows a learning progression with tasks of increasing complexity with the ultimate goal of supporting the learner to become a strong and independent thinker.

Many have tried to bridge the gap between science fiction and science fact and bring this miraculous tool into the real world. However, an artificial intelligence that can mentor a learner in real-life complex problems is still far away.

This is the moonshot idea that Nilesh at Learn Awesome hopes to build. If he’s successful, children everywhere will have a fully-customised education of the highest quality and, by extension, a great deal of economic progress will be made and human suffering reduced.

In our wide-ranging conversation, Nilesh and I cover everything from emerging forms of credentialing to the secret behind the success of the Polgar sisters. Nilesh is a true polymath and so this conversation is fast-paced and jam-packed with multi-disciplinary insights. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I did recording it 😁

Best,

Will

This week I was fortunate enough to sit down with Mr. Gary Fox and pick his mind for an hour in what turned out to be an incredibly entertaining conversation.

Gary is a seasoned entrepreneur and host of the Entrepreneur Experiment- one of Ireland's leading business podcasts. 

Gary is a million-ideas-a-minute kind of guy and so this episode was an absolute blast and is full of valuable insights. In this wide-ranging conversation, we touch on everything from Nassim Taleb's 'Skin in The Game' concept to subscription podcasting. 

Selected Links:

* The Entrepreneur Experiment 

* David Perrell's Blog 

* HostButlers

* Skin in The Game by Nassim Taleb

* Farnam Street Blog 

Show Notes:

@06:20 Gary's Background

@11:19 The dichotomy between what school incentivises Vs real life

@13:46 Curation

@16:15 Gary's first start-up

@21:33 Failure is a teacher

@23:19 Learning by doing

@25:06 Avoiding the lure of safe corporate jobs

@27:38 Building HostButlers

@28:27 The Entrepreneur Experiment

@29:59 The importance of being a good communicator

@33:40 The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet

@35:37 The lack of skin in the game for tenured lecturers

@37:34 The internet broadens the scope of potential careers

@39:44 The Leaving Cert

@40:46 Consistency is king

@42:50 Income Share Agreements

@45:02 Opportunities helping people to reskill for their 'second act'

@50:21 The impending podcast revolution

Here are some of my key takeaways:

On Mastering The Basics

“You're always looking for the new thing, where's the secret sauce? And again, it's just the basics, isn't it? Daily, getting your regular sleep, getting up at the same time just sets the day. I'm focused. I'm clear on what I'm doing. That’s it”

On Photojournalism

“It's very, very addictive because it has that thing that entrepreneurs love. It has the immediate reward. You get, you go out, you take a great image and the next day it's on the front of the Irish Times . . . I just loved it. I kind of got hooked on that. So when I finished the journalism masters, I just started doing that. I'd literally zero background in it, zero experience, so I just got some photo gear and just started . . . and learned by doing.”

On The Dichotomy Between What’s Tested in School and What’s Needed in Life

“It (testing) was designed for a different time when we didn't have access to that information. Your information was power. And, if you had that information and I didn't, well, I couldn't access that. It was in your head. I was like, Oh, Will's a genius. Okay. I'll work for will. Whereas now it's more learning how to learn, I think is going to be the skill. So how do you learn in terms of what are the systems you need? How do you access information? How do you process it and how do you store it? So in six months time, when you're thinking about, Oh, is that unbelievable lesson about SEO? Okay, let me go back and find that because you go back and Google it and, it's gone, it's in the ether, there’s 6 million results about SEO. And so I think that's going to be the new, super power- people who are able to digest information quickly, scan it and go ‘reliable, unreliable.’”

Everything Big Started Small

“That's how all great entrepreneurs start . . . like I’ve done nearly 60 episodes of the entrepreneur experiment now. All of them Just start with a tiny idea. Just start with one thing and it'll often not even resemble what you end up with . . . whatever you start with, it won't be your finished product. So don't stress out about it. Just start, just start something, just whatever you're into, just start some little tiny business.”

SpaceX, for example, started out as the Mars Oasis Project.

On The Lure Of Comfortable Corporate Jobs

“You'll get it's like the tiger in the zoo. You'll get used to the cage and you won't want to go back out. You'll get fed every nine, one and six. You'll get fed your meals . . . The Googles, the Facebooks of the world, you know, they're so good. They cater to people's every need. You're paid very well . . . it's hard to be hungry when you're sleep sleeping in silk sheets.”

On The Importance of Skin in The Game

“There's a lot of lecturers who are just passing the time and cashing the check. They've never been in the area that they're teaching . . . they've never actively engaged in it . . .

Nassim Taleb talks about this in Skin In The Game . . . Like I can read all these books, but I can't enact all the information enough because I'm not doing it.

. . . You wouldn't go to a driving instructor and if you saw them get off the Bus and get into the car to teach you. You just wouldn't, you'd be like, what are you doing?”

These are just a selection of the counter-intuitive ideas explored by Gary and I in our wide-ranging conversation. For more conversations like this, check out the Beyond Signal Podcast.