Thinking models
Flipping answers to inverted questions leads to interesting ideas; i.e., “what should we do to *not* reach our goal for the week?” + flip back and get a suggestion on what to do
Good questions have high suggestive value and serve as a backbone for thinking through models; i.e., you can’t intensify contradictions if you defined the problem badly
Intensifying contradictions leads to modeling the problem correctly and *seeing* the maxi problem. For example, if the problem is “how could one earn $1k in 1 month,” then the solution is relatively simple: get a job. But if you intensify $ and time contradictions and ask, “how could one earn $10k in a week”, then it’s easy to see that no job will ever satisfy that model, and you need a product of sorts that scales well - but you can’t see that maxi solution if you haven’t done the IC thinking
Intensifying contradictions is helpful because people are used to just keep doing whatever they’re doing to avoid thinking and stay consistent (this is called inconsistency-avoidance tendency in psychology)
Asking “what would the answer look like if I had it?” checks for existing but hidden knowledge
Perception
Founders think fundraising is important because that’s what they see in the news
We don’t notice ideas for “facebooks” and “airbnbs” because our perception is trained to look for how these companies look now, and not how they looked when they started - i.e., a site for Harvard undergrads to stalk each other
Jobs once said that if you want to be creative, you need to change your perception filters; if you’re reading the same stuff everybody else’s reading and doing the same thing everybody else’s doing, then you’re unlikely to be creative - go fly to Paris for a year and become a poet
Wealth
Alex Kroll derived his ideas of casts and roles from on Aristotle’s Politics published in the 4th century
Getting to be a leader and owner doesn’t always mean making a significant contribution for two reasons: 1) some contributions require specialty and skill (i.e., Bret Victor, Hamming, Fleming, Feynman); and 2) when you distance yourself from the product, you lose the “insight-from-tinkering” method when you learn new things *in the making* of a thing
First principles
When creating something new, focus on the basics and design a new solution from there
Spencer looked across religions and saw that despite being different, they all have one thing in common - spirituality. He then reasoned that in some cases, the wisdom of crowds is true and can lead to discovering the truth
Example: if we’re opening a restaurant, we should look across all places out there, get rid of differences among them, and design a model of a restaurant based on what they all have in common: cooked food and service
When thinking about Tesla, Musk reasoned from first principles instead of reasoning from analogy; despite everyone saying batteries will always be expensive because they’ve always been that way, he figured where the expenses came from
Misc
It’s hard to see what’s truly valuable from this year right now because you only see causes, not effects; more distance is required, ~1-2y
The purpose of coaching is objectivity, accountability, and questions
Weekly questions for founders should be designed backward from what the startup needs most, i.e., talking to users -> what did you learn from users last week? (Asking to see if they had any conversations at all)