In the bustling tech hubs of San Francisco and the Bay Area, there's a mantra that echoes through the corridors of startups and the tweets of Silicon Valley influencers: avoid status games.

This piece of wisdom, often attributed to Naval Ravikant, has become a guiding principle for many in the tech community. But what exactly does it mean to avoid status games? And more importantly, how does one navigate the nuanced landscape of reputation and status?

For a select few, happiness is a peculiar concept. I would wager that most creators do not chase happiness; instead, they live for something more profound, deeper, and enduring. In the second part of this discourse, I will delve into this further, but first, let me share my personal relationship with the concept of happiness.

As a child, around the age of ten, I struggled to grasp the concept of happiness. When asked if I was happy or what brought me joy, I found the questions baffling

Every so often, I wake up with this burning urge to level up - eat cleaner, push harder, show more heart, grind like there's no tomorrow. I craft the perfect plan for the week, the month, setting goals and challenges to become that person. I'll throw down a monster goal to get my act together - run a marathon, conquer an Ironman, hit a business milestone. I often hit them but it is somehow not because I got better, but because as the deadline of loomed, I am able t tap into a frenzied energy, a maniacal drive to succeed, only to revert to my old self.

Discounting is a great tool and nobody loves discounting more than the sales team. It really helps for sales people to do price discovery and offer the best clearing price for your product for that particular customer. It helps create a sense of urgency by claiming that this price is only available till X date.

It also helps the customer feel like they are getting a “deal”.

My hot take is negotiating pricing, discretionary discounting is highly inefficient, time wastage, bad way to conduct business and an absolutely the least effiecient way to price discovery.

Conviction refers to a state of being sure about a particular idea, principle, or viewpoint. Conviction isn’t a passive state; it is not a default state, rather it is an active process of commitment to one’s principles, decisions, and actions.

Conviction is different from belief. A belief is a passive state where we hold something to be true, very often a result of

Stonehenge. Pyramids. Moai statues. Nazca Lines. Monuments of ancient wisdom, standing against the sky, their secrets lost. We look back and wonder. How were these built? The answers have slipped, like sand, through the fingers of time.

In this ever-spinning globe of ours, art's been riding shotgun, morphing, and roaring through centuries. Let’s hitch a ride through this kaleidoscope, not for the glory of its past but to get a glimpse of where it is headed. These are my musings on how art has been evolving over the last 500 years and where its waltzing towards.

Start-ups default path is towards death.

The only way to steer off this default path is through speed. It is the single most important vector for the company. Your team should enable this.

Many successful founders capture this ethos

Larry page famously came up with the “Toothbrush test” for building product at Google i.e. build products that can be used at least twice per day by users. subtext is that more frequent the product is used, possibly higher the value it generates for the user.

E.g. Food (survival), bathing/washing (disease free, socially pleasant), clothes (protection, socially pleasant).

Most of life is a game. You can play multiple game at once - having a great family is a game in itself. Having influence on millions of people is another game, having lots of money is be another game. One can play multiple games together and most people do. They just don’t articulate it. So at any given point, they don’t know which games they are playing - what the levels are, what is the core objective in that moment, and how to have fun in that game.

As we chase all the goals we set for ourselves - love is the one word answers to life I have found.

Don’t discard it as some hippie bs, read on! Almost all extra-ordinary things we achieve as individuals is one of two loves:

Modern AI models are a black box and tasked with a specific function or functions. The AI model studies millions and billions of data inputs to produce outputs and based on feedback and more data - it refines its own parameters.

Imagine if the AI model was tasked to “Kill bacteria X” or “Save the planet” or “ending war through infiltrating media” - all of this could lead to humanity being extinct.

In a recent conversation with a friend about world-view, left vs right, individualism vs collective, right or wrong, good or evil, moral duty of a human being vs moral duty of society and views on social justice, equality, race and immigration, I had an important realization. Most of someone’s core philosophy can be understood by their answers to these two fundamental question.

Everything in the world moves in cycles - things go up, things come down. Civilizations rise, civilizations decline. Market goes up, market goes down. Corporations gave successes, they have failures. People oscillate between happiness and sadness.

There are few unique things about these cycles

Tim Ferris become famous by writing the 4-hour work week and GaryVee has become popularizing hustle porn.

Both share some attributes - specifically the desire to live a life of passion. For Tim, passion lies in enjoying all aspects of life while finding hacks to spend the least amount of time “working” dedicated to earning money. For GaryVee passion lies in building a large business and dedicating every waking hour in service of that.

I have reads 100s of books, tons of biographies, met some very successful people and answer is still elusive. Individuals can claim grit, hard work, luck etc. but nothing really conclusively answers the question.

The reason I say we don’t have a deterministic answer is because any deterministic answer will have to meet the following criteria

I love life, I love lots of things about living - music, dancing, running, biking, writing, building things, building companies, traveling, waking up everyday so god damn happy to be alive, optimistically sure that pursuing my dreams is the only true north, I love humans, I love unabashed optimism, naked ambition and i love capitalism. I also possess the ability to love multiple humans and I need a relationship that supports that, I need a life that supports that.

As a society the outcomes that we praise, seek and validate are solutions. We like the solutions that win, we love big outcomes. So most people when chasing success are chasing ideas for a solution that can capture the world. I have found the opposite is required in order to build something. In order to create something wonderfully unique we must fall in love with the problem

The signals are changing. In 1900, 90% of the jobs were physical in nature and by 2100, almost 90% of the jobs will be cerebral in nature. Physical qualities which signal intelligence, mental health, creativity and fun will gain more traction than rugged looks and big muscles. The definition of fit is changing from physical health to overall mental and physical health.

There are three buckets of team members while building a company.

1-6s: They are clearly below par. These are obvious under-performers in the company or team, easily identifiable, easy for most people in the team to agree that their performance brings the team down