To the obsessed,

Here are your weekly Ten Bullets. A list of ideas I can't stop thinking about- to help you build companies, make art, and find your obsession.

1. On thinking and doing:

"It's easy to take credit for the thinking. Oh I thought of this three years ago. But when you dig deeper, you find that the people that really did it were also the people that worked through the hard intellectual problems.

I've seen a lot of people make things, I've seen a lot of people fail. The people that change this industry, that have really made the contributions, are the thinker and doer in one person.

Did Leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years out in the future what he would paint, or the technology he would use? Of course not.

Leonardo was the artist but he also mixed all his own paints. He was a fairly good chemist, knew about pigments, knew about human anatomy. Combining all of those skills together, the art and the science, the thinking and the doing, was what resulted in the exceptional result."

- Steve Jobs on Thinkers and Doers (YouTube) (h/t Frederik Gieschen)

2. On obsession:

"The key is to make work into the thing you’d 'rather be doing.'”

- Alex Hormozi​

3. On running:

"I can endure more pain than anyone you’ve ever met. That’s why, I can beat anyone."

"Pre was stubborn. He insisted on holding himself to a higher standard than victory. A race is a work of art. That's what he said. That's what he believed. Of course he wanted to win. But how he won mattered more. He finally got it through my head- that the real purpose of running isn't to win a race. It's to test the limits of the human heart."

- Steve Prefontaine - The Real Purpose of Running (YouTube)

4. On compounding:

"There are two ways work can compound. It can compound directly, in the sense that doing well in one cycle causes you to do better in the next. That happens for example when you're building infrastructure, or growing an audience or brand.

Or work can compound by teaching you, since learning compounds. This second case is an interesting one because you may feel you're doing badly as it's happening. You may be failing to achieve your immediate goal. But if you're learning a lot, then you're getting exponential growth nonetheless.

Indeed, the forms of exponential growth that don't consist of learning are so often intermixed with it that we should probably treat this as the rule rather than the exception. Which yields another heuristic: always be learning. If you're not learning, you're probably not on a path that leads to superlinear returns.

But don't overoptimize what you're learning. Don't limit yourself to learning things that are already known to be valuable. You're learning; you don't know for sure yet what's going to be valuable, and if you're too strict you'll lop off the outliers."

- Paul Graham, Superlinear Returns (h/t Hunter Weiss)

Package your obsession into something that compounds.

5. On finding your people:

Following your obsession is the only way to find your 'people.'

Right now, you might be stuck with friends or family who don't get you. They don't see what you see. You feel like they're in a different world.

But, once you actually use your obsession for something-- art, business, athletics- anything...it becomes a magnet.

You pull people towards you who understand you, and are inspired by you (and vice versa). It happens without forcing anything...except doing your work, with force.

​(Share on Twitter)​

The most important aspect of obsession may be- that is the one true cure for loneliness.

6. On agency:

"How to spot high agency people:

1. Weird teenage hobbies - Teenage years are the hardest time to go against social pressures. If they can go against the crowd as a teenager, they can go against the crowd as an adult.

2. Energy distortion field - If you meet with them when you're tired and defeated, you leave the room ready to run a marathon on a treadmill with max incline. Low agency people do the opposite.

3. Golden question - If you're in a 3rd world prison cell and had to call someone to get you out, who would you call? That's the highest agency person you know.

4. You can never guess their opinions - The boxer that writes poetry. The advertiser obsessed with the history of war. The beauty queen who reads Nietzsche. If their beliefs don't line up with their stereotypes, they've exercised agency.

5. Immigrant mentality - If they've moved from their hometown, that's a good sign. If they've moved from their home country, that's an even greater sign. It takes agency to spot you're in the wrong place, resourcefulness to operationalise a move and a growth mindset to start from zero in a new location.

6. They send you niche content - Low agency people look at the social engagement of content before deeming its quality. High agency people just look at the content. They spot upcoming trends very early.

7. Mean to your face but nice behind your back - The social incentives are to be nice to people's faces and gossip behind their backs. To do the opposite requires agency because they're swimming against the social tide."

- George Mack (Twitter)​

7. On outliers:

"Every true outlier is a one of one. Irreplicable. Who they are. Why they did it, when they did it, and how they did it all come together in a perfect symphony You can't learn directly from them about what they did. You have to absorb their way of being."

- Kevin Espiritu (Epic Gardening)

8. On content:

Zach 🏴 @zachpogrob If you want your content to reach millions of people, write and speak like you're talking to one person. 12:7 PM • Nov 13, 2023 7 Retweets 120 Likes Read 5 replies

​

The big secret to my writing is- I'm writing to myself.

That counts as one person, I think.

It's 'The Obsessed' me, writing to the 'unobsessed' me.

This has basically been my strategy for years- and it must be why my words resonate with some people.

9. On trust:

sucks @powerbottomdad1 if you were ever questioning Sama's character just remember that I am am absolute nobody and he's worth a billion+ dollars 3:33 PM • Nov 18, 2023 8 Retweets 468 Likes Read 17 replies

​

This DM tells you all you need to know about someone.

10. On competition:

The tremendous price of competition is that you often stop asking some bigger questions about what's truly important and truly valuable. Don't always go through the tiny little door that everyone's trying to rush through, maybe go around the corner and go through the vast gate that nobody is taking."

- Peter Thiel - Competition is for Losers (YouTube) (h/t @build_or_die)

If you enjoyed this, forward it to an obsessed friend. 🏴

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Stay obsessed,

Zach 🏴

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