Sunday Reads #131: Why Warren Buffett's investing principles won't work for you.
Neither will Nike's marketing tactics. Or Cindy Crawford's diet.
Welcome to the latest edition of Sunday Reads, where we look for cheat codes to life, business, and careers (sometimes we even find them!).
If you’re new here, don’t forget to check out some of my best articles: The best of Jitha.me. I’m sure you’ll find something you like.
And here’s the last edition of my newsletter, in case you missed it: Sunday Reads #130: Even Nigerian princes have something to teach us.
This week, let’s talk about self-help. Let’s talk about why self-help is completely useless. About why it’s often pointless to learn Warren Buffett’s investing methods, Nike’s marketing tactics, or pretty much anything from a successful person. (And what do to instead).
And of course, some link love (on aliens 👽!).
PS. Do subscribe if you haven’t 😊.
1. Don't learn from the best.
OK, I'm going to call bullshit on 90%+ of self-help.
You know, the kind of book that says "Invest like Warren Buffett". Or articles that talk about "The Cindy Crawford diet". (yes, that's a thing!)
And while I'm at it, I'll also call bullshit on 90% of growth hacking articles. The ones that talk about Airbnb's nifty little hack to increase conversions, and so on.
To be fair: I don't have anything against Cindy Crawford's diet (it honestly seems OK!).
My issue is with an implicit claim in all such articles. A claim that is actually quite dumb when you say it out loud.
"What works for Ms. Crawford, who's been at peak fitness all her life, will work for you."
This isn't about just health books. It's ALL books and articles that show you how to get better at business, writing, health, etc., by learning from others (and I'm guilty too!).
I tweeted about it here:
Now, I know what you're thinking. Survivorship bias, yada yada yada.
No, this isn't the old argument about survivorship bias.
I'm not saying, "There are thousands of people who tried Warren Buffett's investing style and failed. We've only heard of Buffett".
That may be true, but it's not what I'm talking about here.
I'm talking about something a little different.
"What got you here won't get you there".
There's a truism in business, "What got you here won't get you there".
Whatever you did to get to your current scale (probably a lot of things that don't scale, following Paul Graham's sage advice), it won't help you get to 2x from here.
The strategy for each step-change will be different. Because every strategy tends to get saturated.
You can even call it the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs if you like:
Over time, all marketing strategies result in shitty clickthrough rates.
But there's a corollary, which you don't hear:
Everyone you read about is already at point A, and is in the process of getting to point B.
If you aren't even at Point A, how can you expect their strategy to work for you?
Sure, you can get some investing tips from Warren Buffett. They may even be useful.
But remember, he was already a millionaire at age 30, before he was in the public eye. The investment opportunities he got as a millionaire are different from what you will get as a… not-millionaire.
If you're a baby, don't copy a teenager.
Don't copy Shopify's landing page today, even though you know it's 100% optimized.
Copy Shopify's landing page 10 years ago. When no one had heard of it.
Don't copy the best-in-class. Copy what they did, when they were where you are.
Ouch, that's a mouthful. But what i mean is this:
Don't clone Nike's marketing today. It already has a strong brand! Instead, see what Nike did in 1970.
As Cedric Chin says in 7 Powers in Practice:
The Path to Brand Power isn’t Branding.
It’s pretty obvious that Nike has Branding Power. But how did Nike build that Power? How did it eventually have a brand worth pirating?
The answer, of course, is that it innovated its way there. Before the Vaporfly it had Flyknits; before Flyknits it had Nike Air; and before that, at the end of Shoedog, it had the waffle trainer, designed by Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman in 1974.
A non-operator might think that Branding is all about running ads, and designing good logos with nice typefaces. And yes, at a basic level, it is about all those things.
But it is the ‘surviving long enough to have a brand worth stealing’ bit that’s the hard part of building a brand — and the story of any company with a great brand is undoubtedly the story of continued operational excellence over the length of decades.
If you want to understand Power — how it’s built, and how companies find a route to it — read stories of those businesses in action. Don’t rely on analytical blog posts or analyst reports of the company at a frozen sliver of time. If you look at a company with Power as it exists today, it might seem as if all that Power was pre-ordained.
Don't read books on business strategy. Read origin stories. Shoe Dog is much more useful than Play to Win.
Similarly, if you're just starting on Twitter, don't copy the content style of the guy with 100K followers.
Copy the one with 2K followers (but grew 1K in 30 days):
And since I started with health, let me end with it.
The Rock can get away with eating whatever he wants, whenever he wants. He's at single digit body fat, his muscles will soak up all his carbs in a jiffy.
If you're at 20% body fat, that won't work for you!
2. Aliens! 👽👾
The Fermi Paradox has perplexed astrophysicists for decades. We may now have a solution.
What is the Fermi Paradox?
from Slate Star Codex:
The Fermi Paradox asks: given the immense number of stars in our galaxy, for even a very tiny chance of aliens per star shouldn’t there be thousands of nearby alien civilizations?
But any alien civilization that arose millions of years ago would have had ample time to colonize the galaxy or do something equally dramatic that would leave no doubt as to its existence. So where are they?
In short, this is the Fermi Paradox: "Why does life on Earth seem alone in this massive galaxy? Where is everyone?".
Robin Hanson, who had first coined the term Great Filter to explain this paradox back in 1998 (I wrote about it in Sunday Reads #86), now has a better, stronger explanation.
Hanson's new explanation for the Fermi Paradox is:
Grabby Aliens (link here)
I've been following his blog posts on this theory over the last several months, but it's quite complicated!
So I was glad to find this simple explanation on YouTube:
3. Putting time in perspective.
Enjoyed this thread from Tim Urban of Wait but Why:
Couple of things that fascinated me:
How short recorded history is.
Everything we know was written only in the last 5,500 years.
Oh, and Cleopatra lived closer to today than to the building of the pyramids.
Tyrannosaurus Rex was closer in time to watching a Justin Bieber concert, than to seeing a Stegosaurus!
I've never met Mr. T-Rex personally. But I'm sure he'd have been a Belieber.
That's it for this week! Hope you liked today’s edition. Drop me a line (just hit reply or leave a comment through the button below) and let me know what you think.
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Until next time, wish you good health, safety, and sanity.
Jitha