Critical analysis of your worldview. Particular attention to be paid to breaking points, changes, trying to identify what provoked the changes.
Title: Volume of Work
1 Cliff’s Table of Values: This is Who I am in 27 Bullets
A result of listening to 100 books a year for 16 years.
I’ve kept a table of my most important values for the past 10 years. I update it often whenever I realize something that is true and important for me. It explains who I am extremely well and fast, so if you want to get to know me, here we go! The story-heavy video version of this are here and here.
Preface, the things that shaped my worldview most are:
1/ I listen to ~100 books a year and have done so for the past 18 years.
2/ I have an extreme bias towards action, especially when it’s outside my comfort zone, so I tend to have extreme experiences (stolen laptop example, building 36 products in college example, gaining 27lb of muscle, playing Kaladin). These extreme experiences often result in me learning new things about myself that inform my values.
3/ I love thinking about philosophy to understand myself, the world, and the meaning of life. I take time to learn what gives me energy and what makes me happy.
4/ I won the lottery when it comes to parents, siblings, and friends.
My Table of Values:
1 Give Love First: Love is the most important thing in life. The more you give of it to others, the more you have to give — It is like fire, flowing from one candle to another without diminishing the original flame. If you give love to others first, in time you will get 2x in return, it’s how the world works.
2 My mission is to be the person I needed most when I was young.
3 I believe, unwaveringly, that I am capable of doing anything I set my mind to — even things most people consider impossible, given enough time.
4 There is a way around every obstacle. All systems for example, have been erected by and are governed by people. As a result, there is a way of getting around any rule within a human ran system by contacting the person at the top of the governance structure and convincing them to help you or give you a special exception.
5 I believe that I have personal agency and the power to change the world and the situations around me.
6 Going outside your comfort zone is a virtue and leads to growth. [“You cannot fail unless you quit”; “Your success in life can be measured by the number of hard conversations you have”]
7 Economics is not a zero sum game.
8 I can Create Value in the world.
9 Education and self improvement are a virtue.
10 Personal growth is a virtue. Any activity that makes me a better or a more capable person advances all three of my top goals (listed below), and thus is greatly encouraged.
11 Using my time unproductively is an anti-virtue.
12 If, in a short unit of time, I can significantly improve someone else’s life, do it. This usually happens in the form of helping someone adopt a habit, keeping them accountable, or introducing them to new resources or information.
13 Decision making necessitates information. The more perfect one’s information the better one’s decision making (for the most part).
14 Each person has a model of the universe in their brain. To make a great model/map I need to gather a lot of good information, then I need to organize this information into the most correct form possible. An excellent extrapolate-able model with little data (.SVG) is usually superior to a lot of data that is organized in good static form (.JPEG). Start by crafting an excellent model and then update that model constantly. Fill data into the model to flesh it out.
15 Knowledge is like a tree. Building a great trunk will allow me to add branches easily. Once I have a trunk and branches adding leaves is easy and requires little memory because they just fit in place. If I don’t have a branch at a certain spot it will be almost impossible to retain a new leaf of information in that space. This is why re-reading books is sometimes extremely useful. Learning is all about growing my tree, improving my model of the universe, and iterating on this table of values.
16 I can take on groups and win: Just because a group thinks something and I think something different it does not mean that I am wrong and the group is right. Just because a group is competing against me as an individual it does not mean that the group will win.
17 If you smile at people (usually) they will smile back.
18 The world is big and diverse but in practice it is now small due to technology.
19 People by default are good and will help me if I ask.
20 I am one of the happiest people I have ever met (though happiness is difficult to measure). My hypothesis is that this is because of how much love I regularly shared with others, how frequently I feel gratitude and appreciation, that I’ve been able to overcome and achieve WHILE having struggles, because I prioritize self-growth, because I feel such strong personal agency, because I view my body as a science equation I can balance, because I’ve turned smiling at strangers into a standard way of being, and because of my parents and siblings. In other words, due to most of the philosophies on this list.
21 When in real life I’m presented with two choices A & B that I need to decide between, there are almost always options C and D that are also accessible (and sometimes more desirable), they just take way more work to achieve (and often luck). Most people don’t realize options C & D exist because of how much work and luck they would take to achieve.
22 If I go for options C or D, often they will not pan out, but due to statistics and how luck works, sometimes they will. So, sometimes instead of needing to decide, I need to think outside the box, and then execute.
23 In the case of really big decisions, working for options C & D, even if I achieve them 1 out of 100 times, can result in massive, life-changing wins.
24 Above a certain age ‘you are so kind’ becomes a better compliment than ‘you are so smart.’ In a world where you can be anything, be kind.
25 Seek Eustress (positive stress)
26 There exists an edge of human knowledge, and I loved surfing on it.
27 Seek Autotelic activities - things you do for the sake of themselves, not for another reason like making money or gaining status. These things (for me gymnastics & music) are the most pure form of joy / play.
28 I’m an optimist
29 Goals: I believe that the things that will bring me the greatest happiness and satisfaction in life as a whole are:
A. Making myself the best person I can be, and raising kids who are greater than me.
B. Maximizing the I give to others — with my partner, family, friends etc.
C. Creating as much value as possible in the world and elevating the collective quality of life, most likely by founding technology companies that help others and by mentoring others.
These three things are my top goals in life.
Biography
Background
I was born 3 weeks premature and spent the first week of my life on a ventilator in the hospital.
“What's the most dangerous thing that can happen during birth?” My dad asked the doctor. “Don’t worry it won’t happen to you” “No really, please I want to know” “Well… just watch out if you see blood — it could indicate a Placental Abruption which can kill the mom and the baby: The mom because there is severe bleeding if the placenta detaches from the uterine wall before delivery and the baby because of lack of oxygen.”
There was blood. My dad drove over a freeway road divider to save 2 minutes. He paced like a lion up and down the corridor. “She’s tall, that helps” were the only whispers he got from nurses passing by. Tall women can lose disproportionately more blood and still survive. She’s a warrior. She survived. My dad saw the baby in the nursery, a happy new family. 5 minutes later, the baby went missing. “He turned blue in his crib, we had to get him on a ventilator.” Blood had congealed inside my little lungs and was blocking oxygen from entering my body. My first few breaths were not of air - I was drowning in blood.
Not the most gentle start to life, I’m grateful. I’m grateful my mom survived, I’m grateful I got to go home. I’m grateful to be part of a family full of unconditional love. I’m grateful, my parents had the courage to have 4 more kids after me, and that I got 4 best friends for life. I’m grateful to be blessed with parents who have so much confidence in my siblings and I and believed us so much.
My dad worked nonstop when I was young. He’d come home at 9pm and he’d be at the office before I woke up. He needed to provide for 5 kids. Yet, he found time to read to me, he found time to teach me and my siblings math, he found time to teach us chess, he found time to take us on walks and talk to us about life. He found time to take us on bike rides and make us stop to smell the flowers – literally, he is obsessed with the smell of Jasmine. I don’t know where his amazing confidence came from, and his love of learning, and his curiosity, and his ambition, they are so genuine and endless. But they rubbed off on me BIG time. 6 year old Cliff hero worshiped my dad. And to be honest, I cannot think of a better person to hero worship. Here are the values you could learn from my dad based on his actions:
1/ My kids are the most important thing in the world. Above everything else I care that they love each other, that they treat each other fairly and that they will learn.
2/ I love my wife. I am so grateful to be with my wife. I think she is smart, beautiful, energetic, and I am privileged to have her as my partner.
3/ I want to build a smart business. When I have downtime that is what I should think about… what business shall I create?
4/ Physics is so interesting – you see the color of the sky and the sun? Why are they those colors and not another color? Isn’t it amazing that sound can travel from my vocal cords to your ears? How does that happen? Here let me teach you.
5/ Economics is so interesting: Here is what a company is and how the stock market operates. Here is what a loan is… here is how rent works, here is what profit is, and what a hedge fund is, and what a pension fund is (6 year old Cliff was having conversations with my dad about this daily).
6/ Dancing! I love dancing. Every Friday night we would push the furniture to the edges of the room, put on happy music and dance for an hour or two after dinner. Every Friday night, and on many Saturday mornings. ‘Cliff, you see your sister sitting over there alone? She is sad because no one is dancing with her, go ask her to dance with you and make her happy, get her involved.’
7/ Exercise: ‘If you swim 200 laps in a row I will pay you half a shekel for every lap (10 cents)’ It’s expensive but I really want to buy you a skateboard because I didn’t get to have a skateboard when I was young and then when I was older I didn’t know how to ride one so I want you to learn now. Rollerblades? Same thing, it’s worth investing in that.
8/ Music: There’s a solo for the school quire? You can get it just practice. Cliff it’s expensive but I found a $50 piano keyboard. I’ll pay you 10 shekels ($2.5) if you learn how to play ‘I will survive’ on it.
9/ Typing: Cliff there were no computers when I was young so I don’t know how to touch- type. I want you to learn. I will pay you 10 shekels if you can learn how to touch type. I will pay you another 10 shekels if you cross 60 words per minute.
10/ Reading: Cliff if you want to be the person you want to be you have to learn how to read. Why are you not reading. Here I will teach you: proceeds to sit with me several times a week, every week, to re-teach me what sound every letter makes even though it’s super repetitive because I really don’t get it. I don’t want to do it. Ok for every hour we practice reading we can go on a bike ride together. Cliff’s eyes go huge. ‘Ok, let's do it.’ ‘For every book you read I will give you 10 shekels’ the only money making offer I did not succeed in profiting from as a kid. ‘Once you finish reading the book I will read out passages to you for you to complete them to make sure you actually read it’ – was needed.
11/ Fairness: If there is ever a fight between me and my siblings my dad would be the arbitrator and judge. 90% of the time I was deemed to be in the wrong. But my dad is an amazing communicator and always did a fantastic job explaining why. I didn’t like his judgment, and sometimes I thought they were not fair, but usually I understood why because the logic and explanations were logical and consistent. Always, watch out for your siblings and protect them. They are the most important thing in life.
12/ ‘If you write a book in Hebrew 7 million people can read it, if you write it in English 7 Billion can.’ It’s really important that you learn English. ‘Hey, mom and I want to do an adventure to try living in the United States so you can learn English, do you want to do it?’ ‘Yes! Let’s go on an adventure.’
13/ Alcohol is not good for you, drugs are addictive and not good for you, you should run and exercise, you should always be reading, you should learn math, you should treat your siblings well.
Between the ages of 0 and 14 I didn’t really have the ability to read books, so I couldn’t choose my own topics to learn about. How fortunate was I to have a dad who curated exactly the right values for me to learn? Who was so passionate about them. Who explained so well; Who made it fun and interesting and included my siblings in the conversations. A dad who is so charismatic and inspiring that you want to jump out of your skin to go embody these values. It’s one thing to learn a concept or a value when you are 18… but when you learn it when you are 6-11? It permeates your psyche.
Of course I never did drugs: My dad explained to me, logically, so many times, between the ages of 6, 7, 8, 9, 10… how addictive drugs can be. I ‘got it.’ I ‘got it’ when I was so young. Only now does it occur to me that for many other kids the concept of drugs must have come up first with friends of from a movie, not from their parents, and that the explanation about the addictive nature of drugs must have been taught in school at ages 13 & 14 from a random teacher that is not their hero. My hero explained to me logically, and answered all my questions when I was 8, of course I ‘got it’. Even today, 22 years later: how companies’ function, how economics works, how physics and the scientific method operate are not something that I need to think about to get to the answer. They are intuitive to me like catching a ball is intuitive to most kids, like whistling a rhyme you just heard, like playing a video game, like skipping. The part of my brain that activates when thinking about these things is not a far out part that requires concentration and deep thought, it’s an intuitive muscle memory like knowing how to throw a ball to hit a target – I don’t think about it, my brain just ‘knows’ where to go. And my brain got this way through a process that was fun and engaging. How lucky am I?
Kid Thoughts
The first time I can remember critically analyzing my worldview was when I was six years old. Our house had a small bathroom with pink walls. I sat on the toilet in that bathroom talking to myself outloud. I asked myself the question: “Why am I alive?” I sat there for a long time, projecting my thoughts out loud. I thought about the moments in my life up to that point that meant the most to me. I decided they were the ones that were most fun. Specifically, I thought of a time I went on a rollercoaster and how fun that was. I thought, “How great would it be if I could go on a rollercoaster like that every day.” I asked myself why going on that roller coaster was good. I tried to figure out if it was the fact that I was moving fast that was significant. Was it that I felt afraid? Was it that I was with other people and we were all afraid and excited together? I concluded that what was good about the rollercoaster ride was that it was fun. I decided that the goal in life, the meaning of life, is to have fun. I resolved to go on more rollercoaster rides.
Around the same time, before I started elementary school, I decided that when I grew up I wanted to be a billionaire, prime minister of Israel (I grew up in Israel), and a pop star. I wanted to be a pop star because I loved singing and performing in front of people. It was the thing that I perceived to bring me the most fun, even more than roller coaster rides.
Kindergarten life was fun: My teachers praised me for my precociousness. I excelled at drawing and organized my friends for games at recess. At home, I had amazing parents and a large loving family where I was the oldest of four kids (eventually five) and invented games to play with my siblings. I felt like a little king of the world. Being ambitious was easy since all the data points indicated that I excelled at everything I did. When I started elementary school though, things changed. When everyone started reading, I couldn’t do it.
My grandfather was a school teacher in Persia, and valued education tremendously. He and my grandmother moved to Israel where they raised eight kids, seven boys and one girl. My dad, Hadar, was born and grew up in Sderot, Israel: A small town where there was no high school that went beyond 10th grade. My dad went to a boarding school in Jerusalem to complete high school and went on to earn a Law Degree and a CPA degree. My mom, Stephanie, was born in England and moved to Israel at age 9. She had one sister and her father passed away when she was 17. My mom earned her MBA at Israel’s top university and went on to found a business with my dad. In our house, intellectual pursuit and learning to better oneself are core virtues. When I was eight, my dad would sit at the dining table with my brother and me after dinner and teach us algebra. I learned how to solve for an unknown variable given two formulas containing it years before I was supposed to know how to do so for school. My dad would pay us for reading books and for learning how to touch type and would set up mini competitions between us to encourage us to learn.
When I would not learn how to read my parents worked hard to compensate. They spent hours trying to help me get the hang of reading and encouraging me to read books. They bought every workbook possible to help me along and did everything in their power to set me up to succeed. But progress was minimal. My dad got a large, room sized, puzzle game that had all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet on it. He and I would sit on it together and he would teach me the vowels: “a ae ee o oo, ba be bee bo boo, ga ge gee go goo.” I hated that puzzle.
Cliff is Lazy
Reading circles were terrifying. My hands would start to sweat. ‘One’ ‘Two’ ‘Three’ I’d count off the kids in my head going down the page so I could pre-read the section I needed to read. Then someone would read an extra sentence and throw off my math. So I timed it just right. And right before it was my turn… I’d go hide in the bathroom. I’d end up doing this every time. People must have thought I had a bladder problem. Better than them thinking I'm stupid.
We’d get assigned chapter books. I’d try to read them everyday and every day it was like the worlds’ worst punishment. The indication from my teachers was that I was ‘slow’ and from my parents that I was ‘lazy.’ Somehow, I still thought I was ‘awesome’ I just needed to find a way to prove it to people.
More than anything else I hated the word lazy. It was like an infection… a stain my parents would throw at me and I’d try to whack it off my body but could not. My little brother learned how to read… My sister learned how to read… I did not. My brother learned how to touchtype… my sister learned how to touch type … I could not. They could spell.. I could not. We would get assigned summer reading books and I’d just fall asleep in the book… no matter what I did I could not get the hang of reading.
Finally, I just started pretending to read. I’d sit with the book open in front of me and pass my finger under the words. The computation to decode the words was so energy consuming that day dreaming while faking it was much less painful. Reading a sentence takes me the same amount of mental energy and brain power as most people take when solving a four digit long division math equation in their head like 462/7= __?__. Take a second… actually do the math in your head. Did you get it? The answer is 66. That mental strain, that energy, is exactly how much energy it would take me to read a sentence. But no one would believe me.
The worst part was my dad. He was my hero. The person I dreamed that one day I would grow up to be. Everybody loved him. I LOVED him. I wanted him to be proud of me. “Cliff, why are you so lazy? Don’t you want to learn how to read?” “I DO! CAN’T YOU SEE HOW HARD I’M TRYING?!” I’d burst back at him, tears streaming down my face. “No, I don’t. I spend 2 hours trying to teach you how to read every day. I bought every program. Stop fidgeting and pay attention, for once.” “PAY ATTENTION?! I’m always paying attention.” “You’re not. You don’t care. Even your sister can read and she is 6.” “Because I taught her the rules! I didn’t want her to go through this too. I know all the rules for reading. Every rule. But when I apply it, it just…” Looking at my feet “doesn’t work.” I used to dream about reading. I walked around everywhere with a book under my arm, and imagined that one day I’d be able to read it.
The book I wanted to read the most was Harry Potter. But, after the 20th time a librarian woke me up because I’d fallen asleep with my face buried in the third page of the book, I stopped trying to read the physical books. It was too painful.
Luckily my Dad didn’t give up on me. He never gave up on me. Ever. My Dad worked really hard when we were young. He almost never had time to eat dinner with us. But he would come home early for this: He’d sit on my bed. And in a slow, deep voice. He would read Harry Potter to me. My eyes would light up. I loved this so much. When my Dad couldn’t make it home in time, he’d record himself reading Harry Potter on a cassette tape. I used to fall asleep listening to that cassette tape. Over and over and over, listening to my Dad’s voice. I was double lucky because I also had my Mom, and she cared, and she is very good at research. One day, likely during the 1000th time she searched, or in one of the 100 books she read on the topic she learned about “Dyslexia” she thought that maybe I had that. She got me tested. Turns out that is exactly what I had. That, and ADHD. When I learned I was Dyslexic, I took the deepest sigh you’ve ever heard a 9 year old give.
“Finally!” I thought “I’m not broken, I’m not dumb, and I am definitely NOT LAZY!”
“Great,” I thought, “now we know what the problem is called, let’s fix it!” Later in my life I would find that many teachers did not accept dyslexia as an ‘excuse’ to ‘cheat’ my way through classes. But the funny part is as long as my parents understood, I really didn’t care what the teacher thought. I would still respect them… but if it took 4 years for my parents to understand… my parents, who to me were basically gods… how could I expect every teacher to understand? This actually was a pretty amazing realization for a 9 year old to make: Just because I disagree with you on a topic that is really important to me and that I know you are wrong about, even though I am 9 and you are an adult I still respect you… I just hold constant that you are wrong about this specific topic and that’s ok, it doesn't mean you are wrong about everything else. I know teachers who did not accept dyslexia were wrong because I was inside my brain and they were not. And more importantly, because it took my parents 4 years to shift position on this topic. I experienced life in a way that made it pretty obvious to me my parents were making the correct decisions consistently and that they were very kind, caring, smart people who had my best interest at heart always and loved me unconditionally. Even though they didn’t ‘get’ what was going on with my brain they still tried to help me always. Them getting this one thing wrong didn’t make me believe they were wrong about everything else… I applied the same logic to teachers who were wrong… and similarly to friends and teammates decades into the future. Similarly… one could discount me because I’m a bad reader thus I can’t discount anyone else for a weakness or even a wrong opinion… I must look at people holistically.
Even knowing what dyslexia was, I still hated reading. For me, education became suffering. A place where I was not good enough, no matter how many times I tried. I wanted my parents to be proud of me. And I wanted to be the person I dreamed of being. There is so much power in a dream. I had a turning point as to whether I would follow the goals I had set out for myself or if I would let them go because things were tough. I knew that in order to become the person I wanted to be I would have to be able to read.
So I chose to take the challenge head on. I started spending almost every day at the library trying to learn how to read. Almost every day I would fall asleep at a table in the library because my reading was so slow and because I found it so boring. I don’t recall registering a shift in my worldview at the time, but one had occurred. I was willingly spending hours of my time every day doing the one thing I hated most. This is the opposite of fun. When I used “fun” in my terminology during the bathroom thought experiment mentioned above, I was using the term to represent momentary bliss created by short-term activities. With this new dedication to forgo pleasure in the present in exchange for personal growth, representing undefined pleasure in the future, I showed that I had refined my description of “Why am I alive?” I was no longer operating on the basis that my goal at any given moment should be to maximize the amount of fun I am having. One of two changes must have occurred, either:
1/ I had internally decided that the reason for my life was not for the sake of having fun or
2/ I had internally decided that momentary fun was not what I needed to maximize, but that instead, midterm or long-term fun was the metric I should aim for.
My relationship with the values of education and self-improvement also changed here. Where before, education as a value was important to me because my parents told me it was important, now, education and self improvement became real core values of mine. These values were ones I had developed for myself as a means for reaching my goals. These values moved from being externally accepted values to internally generated ones. As internally generated values their effect was much stronger. With time, I learned how to read. I wasn’t very good at reading, and I definitely was not fast, but I could convert text on paper into thoughts in my brain.
As I progressed in school I began to develop ways of learning that would allow me to get around reading. I asked a lot of questions in class and outside of class. Learning in this way played to my auditory and verbal strengths and made me able to understand and retain information well.
I fell in love with listening to books, but not every book has an audiobook. My Dad found the actual audiobook for Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone, narrated by Jim Dale. He got it for me. I listened to it 22 times in a row. Those first few pages I would fall asleep on in the library? I have them memorized. Along with the rest of the first chapter of the book. 20 years later. I didn’t stop listening. I listen to every book in that series. Then Narnia, then Lord of the Rings, then Game of Thrones, Pillars of the Earth, Atlas Shrugged.
I never stopped listening. I had a 20 ton boulder chained to my back that stopped me from being the person I wanted to be. Every sentence I read took ages. Now I had wings. I started pushing my listening speed, from 1x to 1.25x, 1.5x, 2x, 2.5, then 3x speed.
Because the change was gradual I grew with it, and retained every word. I listened while biking to school. When waiting for my mom to pick me up from practice. Before I fell asleep every night. When cleaning my room or walking outside. On the toilet. I started finishing 2 audiobooks every week. 100 books a year.
My high school summer reading book was “Marly and Me” and it did not have an audiobook. So the summer before high school I’d sit with my mom and her bed and she would read “Marly and Me” to me. I was in special-ed class for one period every day throughout high school. I used technology in a way no special ed teacher could have taught me and took full responsibility for my own accommodations and education. I asked for help, got support, and figured out how I learned best.
I took almost every AP and Honors class offered by my school when my applications for them were not rejected, and navigated through battles with administration and teachers who thought dyslexia is “a myth”. I also had some amazing teachers who were unfathomably supportive. From talking to admissions officers I realized that every top university has 10x more qualified candidates applying than spots available - so really above a certain point it’s a lottery. How do you win a lottery? You brute force it with numbers. Most students apply to 6 Universities, I applied to 26. Instead of going home every day of my Junior year I would stay for one extra hour and write more essays, edit my applications, send emails to build relationships with admissions officers. Those hours paid off, I got extremely lucky to get into Brown. One problem. I couldn’t read my summer reading book — there was no audiobook for this book. In the same way, there are no audiobooks for most textbooks, most handouts, PDF’s, emails, and wikipedia pages one needs to read for school.
So, once again before college, I sat next to my Mom on my parent’s bed, and she read my college summer reading book. But my Mom worked, and didn’t have time to read me the whole book. The night before flying to Brown, to start college, I was only 2/3rds of the way through the book. So I did the only thing I could, I cracked the ebook and hacked an old text to speech system to import it into my iPhone over night. I listened to it on the plane and it worked! My Brother and I had gotten into the habit of laying on our beds and listening to a robotic voice read out the AP Chemistry textbook because Tyler was about to take the Chemistry Advanced Placement Test and I was about to take Chemistry at Brown. It worked so well for helping us learn, and it happened to work for my summer reading book too.. But this time on my phone, not off a computer, so I can listen on the way to Brown.
At Brown I had to read 100s of pages worth of PDFs every week. If I didn’t figure something out I’d be done for. So, I taught myself to code on the side (more on how I made this happen even with dyslexia later) and improved the software further. I spent the next 4 years in college perfecting this system. Instead of slaving over a textbook while chained to my desk — I’d take 15 quick photos and then listen while eating breakfast or Longboarding to class. I’d listen to the 100+ pages of reading assigned per week for my classes while on the train or on the bus to hackathons. Often, it felt like I was the only one doing the readings in my classes.
Today, over 50 million people use Speechify. Students, proessionals, and people listening for fun who consume more than 202 years of time listening every month. We built the #1 best Speech AI model in the world to make sure reading is never a barrier to learning for anyone. I got lucky enough to assemble a team of 165 of the most talented engineers and designers in the world to work on speechify with me. Interestingly, dyslexia is not even the biggest use case anymore... It's ADHD now. After that it's tech & finance executives, and after that? It's single moms because they are pressed for time. Then it's first responders: police, firefighters, military who need to learn on the go.
The ‘Cliff’ voice is now our 3rd most popular voice after Snoop Dogg & Gwyneth Paltrow. It sounds exactly like me, and reads out 1B+ words per month for people all over the world. That’s ~20k books a month). Speechify as a whole serves more than 20B words per month; so we read 4.8 million books worth of information to people every year.
I get lucky enough to live out my mission to be who you needed most when I was young.
When I graduated college I wrote an email to someone I’d never met before with the subject line: “Thank you. Without knowing it, you changed my life.” It was to the CEO of Audible
I imagine, that in one of the many times eight-year-old Cliff fell asleep in the library while trying to learn how to read he had a dream that he could. He dreamed, that like all the other kids he could read fantasies and enjoy them. He dreamed, that he could read biographies of great people, that he could glean inspiration from their lives and learn from their stories. He dreamed, that he could read self-help books on how to overcome his social troubles and how to become the man he wanted to be. He dreamed, that he could read the works of great philosophers and that he could consider their ideas when shaping his worldviews. When he woke up, what would he have thought if someone would have told him he would graduate from an Ivy League University and that he'd read 2,000 books? What would he have thought if he could read this essay, and realize he wrote it with no spelling mistakes? If he learned that his worldview was shaped predominantly by books and by his experience overcoming dyslexia? And that 45 million people use a magic tool that he built and his voice to read 2.4 million books every year? Eight year old Cliff didn't even speak English. But I think, he wouldn't believe you.
Self Directed Learning
When I was 12 (2006), I used YouTube to look up parkour videos. I dreamed that one day I’d be able to do what I saw on the screen. I was still a very poor reader, so the only internet that was accessible to me was videos. However, I didn’t really speak English yet, and YouTube was 1 year old, so not too many videos were on there.
By 2008, I had learned English. I was now 14 and there was much more content on YouTube. I still could not read fast. I loved watching Jujimufu videos about Tricking (imagine combining gymnastics and taekwondo). I made a poster in photoshop with a bunch of images of tricks/flips I wanted to learn how to do. This was the first time where my learning became self-directed.
Around the same time, armed with an understanding of English, an iPod shuffle given to me by a family friend, and a connection to the internet, I started downloading audiobooks. First I went in search of more books like Harry Potter: Narnia, Eragon, The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Ranger's Apprentice, Inkheart, The Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice & Fire (Game of Thrones), The Da Vinci Code, I was picking based on book names and descriptions. Then I started to go to bookstores like Barnes & Noble. I’d walk in with a sheet of paper and after an hour emerge with 20 titles written down, this time based on the book cover art, description, and title. I’d rush home, and every book I could find on the internet I would download and listen to.
In the self-improvement section I discovered: How to Win Friends, Freakonomics, Good to Great, The Weekend Millionaire's Secrets to Investing in Real Estate, Predictably Irrational, The Millionaire Real Estate Investor, The Millionaire Real Estate Agent,‘The Four Hour WorkWeek. On walks with a family friend who was surprised that a 14-year-old was reading these books I was recommended ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ It was on the internet; on my 3-mile bike rides to and from school, into my head it went. Then ‘The Fountainhead.’
My mom recommended ‘Pillars of the Earth’ by Ken Follet. I thought it was a beautiful title. I fell in love with Tom Builder and his quest to protect his family and build the Kingsbridge Cathedral. Follet is an extremely thorough historical fiction writer. Each of his books is written from the perspective of 10 characters from all walks of life socioeconomically. Each of his books is at least 1,000 pages long, extremely engaging and interesting, and gives an incredibly accurate historical depiction. I read 10 of his books in one year, each discussing a different century between the 11th and 21st century: Each sharing the dreams, struggles, goals, and challenges of characters from every class. I kept on hunting for more history to read, and became more and more well versed in world history. History led me to biographies: First Benjamin Franklin, then The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Steve Jobs, Shantaram, Albert Einstein, and on and on it went.
The incredible thing, that really only now I’m realizing. Is that my intellectual freedom came when I finally had access to books: Audiobooks to listen, the internet to get the media, and an iPod shuffle to play it on. I didn’t have the ability to read well, but I made do.
By 17, I’d read more business, self improvement, and fantasy books than anyone I knew: 2 books a week for 3 years = ~300 books. I got really into Speech and Debate Club in high school and spent hours practicing impromptu speaking: Given a topic and 3 minutes for thinking, give a 5 minute speech [example1] [example 2]. I still had a slight Israeli accent, was very small (drivers license from the time shows me as 110lb), and my word retrieval in English was nowhere near as fluent as it is today. However, even in these videos from 2011 it’s clear my brain had gotten used to thinking about big ideas and thinking fast: I was intaking so much information (at this point at 1.5x speed) via audiobooks, and then practicing organizing my thoughts in my mind and delivering them.
Though I really enjoyed learning, my dyslexia made it so that reading with my eyes was still painfully slow and boring. I was limited to only consuming information in pre-recorded audiobooks. Then text to speech and Speechify changed my life completely. The degrees of freedom my self directed learning was previously limited to were made unlimited: Even today, there are only 450k audiobooks recorded but more than 100M books and all the rest of the internet. Suddenly, I had access to everything.
Computers are really good at computing, so in the same way a person can delegate complex mathematical calculations to a calculator it is possible to delegate decoding words to a computer which can instantly turn text into a clear audio stream that can speak at 3-5x the rate a human can. Later on in my life using AI I would radically push forward the state of the art for this type of computation, but initially I simply hacked together some apps that would let me apply this computation everywhere on my computer: Highlight text in any application and it will instantly read; hit a keyboard shortcut and it will instantly increase or decrease the speed of speaking to as fast or as slow as you can comprehend (this means you are always fully engaged and never bored), take a picture with your phone and it will instantly read to you.
I started listening to 300k words a week via text to speech on my computer at 400 words per minute (today it's closer to 750 words per minute on average). That’s it. I now had wings. I had the ability to learn anything instantly and easily. Like Bradley Cooper in the movie Limitless.
At Brown, I got to pick my classes. When I got blocked from a class I wanted I’d just show up anyway and do the assignments and the tests - professors couldn't control my schedule and inevitably I got into all the classes I wanted to take (sometimes I’d ‘lose’ a battle to get into a class and come back the next semester, but I got to learn what I wanted). By Junior year at Brown, I was missing prerequisites for more than half my classes, often 6 prerequisites were missing. For one of my favorite classes: A masters level course on Photovoltaics Engineering, I was missing 8 prerequisites. All of this was possible because of Text To Speech.
I dropped my economics concentration at Brown because I realized that most Economics concepts came to me intuitively and that I could learn most of them from books— I dedicated these class times instead to taking courses I found difficult like Software Engineering or Data Structures. My favorite class was ‘CS0320 Software Engineering’ where I really got destroyed. I was the only senior in CS0320, notorious for being one of the hardest computer science classes at Brown which people often fail out of. The class was so hard for me that coaching myself mentally became as important as putting in the work (it took more time than my 3 other classes that semester combined). I picked up a notebook and every morning and every evening I would write 3 times “I’m good at computer science” “I’m good at computer science” “I’m good at computer science.” I would spend 50-75% of the day coding in the computer science lab, the soundtrack of ‘Hamilton’ the musical blaring in my earphones.
Since people like me with dyslexia find spelling challenging, computer science never came easy to me. I would spell a variable with an ‘e’ in one case and an ‘a’ in another, and the program would crash. Inspired by my brother, I knew I had to learn how to code, and that giving up was not an option. In the same way I had had to learn how to read, I had to learn how to code.
So, for more than a month, I’d spend 8am to midnight almost every day in the computer science lab at Brown. First semester, 2nd year at university (I was 19) looked like this: I’d go to the dining hall… take a full bag of bread… turn it into 8 peanut butter sandwiches and go code. Code, code, code, eat a peanut butter sandwich. Code, code, code, eat a peanut butter sandwich. Code, code, doze off… Do some backflips on the grass outside the computer science lab to wake up… Code, code, code, peanut butter sandwich.
After that first computer science class, I took an online course from Udemy (YouTube for learning) on how to make iPhone Apps and Websites. I learned the most from Rob Percival's - “Complete iOS developer” and “Complete Web developer” courses — 27 hour courses where you build 21 projects: Clones of google maps, snapchat, tinder, etc. I would watch Rob Percival code and then I would copy his work on a separate computer. That way if I made a mistake, and could not find my bug myself, I could see on the screen recording exactly what he did and emulate it.
When most Brown students would fly home for Christmas break, while the campus was covered in snow, I would take design classes at the Rhode Island School of Design. Between design classes I would spend 10 hours at a time in the empty Brown science library watching Rob Percival coding videos and building iPhone apps and websites. I participated in 42 hackathons while in college. I got to fly all over the world to participate. I became really good at identifying good teammates and recruiting them to my team. I ended up building 36 products when I was in college (How I built 36 Products when I was in college at Brown) (Q&A on how I Built 36 Products in College). This experience made me a lot more able to create initial versions (MVPs) of any product I could dream up… eventually Speechify.
I felt so grateful for the freedom I got to have in my learning when it became self directed. To understand why this was such an important moment let’s reverse back to the other side of my early educational journey, the non self directed side.
Bullying
In elementary school, especially third grade, I was constantly bullied by kids in my class and generally socially ostracized. I don’t know why this happened and can’t explain the reasons for it other than I was a very small child having been born 3 weeks premature. The bullying peaked to a boil when one day I was slapped by a bully in the middle of class when I was 9 years old and choked by another. Physically, I couldn't do anything about it. I was excluded from most social events, and often ignored in social settings. I don’t know why this happened. I really wanted to make friends but I just didn’t seem to get the hang of it.
Though I didn’t have any friends at school, I did have my three siblings at home and I remember being so actively grateful for them. I developed a deep appreciation for the support my family gave me, and a subconscious knowledge that if everything went wrong, my family would always be there for me.
Nothing changed for years, until, one day, two of the kids who were most cruel to me targeted my brother. I climbed up the stairs to the play area on the second floor of our school to see them standing on either side of him. They had taken a toy he had brought from home away from him and were throwing it above his head, making him jump, plead, and run around to try and retrieve it. I took a running start, jumped, and flying kicked one of them hard enough to make him fall to the floor and knock out a tooth. What proceeded was a mad dash of a group of several boys in my grade chasing me around the school yard and me jumping over fences, running through bushes and classrooms trying to avoid them. After that day, they never bullied me again. From that point onwards it became easy for me to make friends and I started to flourish. This odd experience emboldened me in never crumbling to social pressures. I don’t smoke or drink to this day and it may be these experiences help build the muscle that would help me withstand social pressure to do so when I grew older. I came away with a strong feeling that even if things are tough, I can make them change.
I’d built two strong friendships in 6th and 7th grade in Israel, then moved to the U.S. in 8th grade. In middle school, I already had a large impression of the importance of time: Kids in my middle school would spend hours every day after school sitting on a bench at the park by our school talking. For the first few months in the U.S. I would sit with them and listen — every once in a while participating, sometimes going to someone’s house. But I was keenly aware that we were talking about nothing: I felt nothing in that conversation made me a better person, I wasn’t learning much, I wasn’t engaged. Maybe it was the fact that my English was not as developed yet. Eventually, I stopped sitting at the bench after school because it was boring. I much rather go home and talk to my siblings about ideas, schemes to build businesses, or learn new things. In high school as well, kids had different interests than me: Call of Duty, Weed, Alcohol, and Halo. I wanted to talk about inventing things and how to take over the world.
Moving to the U.S.
Right before 8th grade, my parents suggested moving to the U.S.: “Do you want to go on an adventure?” “We want to make sure you know how to speak English” “If you write a book in hebrew 7 million people can read it, if you write a book in english, 7 Billion can” My eyes lit up. My siblings and I were fully sold on the adventures. ‘Lets do it!’
My dad found an audiobook of Harry Potter in English. I listened to it 22 times in a row.
We moved to L.A. and I enrolled in summer school for English learners. I was slightly sad to lose my free time over the summer but more excited to learn. At the end of the summer, we moved to a town called Ross in Marin County just outside of San Francisco. When I started 8th grade at Ross School, one class stood out in particular, American History with Mr. Bloom. This was well known as the hardest class at Ross.
Every night, students had to read a chapter from the textbook and hand in a typed out outline. I could not read quickly or touch type in English. I Googled the textbook to see if I could find a recorded version of it online, and to my luck, one existed. In broken English I explained my situation to Mr. Bloom. He was kind enough to agree to meet with me every morning before school started so that I could verbally answer questions about the chapter to show that I had read it. In that first trimester, I got a “C” in American history. By the second trimester I was regularly handing in chapter outlines, full of spelling mistakes. This experience solidified in my mind that systems are flexible and that all you need to do to fix a situation is be vocal about what you need and work with the person who governs the system to fix it. My experience with Mr. Bloom also ingrained in me the idea that hard situations are not fatal, that being outside one’s comfort zone is an opportunity for growth, and that people can be kind and help you a lot if you ask.
High School
Sadly, there aren’t audiobooks for every book assigned in school, especially not textbooks. So I still had to struggle. In high school, I was enrolled in Academic Workshop, a period each day where students who performed poorly in school got academic support. I’d regularly come to school early or stay late to review material with teachers verbally. I would ask my mom for help to read out passages to me when a recording was not available and when my slow reading speed would have taken me all night to finish a reading assignment. In Academic Workshop, an incredible man, Mark Raisler, would sit with me at the computer and help me correct my spelling, which at the time was so bad even spell check couldn’t give the right suggestions for. This experience ingrained in me the view that nothing can stand in the way of a person who is determined, with every fiber of their being, to learn or achieve. It ingrained in me the view that even when I’m at a disadvantage I can succeed, and the optimistic view that when you ask for help people will often help you. My experience made me feel a Personal Agency: That I have the power to affect how my life turns out. Vitally, my experience with dyslexia gave me deep empathy for other people with invisible disadvantages, how could I judge others if I did not want to be judged myself, this view is central to how I view the world. Even if you can’t see someone’s struggle it may be there, I have no way of knowing without knowing the person deeply, so I can never assume.
BC Calculus
In my senior year of high school, the teacher who taught the most advanced math class rejected me from her class because I was dyslexic. I fought to get into the class and used every resource available to change her decision. I loved math and wanted to learn. Eventually, by force of will, I got her to change her decision. I learned jerks exist, what it feels like to be targeted and discriminated against for a specific disability. But most importantly, again, I got to practice being outside my comfort zone in a position of conflict; and, again, I got feedback from the universe that if I throw my full will behind something I can make it change and affect the outcome.
Exeter
There was one thing that I didn’t succeed in doing in high school no matter how much will I put behind it. Transferring out. In my sophomore year of high school, I learned about schools like Phillips Exeter Academy and Phillips Andover Academy, incredible boarding schools in New Hampshire with better resources and better academics than my high school that also had excellent financial aid programs. I was excited by the idea that at one of these schools I could learn and grow so much more than I was growing at my local high school. Given the fact that I was finding many aspects of academics in my local high school to be difficult, it is funny to look back and think that I wanted to go to an even harder school. This behavior indicates that by this point, I held the worldview that everything should be done to maximize self improvement, personal growth, and education. I also believed anything can be done with enough perseverance and that placing one’s self outside of one’s comfort zone was a virtue.
I took the necessary tests, asked for recommendations from teachers, submitted my grades, and spent a lot of time writing the best essays I could. I was rejected from 4 of the 8 schools I’d applied to and waitlisted at 4. I called the head of admissions or the admissions officer in charge of my area at each of the schools to try and persuade them to let me in, to no avail. I wrote them personal letters and included new accomplishments to see if I could change their minds but did not succeed there either. This was something I wanted with all my heart. I’d dreamed about these schools ever since learning about their existence but no matter what I did I could not get in. This was the first time in my life where my will, hard work, and determination were not enough to get me where I wanted to be. It was difficult for me to accept this and to fit this truth into my mental model of the world. The only way I could fit this truth into my worldview was by reasoning that the reason I didn’t succeed in this goal was time. You can only apply to a school once (or twice in some cases) per year, no more. If you don’t get in for freshman year you can try again for sophomore year. If you don’t get in for sophomore year you can try for junior year. Most schools don’t accept transfers for senior year. There were no more opportunities for me to try in this case. I reasoned that had I had unlimited tries, eventually I would have gotten in. This experience made me adjust my world view of “I am capable of doing anything I set my mind to” to “I am capable of doing anything I set my mind to, given enough time.” Or, given unlimited attempts. My favorite quote, and one that reinforces this idea is “You cannot fail unless you quit” by Abraham Lincoln and has also served to reinforce this worldview in me.
It is curious that I chose to reason away much of the significance of this event. I can rationally understand that events like this do occur in life, where no matter how hard you try and how much you want something you don’t get it (the same thing happened to me with some colleges I applied to). But before integrating this reality into my worldview I put it into a filter to judge whether it would be good for me or not. It turns out that I do this with every view before entering it into my worldview. In this case, I decided that rewriting my existing view, that I can do anything, with the data presented here, that there are things I can’t do, would be detrimental for me. So, I edited my previous view slightly, to say that “I can do anything I set my mind to (given enough time), but I did not rewrite it to say that “there are things I can’t do.” Most of my good fortune I attributed to my unwavering belief that I can do anything I set my mind to (given enough time).
Tyler
The other key in my learning has been learning by example. And no example has been more impactful than my brother Tyler. Tyler had a bigger impact on me than almost anything else in my life: Tyler was the one who showed me how to use download audiobooks from the internet, and inspired me by his actions to realize what was possible: Tyler was always technologically inclined, so my mom enrolled him in a computer science class when he was 7 (not knowing it was meant for adults). When she came to pick him up everyone was at his computer learning from the precocious child how to complete the homework assignment. Tyler started building websites when he was 8, taught himself Visual Basic and got excited about encryption when he was 10, by 11 he was building iPhone apps and made 47 Apps by the time he was 17 with several ranking in the top 10 social networking category of the Apple App Store. Within 1 year of arriving in the U.S. he was valedictorian of his middle school, skipped a year of Spanish and a year of math, memorized 320 digits of Pie, and matriculated to Exeter (the #1 ranked high school in America). He skipped 4.5 years of Math at Exeter and 3 years of computer science. He topped his advanced placement classes in Chemistry and Physics and taught himself piano to play pop songs. Within a few years he could play almost any song he heard by ear. He learned how to produce music and got a MIDI keyboard to sync his ability on a laptop with that on the piano.
Tyler started employing graphic designers to make his apps look better, and even hired a caricature artist he met on a boardwalk to provide sketches for his app ‘Caricature Booth.’ My little brother was hiring adults, so naturally I knew I could too. Tyler got into legal battles with Hasbro and BlackBerry over trademarks; and won. He was making money from apps and websites people downloaded and paid for while he slept when we were in high school. Naturally, I thought it normal to make money in this way.
Tyler got into almost every top school when he applied to university and decided to go to Stanford. At Stanford, he became President of his fraternity as a second-year student, then 4xed the membership of the frat in one year with a brilliant recruiting strategy. He raised money for a cyber security company he started and stopped out of Stanford when he was 20 after his sophomore year. I had just graduated from Brown. Tyler is also a very good person. He is kind, empathetic, will go miles out of his way to help other people, and extremely logical. With time Tyler became the arbitrator in my family, known for having a rational correct view of events. Tyler has an impeccable memory; he remembers exactly what was said in a conversation that happened a year ago… and has all my credit cards and ID memorized after having looked at them once. Tyler loves big ideas. We spent hours talking about science and engineering, inventions we wanted to make, ideas we had for the world.
Because of Tyler I realized the power of technology, once again not as a concept I had to think about but as an idea that was woven into my psyche like a force of nature is.
I applied to Exeter, I didn’t get in. I applied to Stanford twice, both times I didn’t get in. I didn’t get into the advanced placement classes when we were kids in Israel, I didn’t get into many of the Honors and Advanced Placement classes I wanted to take in high school – I had to fight my way into them – when your essay is 50% spelling mistakes you usually don’t get accepted into the classes. But I just made appealing into a way of life. My mom read my high school summer reading book to me but also my college summer reading book because I couldn’t finish it on my own. I didn’t get into Stanford, didn’t get into Harvard, not into Dartmouth, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, UPenn, Pomona, Rice, Vanderbilt, Williams, etc. but luckily I didn’t apply to 6-8 schools like most people in my high school did. I applied to 26. And luckily I got into Brown. This was one of the early moments that taught me that volume of work matters. Shots on goal, at batts, reps reps reps. That’s how you win and also how you get better.
I got Tyler into audiobooks and together we dove into more advanced fantasy and Sci-Fi: Ender’s Game, The Land, Daemon, FreedomTM, Bobaverse… Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings… (Kaladin and Kelsier had such an impact on my life that they deserve their own section), Reskin Free the Darkness, The Name of the Wind, Nightlord, The Demon Accords, Dawn of Wonder, Harry Potter & the Methods of Rationality. We continue to dive into music together, gymnastics, random areas of law and philosophy. I could not be more grateful to have such a partner through life.
Brown
When I went to university at Brown I finally found my people: 6,000 undergrads from all over the world who were interested and interesting: For the first month of every semester I would have 3 dinners every night… I’d grab a plate of food and sit with 7 people I didn’t know, finish, get a second plate and approach a new table of people I didn’t know asking if I could join them… I’d grab some tea and a snack and join a 3rd table of people I didn’t know. I got to know 60% of my grade in the first 1-2 months at Brown and proceeded to get to know the other grades. People had so much depth. I was so happy, I flourished, and as a result of my reps meeting new people so did my ability to make strong connections with strangers.
How To Make Decisions The best talk I’ve given, all my learnings from Brown and first 2 yrs of Speechify
[write about time at brown, friends, classes hackathons and how my views of the world change]
Speechify
After doing 42 hackathons while a student at Brown, building 36 products, starting Brown’s independent major in Renewable Energy Engineering, and gaining 27lb of muscle while in school I chose to forgo getting a job. Instead, I lived right off campus from money I made in my summer job teaching computer science. Determined to make my own company, I decided I would live right off campus working full time on projects until one took off or the school year ended, at which point I would go back to my summer job and then do the same process again. I was paid $5,000 per month for teaching computer science. In a 2.5 month summer I made ~$10k. After paying for rent and food that summer I was left with ~$7k. I paid $450/month for rent in Providence Rhode Island and (9 months) and ~$300/month in food.
2017 started with me living alone in a cold house in Brown University in Providence, RI. Since all my roommates went home for break I kept the heating off and wore 3 sweatshirts + a hat and scarf. My sleeping schedule at this point was completely off. Every day the sun would rise and its rays would shine off of the 3 ft tall snow, through the window at me and Krishna Aluru, huddled over our computers from a night of coding, our feed pressed up against a space heater from Amazon. Our only sustenance Chicken Tikka Masala and Naan from Kabab and Curry.
A few months earlier I learned about a conference where 1,000 dyslexia educators were going to get together and I decided I had to go show them Speechify - I wanted to make sure their students could use Speechify instead of struggling with reading the way I had throughout High School. There was only one problem: I'd just learned about this conference and it was happening tomorrow, in Florida. So, I figured out how to use United's Points system, talked their customer service rep into giving me a $200 discount over the phone and booked a ticket at 3 in the morning. At 11am I landed in Florida. By the end of that conference, 13 schools had offered to fly me out to teach their kids how to use Speechify, many more had started testing with it, and now I was in constant communication with students figuring out how to make Speechify better. I committed to code for 5 hours every single day and tracked my progress using Rescue Time on my computer, for every day where I didn’t text a screenshot of the 5 hours logged to my friends, I had to do 300 push-ups and 200 pull-ups before 9am that next morning, if I didn’t hit that goal I had to run 10 miles that weekend. I endeavored to post on 5 reddit groups and 5 facebook groups about the tool I was building (if I didn’t do this by a specific date I would need to run 10 miles). I got a few people to pre-order my product for $100 from these posts.
The challenge was not having grades or other forms of social accountability. To wake up in the morning I arranged to meet a friend for the gym every morning at 9am. After working out we’d go have breakfast in the dining hall and I would work there until it closed at night. Still to this day, I keep myself accountable by arranging a gym session or zoom call with someone else every day at 8am or 9am.
I was working on the Mac app and iOS apps for speechify using Firebase as my database. At the same time I was working on drumming up interest for the product online. I posted on several more facebook groups asking other students to help. I explained a PR project I wanted to do and collaborated with anyone who would message me. More than 100 people touched speechify in the early days but no one stuck with the project. One day a 20 year old student from Bulgaria named Simeon messaged me saying he loved the product and messaged a reporter about it. He asked how else can he help. I gave him the PDF of what I wanted done, went to sleep, woke up in the morning, it was done. A few days later he responded to another post I’d made, this time on my personal page asking if any of my Brown friends knew Javascript and CSS/HTML and were free to help me fix my web page. I can help with that he shared. I gave him a sketch of how I wanted to change the web page, went to sleep, woke up in the morning, it was done. Simeon didn’t know how to code for iOS or Mac but he took over sourcing iOS engineering candidates from me. Eventually I got him a visa, got him an apartment and moved him out to work with me in San Francisco when he was 21. I tried to get Simeon a GreenCard but he had not graduated university and doing so was very difficult. So I went and read the law, talked with 15+ lawyers and found a way to do it. Eventually I got him a GreenCard, in a couple of weeks Simeon will become a U.S. Citizen! Getting Simeon a GreenCard was my proudest accomplishment by the time I was 24.
I started flying around to schools all over the U.S. to demo speechify and teach students how to use it. After I’d talk, I’d sit in the back of the class and help every student with every edge case and bug. Here is a great video of students at The Hamilton School discussing their use of Speechify many years later. 4 years later The Hamilton school invited me back to give a talk about how speechify had grown in that time.
Then, we launched Speechify on Product Hunt. We’d set an aggressive deadline for ourselves and on three different occasions that week, I woke up in the early hours of the morning to find out I’d fallen asleep on the floor while still working on my computer (I love that feeling). A look at my calendar from this time shows that "Get food in your belly" was a scheduled event on several days - just to make sure I did not forget.
Simeon stuck by me even when other teammates left. He was with me through thick and thin. Even when he had to move to the UK to finish his university degree he continued working on speechify then came back in person as soon as he could. My relationship with Simeon is one of the most magical things I’ve experienced in my life and the best example of loyalty in a relationship that I know of. Later I developed such relationships with Chaitu, Tyler, Pankaj, etc.
The first 3 years of building Speechify: ages 22 (2017), 23 (2018), 24 (2019), were difficult. I started off doing all the programming myself even though I am not the best software engineer.
The hardest part of speechify came in 2017 & 2018. I was tinkering trying to get Speechify’s retention rate to increase. After talking to so many students on Stanford’s campus trying to get them to use the product and after 6 of 8 team members left the company (we were just down to me and Simeon) I exported a list of the emails of all our users and went down this list calling them via AppleID FaceTime Audio calls to chat about how I could make the product better — I went down the list fixing every bug and implementing every feature we thought would lead to success. When I needed an emotional boost Simeon and I packed our bags and went back to Brown.
In early 2018 I hired expensive senior engineers from Apple and SnapChat, both lasted no more than 3 months. It was a time when I was trying so hard to scrape my way to success and this seemed the right move to win. It was not. These engineers were experienced but not invested: They over engineered projects, did not have a fire in the belly for the product or under their butts for the product to succeed, they would leave at 5pm and not be reachable on weekends. Nothing worse. Simeon who at the time was 21 and far more junior grew and grew and grew- putting in nearly twice the time and helping the product succeed. We parted ways with the sr engineers with fancy pedigrees for hungry younger engineers on which we were ‘taking a chance’ though we were picking people I thought highly of.
I went on a 1 week trip to Israel and on the day I arrived I bought the cheapest car I could find and drove with Simeon to Palo Alto. I hired 3 interns to come work with us. We got a little air bnb in east palo alto which later we realized was a sketchy neighborhood — an old man emerged from the closet in the middle (it turned out he owned the house and rented it to us without telling us he was still on the property). After skipping between airbnb’s and landing closer and closer to whole food I finally found a hose that was willing to rent out to us for 3 months for the summer. It had 5 rooms. I quickly hired another intern after meeting him in a breakdancing battle at a party at WWDC — Apple’s annual conference which I’d snuck into earlier that day. Ironically, our house was nestled directly across the street from the home of Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. As the product improved, I started expanding the team outside of the United States.
Speechify’s unfair advantage for many years became the fact that we were able to hire internationally. No matter where the candidate was in the world, we could bring them on our team. We hired folks from Ukraine, South Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, China, Nepal 22 countries in total. The longer you are around the smaller the world becomes… here is a quick summary of places I’ve been in the last year alone: Miami, SF, NYC, London, North Carolina, Paris, LA, The Hamptons, Marrakech Morocco, Dubai UAE, Ireland, Israel, India, Providence RI, Nice France, Orlando FL, Puerto Rico, Dallas TX, Cayman Islands, Austin TX, Scotland.
[write more]
[write about speechify over time maybe drop the house location images]
Speechify World Wide HQ over time
Sept 2016 - Jan 2017 Barnes St, Providence, Rhode Island, Brown University
Jan 3rd 2017 Cliff Makes Forbes 30U30 list
Jan 16, 2017 - April 2018 10th St, San Francisco, California Neema Building. Living in Tyler Weitzman’s Apartment. Life at this point in SF Video SF cliff talking about dyslexia
May 2018 - September 2018 Webster St, Palo Alto, California
(3 of the most amazing months in the summer with 7 teammates by Stanford), Ukraine Team begins
Jun 2018 - August 2019 Lincoln Ave, Palo Alto, California Jennifer & Anna Sandell’s Guest house
(3 minutes from University Ave, 15 minutes walk from Stanford Campus, living with Jennifer and Anna Sandel in their guest House ❤️ (Also worked out of Japan, Mexico, Ukraine, Beijing, London )
May 2019 - Aug 2019 Pepper Ave, Palo Alto, California
Iterations on iOS Onboarding, Ukraine Team, iOS paid plan develops, missing Simeon in UK finishing last yr of school with Sophie
Sept 2019 - Jan 2020 2 Pearson Square, London, United Kingdom Sinclair’s Apartment
Worked from Europe: Paris, Nice, Barcelona, London, Brown, LA, London, Berlin, Munich, Copenhagen, London, Melbourne Australia
Actions: Sinclair, Protein House, Pure Gym, Hamilton in the Victoria Theater, figured out paywall on Launch in Munich, Learned how to Run Instagram ads from Refleclty in Copenhagen, Started recruiting Chaitu at Brown, Messaged 100+ CEOs/Heads of growth while at Pret A Manger.
Jan 2020 - July 2020 8770 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, California Taylor Offer’s Apartment
Simeon Gets Greencard Jan 2020 moves to U.S., Chaitu comes to visit Feb 2020. Feb COVID19 Pandemic Begins. March 2020 - April 2020 Cliff in Marin with Family while Simeon & Chaitu live together, insane workouts begin. Valentin joins June 2020. Gold’s Gym, DEXA Scans, Tempest/SpaceX, JAM.
Cliff Podcast from this time Best ad we ever made (100M+ views across platforms):man in the pool ad
Aug 2020 - Oct 2020 Simeon in UK, Cliff & Chaitu live in SF first in Neema then in AirBNBs
Nov 2020 - Jan 2021 Grand View Boulevard, Los Angeles, California
Cliff, Simeon, Chaitu, Alek, Geffen, Valentin, Vamsee, all in one house. Ammar/YesTheory, Logan/Ranch/Encino, Geffen & Cliff get Covid, Cliff closes series A, Simeon Visits UK, launch Chrome
Cliff 26 rules for turning 26
Feb 2021 - Oct 2021 South West 31st Rd, Miami, Florida Miami House Vibe Video Video from this time
Cliff Simeon Chaitu Vamsee Geffen Neema & Peacocks all together Alek, Jan, Tyler, Alex, Valentin nearby
South Beach, YMCA, Miami Strong, Bulgarian Grandma, Gustav the Driving Instructor, NBA, Mr. Kim’s,
Oct 2021 - Dec 2021 London House in Fulham Park Gardens. Chaitu Simeon Kenny Jack Jan Tyler Cliff Vamsee Laurie House Vibe what cliff’s like was like around this time video cliff publishes Read To You
Hamilton, Working out, board games,
Grand Hotel Miami Cliff Hyper Focusing on Recruiting Video
Rohan Joins Speechify
Tennis Court Villa Miami Team Summary From this Time Video
Seattle Rajiv’s House
NewYork Murry St, Manhattan
London
Podcast 1 From this time (best podcast I’ve done)
Miami / Hollywood Florida / New York
Writing - 30 Moon Wishes
When I was 15 I had my first deep experience with the power of writing. I had always dreamed of being a fantasy author one day but I never thought of writing as a tool for organizing my own thoughts. Today, I take it as a given that good writing is good thinking. I think of the brain has a hard drive that has a tremendous amount of data in it (ideas, concepts, aspirations, emotions, etc). But it’s all jumbled up floating in a storm. If you write you force yourself to dust off the shelves and organize things neatly. The act of writing about your beliefs and thoughts, not just talking or thinking, but writing, indelibly, forces you to re-write and upgrade the operating system of your brain. Writing also makes you a better speaker in conversations later… you have already formally thought through most important arguments and have a concise well reasoned response. Not only that, writing gives you the privilege of carefully selecting only the most interesting and impactful experiences from your life and figuring out how to communicate them in words so that later you can share them with others as a good story teller. This respect for writing came from my experience with the 30 Moon Wishes.
In my sophomore year of high school, my mother told me that it was a full moon and that therefore I had 30 moon wishes I could make and that I should take advantage of them. On that day I was babysitting the children of a family friend, so after putting them to bed I sat in the living room, pulled out my notebook, and started to write out my 30 Moon Wishes. I wanted to make the most of my wishes so after I finished my list I went through them to see if I could consolidate them into core wishes that would get me the same thing (this way I could then ask for more things). In the end, I realized that most of my wants could be condensed into three main wishes or goals in life: Have amazing kids, have an amazing wife, and become a billionaire. I wanted an incredible spouse since I could tell how much my parents meant to one another, and my wish for amazing kids came from observing the pleasure my parents experienced at our successes. I also wanted to have many kids because I cherished the pleasure I had growing up as one of five kids and all the joy brought into my life by being part of a big family.
Here is a doc I made anyone can copy to do this exercise easily:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10bDcbbpLT0qFTQyt8bqiTZD_bKLHrACQDFUoeyItemI/edit?usp=sharing
When making this list, I already knew that I did not need a billion dollars in order to meet all my material wants. I tried to reason what was the most amount of money I could possibly spend where every dollar spent would still add to my happiness. I wanted to have a big, nice house with a trampoline and a large yard and one or two vacation houses or the ability to afford frequent vacations including trips to Hawaii and to ski resorts. I wanted to be able to have 5-7 kids and to be able to support them and put them all through college without having to worry about it. I wanted to be able to take care of my parents. And I wanted to be able to spend money on whatever food, clothing, cars, etc. we needed without having to stress about it. With a $3 million budget for my primary house, a $2 million budget for vacations/vacation houses, $2 million budgeted for college expenses, and $5 million budgeted for all other expenses I didn’t need more than $12 million to meet all my possible needs. Any additional dollar I owned beyond this $12 million would have steep diminishing marginal returns. So if money is not useful to me after $12 million why the ambition to be a billionaire? I didn’t yet have the answer. Later, I would find out it’s rooted in my frugal upbringing. It is a privileged desire. It is said that "A healthy person has a thousand wishes, a sick person has only one." I had/have loving parents, loving siblings, I am not hungry, I have access to education, I am healthy. So naturally, what I wanted most was:
1/ To preserve the state of affairs. The only way our lot in life could decrease is if someone got ill or if we somehow lost our ability to pay for food/shelter. Money and education are the best ways to fight against illness when it arises. We were already quite smart, but we didn't have that much money, it would be good to have that - what I did not know yet is how important relationships are when you get really sick, more on this later.
2/ I wanted to have more comfort and ‘vacation time.’ I could see how hard my dad was working and it was clear money was his number one stress in life. It was also the thing keeping him from spending more time with us. If I had more money I could spend more time with my kids when the time came. An ambition of mine became to have enough saved up that by the time I started having kids I could spend all or at least the majority of my time with them.
3/ Recognition. I had a desire to become famous - famous people made friends with anyone easily, and I did not yet have friends other than my siblings, and for sure not the friends I aspired to have. I wanted to have the ability to be-friend other people like Tyler. What I did not yet know was how hard it is to find such people.
4/ Art. From a very young age I loved music. It speaks to my soul. I started writing songs when I was 5 and singing them to my parents on camera. I was the soloist of a 100 person singing dancing troupe when I was 12 and got to perform on TV in israel. Performing music on stage was likely my favorite experience in the moment I’d had so I wanted to recreate that.
If I didn’t have a loving family, finding that would be my top wish and I would think more about finding the right partner to start that family with or fixing the relationships within my family. If I was an only child and didn’t have friends, loneliness would be my biggest woe. But I had four best friends who share half my DNA. We are, with my parents, a Unit. With great great gratitude I can share that loneliness was not something I struggled with, even though I did not have any friends from school. So, I wanted to solve for financial freedom because it would yield security and I wanted to find my ‘people’ my real friends. Interestingly, I saw a pretty clear path as to how to solve for the financial freedom but I was so unclear about how to find my real friends that this didn’t even enter into my goals list when I was 15. I imagine I just assumed that my friends would change when I entered university, and that indeed was the case. And that if I got into a great schools it was likely to have great people in it. Luckily that was the case but I would also later learn that there are so many AMAZING people who go to all sorts of school or who do not go to university at all. I just needed to get good at finding them and making friends with them I’d learn how to do that later.
3 Principles / Concepts
Muse Companies: You can build an online business that will make you $300k a year, sell an information good, softwear, or even a physical product (a bit harder), advertise it in magazines, with fb or google ads, sell your product for less than the cost of advertising and the cost to serve the user, hire a remote customer support team to manage the experience for users, then spend no more than 4 hours a week managing the team. Use the rest of your time to travel, pursue your hobbies in sports or arts, build your family, or chase down a much bigger vision in business or impact.
New Rich: People who were not rich with money but rich with time. They can live anywhere in the world, have 100% control of their time, and have reached financial freedom as a result of their muse business.
Pareto Efficiency Principle| The 80/20 Rule: 20% of the pea pods produce 80% of the peas, 20% of your customers result in 80% of the revenue (double down on them), 20% of your customers create 80% of your headache and time-suck (fire them).
Virtual Assistants: Ferriss introduced me to the concept that you can hire someone on Upwork or Freelancer to work for you for $3 an hour to execute against a task you describe. In the summer after my junior year of college, the first time in my life I had a steady income— while earning $30 an hour as a Product Management intern at RetailMeNot and working as freelance iOS Developer, I hired 10 freelancers in the philippines to help me find and apply to scholarships. I succeeded in removing most of my college loans as a result of outside scholarships I found and eventually won using this process. Later I would hire remote software engineers and graphic designers in the same manner to help me work on products.
Micromanaging: Ferriss shared a maxim I never forgot: ‘It is amazing how much someone’s intelligence seems to grow when you bestow them with more trust and the ability to make more decisions.’ In this context Ferriss shared how he used to get so many questions from his customer support team. Then he told them— ‘anything that you can solve and it will cost less than $5 please do not involve me.’ Request for his time went down by more than 50%... he tried again “Anything you can solve which will cost us less than $50 please go ahead, no need to ask me” request went down to 10% the original volume…. He’d review the decisions once a week… filed them in an FAQ for the entire team to reference… communicate what he’d have preferred done in cases where not the right decision was made and voila: He was left with much happier customers with faster response times, much happier and more empowered teammates, and a much less stressed Tim with more time on his hands.
By nature I am a very trusting person who follows “Trust but verify” as a methodology. One of my biggest blessings is that from early on in my journey with speechify I've felt comfortable delegating tasks to teammates and trusting people who I recently met. Yes, I’d scope down tasks and access such that there is a capped amount of expected damage that can be caused if mistakes happen, but for the most part I was always willing to take a chance. If the teammate does not work out we learn that quickly and if they do workout that is such a large asset we won by trying. I always want to jump in the deep end of the pool so I give teammates the opportunity to do the same.
Global Arbitrage: “Fun things happen when you earn dollars, live on pesos, and compensate in rupees” (4hr work week). I became very aware of the strength of the dollar and cost of living differences — that rent, food, electricity, cost sometimes 10x more in the USA, and that as a result you can hire someone abroad for a much more affordable rate.
Minimum Effective Dose: In medicine and chemistry there is a minimum effective dose that causes the desired effect. More chemicals after that point have diminishing marginal returns, the same is true for time and effort in some elements of fitness, health, and business. It is wise to identify these places and hit the exact minimum effective dose. Not above and not below: Consuming 1 gram of protein per 1 lb of body weight is considered optimal for muscle gain while engaging in weight lifting. The normal person consumes less than 100g of protein a day. Far below the ideal amount. When I experiment over and over with Dexa scans and diet I find that for me (and friends my age) the number for ideal muscle gains actually turns out to be closer to 1.3g per lb of body weight. That is the minimum effective dose. I have not found that there is any diminishing return to consuming books (as long as you leave time to execute). You can definitely over-optimize time spent on SEO and many other facets of business.
Lifestyle Design: It’s your life, you can design and define it. You don’t need to pursue the goals other people set for you or even use the same rules of the game others use. If you define a different goal than others it’s often easier to reach since the niche is not as crowded. Think, about what happiness truly means to you. Then write it out on an actual piece of paper — my second profound experience with the magic that is writing out your thoughts and not just thinking them or talking about them, but writing indelibly. Time should be spent designing your ideal life. Once you have it really thought out and planned out, after many hours of thought and planning, then move forward to execute against your plan. The Four Hour Work Week, and books like The Lean Startup - taught me clearly that no plan survives contact with reality so I came into the ‘game’ knowing I would need to try again and again until something ‘worked.’ Not only that my love of Francis Bacon's scientific method and my many hours spent in physics lab and engineering classes made it clear to me that this entire process needed to be approached with hypothesis after hypothesis … testing, discovering, experimenting, until I found what worked and what I truly wanted.
A version any person can copy to do this easily:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cnBNDPcuk_Rz315cAB6ogd_p6_UZgeimeDR-jkbyzxo/edit?usp=sharing
Target Income: Many people enter the job market trying to optimize their salary and think about will I make 100k a year? 60k a year? 200K a year? I start with the end in mind. What do I want? Let’s say I want a $2M house, two $30k cars, a two $200/mo gym memberships, $2,000/mo to spend on food for my family and $10k for vacation/travel a year. How much do I need to make per year to support that?
House: 30 yr mortgage, 3% interest = $2M cost/30 years/12 months= $5,550
+ ($2M*0.03 intrest rate)/12= $5,000
+ 1.5% property tax and maintenance $2M*.015/12= 2.5k
= $5,550+$5,000+$2,500 ~$13,055/mo let's round up to $14k
$60k for cars let's assume over 7 yrs so $60k/7/12= $714.28
+ $400/mo for gym
+ $2k for food
+ $10k/12= $833 for vacation/travel
And let’s assume another $2k for miscellaneous costs per month
14k+.714+.4+2k +.833+2k=19.947k ≈ 20k/mo or *12= 240k per year
Assuming a high 37% tax rate = 240/(1-.37)= $311.68K/yr income needed
Assuming a conservative rate of return of 5% per year 311.68K/.05= $6,233,600
- So, you’d want $6.3M saved up to get this just from savings on a well yielding bond
Or assuming a generous S&P 500 return rate of 8% $311.68K/.08= $3,896,000
- So, you’d want $3.9M saved to get this from investing in the S&P 500 index
I did this calculation when I was 18 and realized if I invested $10M at 5% return I could have $500k income per year passively and at that point I could focus 100% of my time on my kids and aspirations like music. The idea that you could become completely financially free just by saving enough money was incredible to me. Later I’d realize that when people seek money really what they are seeking is security and freedom. Money is a very effective tool for that, but in order to thrive and grow beyond security and freedom one has to figure out what actions to take with that freedom that make your soul sing. I endeavored to hit this financial goal by the age of 24. Surprise, I did not hit this goal by 24. Leading up to my 24th birthday I was sad, because I was anticipating hitting that day and morning the loss of a dream. My mood changed materially after a conversation with my dad: “Cliff when your mom and I got married, I had no more than $30k and you were on the way, however, I had a law degree and an accounting degree. I knew I had the ability to make money. You are not going to stop working right now. So why be hung up on this number? Do you have the financial freedom to meet your goals? Yes, so that is all that matters.” I thought about this and realized my dad was 100% right. I didn’t only think about it, I wrote it out:
I broke a spreadsheet into sections: Creating Value/Company, General, Love, Sports/Fun, Music, etc.
I wrote my goals for each category and mathed out exactly how much money I needed for each section. I wanted to grow my arms to 16.5 inches and my shoulders to 51 inches… to do that I needed to eat 200g of protein a day: $50 for protein powder and $300 a week for groceries, a gym membership ($50/mo), a car and gas to get to the gym (~$200/mo).
I wanted to live near Stanford so I could sit in on classes to learn more and talk to students to test out Speechify with them… $1.5k a month in rent.
I wanted to progress quickly in parkour/tricking so I wanted to hire a coach at $45/hr 3 times a week ($580/mo).
I wanted to get better at guitar: Free, but buy a better guitar: $300.
I wanted to go on a date once a week ~$50 a week -> $215/mo etc.
The more specific my goals became, the more I realized I was very close to being able to afford everything I needed already… the distance between where I wanted to be (when I actually did the math), and where I was, turned out to be extremely surmountable. This took so much stress off my chest. Below is an example of what this exercise looks like:
A version any person can copy to do this easily:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18svrUDlXCH23-a1Oat3MyytuSCKPyj00tSpZbKX9K1E/edit#gid=0
Forgive Yourself Then Move On: I was disappointed I did not hit my goal by the age of 24, the moment I hit 24 though, I immediately ‘forgave’ myself and reset the deadline/goal. Being able to readily forgive myself when I don’t hit my goals I find to be one of my super powers and unfair advantages in life. As a result of this habit, I’m able to work extremely hard towards a deadline, and then to take things in stride and in context when the deadline passes, without wallowing in sorrow for having missed the mark. Further, I’m able to be forgiving of others when they don’t hit their deadlines. I check to make sure the work was put in (If the work was not put in, then I do hold myself and teammates accountable), but if the approach was rational, and the effort was there, there is no reason to lament the lack of the third needed factor, luck. Just dust yourself off and do it again.
Adversity Quotient: People often talk about IQ - Intelligence Quotient, and sometimes about EQ - Emotional Intelligence Quotient. But AQ, in my opinion, is what really matters and is the number one factor for success in life: Adversity Quotient. Adversity Quotient is the degree of difficulty one is willing to bear before giving up. It is a measure of perseverance and tenacity. In some ways a measure of pain tolerance, in others a measure of vision — how long term is your vision? How vivid is it? In some ways AQ is a measure of one’s adaptability to changing situations. It is not a measure of strength, intelligence, or skill — it is a measure of one’s ability to hold on. To not give up. If I was to pick one trait that has led to the majority of my accomplishments in life, it’s Adversity Quotient. I just don’t give up. I lose, and lose often. I just always try again. In the past I thought that my AQ was due to my force or will… or as Nietzsche put it ‘will to live’ or ‘will to power’ but the more I write about it. Nice talk I gave about AQ here. The more I realize that it’s more so a factor of my self belief and the vividness of my vision for the future and belief in my ability to overcome. Author and entrepreneur Alex Hormozi proposes a thought experiment: People may tell you they don’t have money… but imagine I told you I would sell you this brand new Ferrari for $5k. Most people who claim to be broke would be able to find the money to buy it: they would max out credit cards, take out a loan, borrow from friends, why? Because the Ferrari is right there in front of them. They believe that it is real, they believe in its value, they can easily envision re-selling it for $250k closer to its actual value. Somehow, I’m not sure how, life brainwashed me to believe in myself. I can so clearly visualize myself accomplishing goals I set out for myself. When I was 17 I decided I was going to do a cork on grass. I’m 30 and still chasing down that dream. When I was 5 I decided I was going to be a popstar… I still write music and think daily of how to achieve that outcome. “Read To You,” “Fire In My Chest” “Big Talker” “This Can’t Be” “Arnold Rising” “Hasta La Vista” “Human Spirit”
Ironically, I just realized that if you listen to Human Spirit, Fire In My Chest, and Read to You in that order you don’t even need to read this paper. They explain my world view and how I feel about life perfectly.
My favorite illustration of AQ can be found here. The most impressive examples of AQ I know of can be found in Viktor Frankl's life story Man's Search for Meaning: ‘A strong enough Why can endure any How’ and in Siggi B. Wilzig's story: Unstoppable
Volume of Work: The second most important factor in my progress through life is volume of work. Sets in lifting, shots on goal, A/B test variations, updated hypotheses, 1,000 ways to make a light bulb, or to put it in Sir Ernest Shackleton’s words: “Through endurance we conquer.” No great thing is done in a day. Not in a week, and not in a year. Greatness is achieved through many years of consistent, intense work. It’s not the size of the weight, or intensity of the exercise at one moment. It is the Volume of work, over an extended period of time day in day out with consistency that yields greatness. My favorite example of this principle is embodied in Arnold Schwarzenegger. Specifically stories of his early life about Arnold before he was successful Arnold and Me: In the Shadow of the Austrian Oak and Education of a Bodybuilder.
Shifting Goals: Accordingly, if you measure twice and cut once with the 80/20 principle and Minimum Effective Dose principle at your back… you find that you can dispense with some goals that are not actually needed and find a clearer focus. Instead of fixating on money I became good at thinking more about pursuing what excites me and gives me energy. “What gives you energy” has become one of my favorite questions to ask new people I meet to get to know them.
The Happiness Hacker: Whenever I find I’m not as happy for a few days in a row I start rating my happiness on a scale of 1-10 in the morning and evening. I add a line on why I’m feeling the way I do. Writing this down always helps me troubleshoot what the problem is and I can quickly follow up with solutions. Reading research about Happiness also helped me a lot. I found that few things can have a baseline happiness impact but some can:
Updating one's music playlist once a month and having good music playing by default every day has a 3% qualitative happiness boost.
Most people who experience a crippling injury drop by up 20% in happiness, but often asymptote back to where they were previously. Marriage has a 10% positive impact on baseline happiness and divorce has a 20% negative impact on happiness. *Note: that these stats are ones that stuck with me from long term reading but I don’t have the sources handy so think of them as heuristics rather than facts while no reference to the original research is noted.
Low-Information Diet: Tim Ferriss was the first to introduce me to the idea that you can elect to not consume the news: Upon election week he reads the websites of both candidates… surveys 6 well informed friends on both sides about who they are voting for and why, and proceeds accordingly. If you can’t impact it there is little reason to dedicate mental bandwidth energy and time to keeping up with a topic. In my opinion it is better to study history and philosophy and strengthen your core values system. If you go to a movie and it is not good, Ferriss points out… leave… don’t sit through the full feature. If you are eating a sandwich and it does not taste good… even if you paid $25 for it… put it down and don’t take another bite. Until I listened to Ferriss describe these things I’d never considered these day to day applications of understanding the sunk cost fallacy. Ferriss illustrated this beautifully by sharing a story of when he tried to mimic a friend’s amazing cheesecake recipe and accidentally put in 10x the amount of stevia sweetener as needed — the result was a discussing nearly un-edible bowl of mush… he dutifully sat in front of the TV with ladle prepared to bear his punishment for the mistake. Initially I empathetically resonated with him - I knew exactly what that felt like… as he kept writing I realized that in fact he was not required to eat that much. In my head you can’t throw away food - really you can’t throw away anything of value… Reading the 4hrww made me feel I had ‘permission’ to do so when I judged the value to not be present. This could be the case with a physical object, media, news, money, apartment leases… anything of great value that previously I’d feel compelled to continue engaging with… that now I realized the ‘cost’ is my freedom… my joy, and what gives me energy… and I value that more. Similarly, Ferriss explains how - the way you loose value/money does not need to be the way you get it back… he bought a house and eventually it became such a headache to rent he sold it at a 15% loss… knowing that with the saved time he could make money by angel investing and consulting. Wise, yet counter intuitive to me before reading his work.
Mini-Retirements: Another exciting point Ferriss shared is the concept of Mini-Retirements. Why wait until you are old to enjoy the world - at the point where it’s harder for you to get around and you are less likely to indulge in extreme sports, late night, and carefree activities? Instead break your life into “Mini-Retirements” travel while you're young and give yourself a 3 month sabbatical every year to surf in australia, do kickboxing in thailand, or take the time to write music, writer a book, pickup painting or travel the amazon. Theodore Roosevelt actually did exactly this, and often. It’s giving one’s self permission to truly be free and optimize for one’s own happiness at the cost of issuing the life format most people subscribe to because they are tethered to a corporate job. This seemed like a much more logical way to live and a freedom I craved to attain.
Later as I built Speechify I hired internationally, and from the first year built the business remote first. This way I had both freedom of time— I could work any hours I wanted, for example I could workout at 10am if that gave me energy and then grind at 3am… doing so would not result in other’s on the team working less because the CEO is gone from the office in the middle of the day. And it gave me freedom of place: I could work from any country I wanted, any time zone where I could charge my computer. This allowed me to hire internationally even better and get to know the world while I built my business. In one’s 20s when there is no mortgage and no children going to school it is the easiest time in life to travel around. Yet most people can’t do so because of a job that tethers them to one spot. In my case I enjoy working 80 hours a week so constant travel would distract me. Instead, over the last 8 years, I got very good at finding Airbnbs at new locations every 5 months or so. I’d rent a big house short term and move there with the speechify leadership team. Bouncing between SF, LA, Palo Alto, NYC, Miami, New York, Seattle, Israel, London, Germany, France etc. meeting amazing people along the way, recruiting folks to our team, and getting to know the world all while being able to zone in 80 hours a week… just at different locations… so when it comes to distractions they are new. A massive added benefit is that if you live at 2.5 different locations every year, the year doesn’t end up feeling like 1 year… it feels like 2.5 due to the change of scenery. It’s like a Time Machine that gives you time back and more memories. Worth every ounce of work that was needed to put the plan together. Indeed many of our core teammates met their life partners in a city that was not their own just as a result of our travels.
Friendships know no international boundaries. You can make friends over the internet with someone 100s of miles away and you can make friends in person with someone while abroad and maintain that relationship for a lifetime over the internet. Technically is magic, and its impact on allowing you to maintain relationships is one of the most special elements of that magic.
Dreamlining: Imagine that anything is possible. You have $100 million in your bank account. What do you do now? From Tim Feriss’ 4 hour work week: “Create two timelines 6 months & 12 months: list 5 things you dream of having (including, but not limited to, material wants: house, car, clothing, etc.), being (be a great cook, be fluent in Chinese, etc.), and doing (visiting Thailand, tracing your roots overseas, racing ostriches, etc.), in that order. For now, don’t concern yourself with how these things will be accomplished. That’s all covered later. Consider the question: What would you do, day-to-day, if you had $100 million in the bank? If still blocked, fill in the five ‘doing’ spots with the following: 1 place to visit, 1 thing to do before you die (a memory of a lifetime), 1 thing to do daily, 1 thing to do weekly, 1 thing you’ve always wanted to learn. Chances are that the ultimate TMI (Target Monthly Income) figure will be lower than expected, and it will decrease over time as you trade more and more ‘having’ for once-in-a-lifetime ‘doing.’ Mobility encourages this trend.”
Over the course of my life, I've done a version of this exercise over and over in writing. First with my 30 moon wishes, then 3 years later when I found this book, then a custom version I built when I was 23, then a shared version I keep with my friends Valentin and Barish called Elephants. I’ve kept a google sheet over the last 6 years of Elephants which tracks my goals: in 1 month, 3 month, 6 moth, 12 month, 3 yr, 5 yr, and 10 yr time frames across 8 categories: Company/Business, Physical, Music, Financial, Romantic, Family, my goals for others/Loved ones, Spiritual/Emotional/Intellectual.
Constantly updating, thinking about, adjusting, and working towards my goals has been one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had. It has saved me countless hours that would have been spent in the wrong direction, kept me true to me, and motivated me to perservierance on small things I really care about even when most people would have given up long ago. 30 year old Cliff is still fighting tooth and nail to do a cork effortlessly on grass as 17 year old Cliff dreamed to be able to do, most people would have given up at 18 when they didn’t get it. I just keep working at it until I get it.
Fear Setting: Define the nightmare— write out exactly what the worst case scenario is. Imagine you try what you want to do and you totally fail. What will you do after? Where will you live? How will you pay for food? Who will be your friends? What will you do? “Then a funny thing happened.” Feriss writes, “In my undying quest to make myself miserable, I accidentally began to backpedal. As soon as I cut through the vague unease and ambiguous anxiety by defining my nightmare, the worst-case scenario, I wasn’t as worried about taking a trip. Suddenly, I started thinking of simple steps I could take to salvage my remaining resources and get back on track if all hell struck at once. I could always take a temporary bartending job to pay the rent if I had to. I could sell some furniture and cut back on eating out. The options were many. I realized it wouldn’t be that hard to get back to where I was, let alone survive. None of these things would be fatal—not even close.”
One of the most important decisions I made in my life was not taking a job after graduation. I was dedicated to making my own company work. When jobs from large well respected companies were tempted I ran this exercise and wrote it out: I could go back home and live with my parents, as a 22/23 year old I won’t love that but I’d survive and eat at home — let’s imagine what I know is definitely not true ‘they are too embarrassed to take me back’ I know at least 10 friends who will let me crash on their couch for a week each then I can go back to the first friend. I could code for iOS and make $30 as a freelance developer on Upwork. Realistically, after 2 years trying to build my own product with full application of myself I would likely be much more competent at building products than any fresh university grad, so getting a job at Google or another technology company would not be out of reach. Let's say I had 2 months to practice for the interviews and it was life or death I got it? Of course I could get the job, if needed I’d apply to 100 places until someone would take me. Armed with the knowledge that I would not starve if I tried, I ‘went for it’ even though I didn’t know what company I was going to work on yet. I just knew that I would build and think and make until the right thing ‘hit.’ I'd live off of savings for 9 months of the year and for 3 months of the summer I’d teach computer science (I love teaching anyway) and after a year nothing I did took off, I would do this again until I succeeded. The only ‘costs’ was:
1/ Not adding to my savings (key in allowing this was that i’d reduced dramatically the loan payments due for my time in college by hiring VAs when I had an internship),
2/ The ‘shame’ of others thinking i’m treading in place: not pursuing a masters degree… not working a job… staying effectively ‘in college, but unemployed’ to be perfectly honest I really didn’t care what people like that thought of me, I knew who I am and I was going to chase my dreams even if I had to fight for it.
3/ That I would tread two years ‘in place’ and not advance. This I concluded was also a fallacy: I would learn more trying with all my might to build something from scratch than working at a big organization - this cost was mitigated by the interaship I did the year before and by my confidence in knowing I would work insanely hard. And in any case what does ‘advance’ mean? I would always dream of doing my own company… so if I went to a job at google now i’d be shortcutting to the failure case… plan B… No! I would do what I really wanted first. And if I failed? So be it, I would get to move forward with no regrets having left my all on the court: The Man in the Arena, ubermensch, eustress. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is taking the action you know is right even in the presence of fear and some threat.
Ferriss sights Seneca “Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?”
Ironically, 3 months ago I accepted a challenge from a friend and started with no phone, no money, no computer, and no house…. only a $300 car. I slept in Walmart parking lots, walked around with cardboard signs offering backflips and songs for $1, sold flowers door to door, took the tailgate, jack, and mirror off my car to buy a guitar which I used to busk, without an identity or help from friends/family. By day 3 I’d made enough money to buy a used iPhone (which I had to find with cardboard signs and by jumping on tables in public places since I didn’t have craigslist or facebook marketplace without a phone). Day 5 I had enough money to buy a used computer. Day 9 I got a job at a gym and as a waiter at a pizza shop. I applied to 25+ places, 2 week payment cycles are rough when you have nothing. On Day 12, the gym’s owner let me sleep in a closet. I upgraded from Walmart parking lots.
I learned many things but mainly confirmed my views of the world:
1/ People are extremely kind. If you give them a chance to help. Many will. Extremely kind gym owner is a perfect example.
2/ No plan survives contact with reality… I thought I would be able to make a tremendous amount of money allowing people to pre-order flowers. Nobody bought my flowers when I knocked on doors… I only started succeeding when I offered backflips for money.
3/ My lowest low was when it got cold, rainy, and dark out, no one was around (no people, no money) and I was trying to get into bars to sell my flowers… defeated, tired, and hungry I ended up sitting on the cold concrete. It felt very uncomfortable going into other people’s businesses and trying to sell my own things (not allowed). I felt unwelcome. Eventually, I turned to a table of people and was just honest that I didn’t know what to say: “Hey, I'm living out of my car right now, I'm trying to sell these flowers to make enough money to buy a phone but no one is buying my flowers… Could you help me figure out what to say to people?” The immediate and total support I got from strangers was instant A/ “I will buy your flowers” “I will buy two” “Hey you guys over there, do you want flowers?” B/ “Are you actually living out of your car? How can we help?” “Well the thing I want more than anything is access to a computer.” “Oh you can get us at the library let us take you!” The next day I went out with a new plan… On a huge cardboard box I pulled out of a dumpster I wrote in big letters: “Need friends, come say hi!” I stood with my sign by a populated area and people came up to say hi all day.
4/ None of my ‘business ideas’ helped me when I was at rock bottom. But asking to be people’s friend did. I could not find someone to sell me a used phone no matter how hard I tried. Eventually, someone who had been there for an hour, sitting 3 tables down started a conversation because I had a sign saying “Friends welcome, say hi” after chatting for 8 minutes she realized she did have a used phone back home but would need to ask her parents for permission to sell it. She called, they said yes, I got to buy a phone for $150. Just because I asked people to be my friends.
5/ My simulation was just that, a simulation. In no way do I feel it is representative of what it is actually like to be homeless. I knew I was never in real danger. I knew that at some point it would end, and I did not have to deal with the crushing emotional toll the uncertainty and lack of safety would have caused if the situation was true reality.
6/ We ended up calling the challenge after 15 days instead of the planned 100 days. Many misshaps lead to this, but in life I take 110% responsibility: Months later, while mourning that this project did not see the light of day, I realized the real reason it failed: I forgot to be grateful. I grew resentful. I was unhappy that some things I’d agreed with production were not setup (identify, bank account, etc) but really I had in front of me the opportunity of a lifetime to show the world what is possible with a lot of motivation and some experience. This video was supposed to be viewed by 200M people. And I forgot to be grateful for the opportunity. Instead I allowed myself to feel resentful so when a discussion started to stop the project I agreed. This is not me. I never give up. I never throw in the towel. The resentment crept in on me spurred by the fact that I was hungry, cold, tired, demoralized, and sick from sleeping outside and surviving on 2 uncrustables every day. But I let it get to me. That was a BIG lesson. How much my mindset can change when you take away food and shelter and how important it is for me to always maintain my gratitude and not allow resentment to ever creep in.
Eustress: The opposite of stress is not calm. Calm is in the middle. The opposite of stress (negative) is eustress - a positive form of stress that can motivate and energize, making you perform better and feel more fulfilled. The pain/stress when you are PRing on bench press, when you do a double backflip, when you ride your bike really fast is Eustress. Eustress is the feeling felt by Theodore Roosvelt’s Man in the Arena “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” … “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.” This speech by Teddy Roosevelt reverberates in my soul. Roosevelt (and his dad) are the people I admire most from history. Roosevelt, in my opinion, owns the distinction of living the most remarkable life of anyone I’ve read about. He has the real hero's journey. He grew up so astigmatic and weak that he could not participate in activities outside he had to sit in a chair at home and all his thirst for adventure he quenched by reading books about safaris in Africa and history.
Young Roosevelt was prone to fits of asthmatic coughing so severe that his father would whisk him up in his arms and ride a carriage with him to force a greater amount of air into his lungs. After being bullied on a train in his youth Roosevelt took up weight lifting— the earliest instance of anyone I've ever read about engaging in weight lifting. This was in the 1880s, the first international weightlifting competition recorded was held in London in 1891. Teddy’s father wrote to him: "You have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body." Roosevelt loved and engaged heavily in the boxing club at Harvard even though he wore glasses!! And without contact lenses, glasses-less, at the time he would box and never back down without being able to see!! Upon graduating from Harvard while meeting with his doctor, Roosevelt was advised that his health condition was frail, that he should avoid strenuous physical activity at all cost and that he should pursue a desk job to ensure he did not strain himself. After listening and listening, Roosevelt got up from his chair, and standing up to end the meeting proclaimed “Doctor, I'm going to do all the things you tell me not to do. I'm going to have a horse, and I'm going to ride, and I'm going to climb a mountain, and I'm going to swim, and I'm going to row, and then I shall feel better.” At this time Roosevelt’s housemate shared that you could know Roosevelts just entered the abode because the front door would burst open and someone would enter the house running “in top hat and proper coat, entering … at full speed and bounding halfway up the staircase before the front door slams shut behind him.” This, is the type of person I aspire to be. Always.
As President, Roosevelt was famous for his big barreled chest. At 5ft 10 inches, Roosevelt even as President would regularly swim in the potomac river, ride, hunt, and is even cited to have engaged in sumo wrestling when visiting Japan.
At 53 years old Roosevelt was shot by John Schrank with a .38 caliber revolver as part of an assassination attempt, luckily the bullet was stopped by a 50 page folded speech in Roosevelt's breast pocket and his metal eyeglass case which together slowed the bullet. Roosevelt decided to proceed with his 90 minute speech, showing the audience his blood-stained shirt. After the speech Doctors determined that it would be safer to leave the bullet in his chest rather than attempt to remove it. Roosevelt carried the bullet for the rest of his life.
In the course of my life I’ve been so fortunate to acquire so many friends. There are 4,808 phone numbers in my phones’ address book. But along with Tyler, Simeon, and Laurie, one friend stands out as the shining example of who I aspire to be: Valentin Perez. Valentin and I have been friends for more than a decade. There is no one who I know who embodies the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt more than Valentin. I am so fortunate to call him my best friend and to be inspired by his example every week. For a long time I’ve shared with Valentin that my dream is for my son to turn out like him. This is the second best compliment I can share with him. That to me, he is the modern day embodiment of my hero Theodore Roosevelt.
The Tree of Knowledge: (A Cliff invented concept) Knowledge is like a tree. The roots are what you learn at home, the trunk is built up of what you learn in elementary, middle, and high school, branches are created in college and from books you read and special experiences you have. Leaves are added onto when interesting facts or ideas are exposed to you in books or life that make sense in relation to your existing knowledge graph. Building a great trunk will allow me to add branches easily. Once I have a trunk and branches adding leaves is easy and requires little memory because they just fit in place. If I don’t have a branch at a certain spot it will be almost impossible to retain a new leaf of information in that space. This is why re-reading books is sometimes extremely useful. Learning is all about growing my tree, improving my model of the universe, and iterating on this table of values.
Map of Knowledge: (A Cliff invented concept) Each person has a model of the universe in their brain. To make a great model/map I need to gather a lot of good information, then I need to organize this information into the most correct form possible. An excellent extrapolate-able model with little data (.SVG) is usually superior to a lot of data that is organized in good static form (.JPEG). Start by crafting an excellent model and then update that model constantly. Fill data into the model to flesh it out. A good example is Google Maps: Some areas are extremely fleshed out and you can go very deep into each street corner with no pixilation, some areas (especially guarded by military security) are extremely pixelated and can't make out everything. I want my map to be as accurate and as full (not pixelated) as possible. You can add to your map and add to your tree by reading more books, having more experiences, taking more classes, having more conversions, and writing more.
Edge of Knowledge: When I took Photovoltaics Engineering and Fabrication of Semiconductors in University I was amazed that the concepts we were learning about did not appear on wikipedia and did not appear in any text book. We could either read from a PDF our professor printed for us from research he followed in real time or draw our own conclusions from heating silicon wafers at 475 degrees fahrenheit in an oven while doping them with boron, or pouring silver conductive fingers into them in a new pattern. We were at the edge of science, and things we were discovering were indeed up for debate because no one had figured this out yet. To do this type of research in a field as impactful as solar energy was so exciting to me. I was the least experienced person in the class but ended up doing well in it and being a valued member of my team because a. I could present really well and b. I took the initiative to email every advanced photovoltaics professor at other universities like MIT and Stanford. I befriended them and filled the gaps in my knowledge by first reading their papers and watching their youtube video lectures and then by emailing them my questions about things they did not cover or that I did not understand. I learned that there exists an edge of human knowledge and that I loved surfing on it. Later, one of the most important things I did at Speechify was compile a list of the 100 highest grossing consumer subscription companies in the world. I would email every CEO CMO and Head of Growth. I would find their emails, linkedins, instagrams, facebook, twitters and politely follow up. Until each took a zoom call with me. On those calls I would add as much value to them as possible: Teaching what I’d learned so far that was unique, helping them connect to their peers who they admired, and asking them questions they had not thought of before. I’d share things I figured out that I thought could help them - we were solving similar problems so my unique solutions were very helpful sometimes. Further I engaged them in bigger conversations about books, economics, ideas and the world. Unsurprisingly, most of them were big readers and were delighted to hear I’d read their favorite books and could discuss those books with them, a likely outcome given that at this point I’d been consuming 100 books a year for 10 years. After building a friendship over zoom and text I would share that I’d love to come visit them and ask when would be a good time… often I’d already be visiting their city or share I was intending to do so (knowing my main and often only reason for going was to get to know them better).
Don’t let distance get in the way of learning: I flew all over the world to Denmark, Germany, Canada, SF, Austin, LA, Miami, NYC, Israel, Necker Island in search for every crumb of learning I could have. I would sit in their offices and watch how they bought ads. I learned how to do this myself. Then I made a list of the top creators in the world and ran the same process.
Add Value First: Sometimes it was harder since sometimes folks have 10M to 250M followers or are billionaires and thus are inundated with thousands of messages a week. But some would respond to my messages and they would introduce me to their friends. I would add value to each person I met, be supportive, share love, invite them on my adventures and vice versa.
The Closer You Are to the Action the More Accurate Your Learnings will be: In time, I started to understand how to make content that converts and goes viral to a degree no one could ever learn in school or from observing online without the personal connection.
Confidence is The limiting factor. The freedom of ‘if he can do it so can I’: More importantly - my confidence grew. Tyler is my brother - if he can make an iPhone app so can I. Valentin is my best friend, if he can do 60 pullups in a minute so can I. Matthew is my training partner, if he can do a roundoff back handspring double backflip so can I. Logan, Jimmy, Ammar, Ali, Casey, Connor, Eric, are my friends, I’ve spent months traveling with them, living with them, talking with them, supporting them. If they can make a video with 100M views of course I can do that too. Mike, Ev, Dylan, Richard, Chris, Gwyneth, Ari, Don, Enrique, Pedro, Alex, Max, are my friends, if they can build Instagram, twitter, Figma, Virgin, Lululemon, Goop, Endeavor, Audible, Brex, Plaid, Scale, Grammarly, of course I can build a company of that size too. Hamilton, Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Napoleon, Caesar, Alexander, Churchill, Aristotle, da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, Graham Bell, Tesla, Ford, Edison, Rothschild, Rockefeller, Munger, Buffett, Disney, Lucas, Bloomberg, Gates, Jobs, Dell, Zuckerberg, Musk, Theodore Roosevelt I’ve read 50+ hours about each of their lives if they can do it. Of course I can too.
Now is the best time to be alive and innovate: After all, we live in the most abundant time in human history. We have more access to knowledge and the fastest speed of innovation in human history by orders of magnitude.
Bias to Action: Most importantly I would just do it. Often I would just do first. Thus, in conversion I could talk to experts about the things I did that failed and ask the specific important question not the general one. I would read 100 books about a topic (Ads, SEO, Team Building, Sales, Hiring, Engineering, Product, Leadership etc), meet and talk to the top 50-100 ppl in the field, then rewrite the playbook and do it my own way - often far more efficient than convention because I tailored the approach to my values, my skills and what gives me energy. For example, I am naturally a lot more risk averse when it comes to capital than most people - I like protecting the downside, so I would edit approaches in a way that optimize for this.
The Scientific Method: I would never expect my first attempt to work. I expected it to take 10-20 iterations before I found the winner. And often it’s in the thousands: We’ve made and tested more than 4,500 ads for Speechify. We would test 100 ads a week… 95% would underperform primary ad spend and 5% would over perform, then we’d make variations on the winners and follow up with more fresh ideas. I made a list of the top 100 ads of all time and personally re-created them (but about speechify this time) as the actor, director, and partial editor. I personally oversaw over 500 onboarding designs for the iOS app launched to production in the company's first 4 years… for the last 4 years we have kept innovating with an iOS squad shipping onboarding tests weekly… onboarding test variations for Speechify number in the thousands. The team today is 135 people but more than 1,200 people have touched the product at some point in time. The teammates with fire in the belly, high loyalty to the team, self driven initiatives, bias to action as an individual contributor, impeccable agreements, and an itch to increase their impact responsibility and scope naturally rise to the surface no matter where in the world they come from: For some of our most impactful teammates who now lead teams were hired translators for the interview because they declined to participate for fear their english was not good enough. We hired them anyway and they thrived while adding so much to our team (we hired them an English teacher once onboarded to meet with 3 times a week).
Potential & Learning Speed Over Pedigree:
When hiring I don’t care where you went to school or if you worked for Google or Apple. I care that you have fire in the belly for the product, high loyalty to the team, and that you are able to ship features fast and move metrics. I look for mental aptitude and learning ability, commitment, an itch to work hard, and good heartedness. In the anime series Dragon Ball-Z a wearable device called a ‘scouter’ can tell you the power level of another character with the famous phrase "It's over 9000!" used to indicate an overwhelming ability. When I assess candidates I’m ok with a low initial ‘power level’ as long as I perceive that the loyalty, work ethic, learning ability, and intellect are there to allow them to reach a very high ‘power level’ as we continue to grow together. I’ve often been surprised that this approach is an unusual one and that people find it so endearing. My approach is predicated on the fact that I am willing to teach others, invest in them, and help them grow. I think the reason people are surprised by this is because I have a feature most don’t: I LOVE seeing other people grow. It makes me so happy. For me it is autotelic. It gives me energy to teach… Giving speeches at colleges is one of my favorite things in the world to do - I get so much joy from it. It’s powerful because students not only get to learn from my world views and experiences - they meet me in person. I am not a fake story or someone they never met. They see me in person… know where my weaknesses are and exactly how I got to where I am…. So the confidence that comes from ‘if he can do it so can I’ transfers to them which I love.
Loyalty: People often think “but what if you invest so much in a teammate, they grow and then they leave you” 1/ This sometimes happens and it hurts a lot but it happens less than you’d think. 2/ If they are going to leave they will do so early (within 12 months). One of the criteria for an excellent teammate is loyalty. And if indeed they left, you dodged a bullet. The very act of them leaving you shows that you didn’t lose that important of a partner. [1]
Loyalty is very easy to identify: A truly loyal teammate, when you give them love, they will give it back. I’m not talking about a normal relationship where there is quid pro quo. I’m talking about a truly loving relationship - Mudita (explained below). It’s when they want what is best for you and they feel for you like you are a member of their actual family. I have this type of relationship with maybe 10 people but by far the most extreme example is Simeon Kostadinov [2]. A truly loyal teammate, even if offered more money someplace else when you say. “I need you.” “This other offer is really strong, but I need your help to stay with us for 1 year and I promise by that point we will be able to surpass what that other company can offer you. Please stay.” It may be that you do your best to match what they are offered elsewhere - but, they will know inside their heart what you have done for them and they will want to help you. Not as a favor to return forever… but because you treated them as family and they will want to treat you as family in return. Family is family, it comes first. The ability to choose your own family and add people to your circle as you move through life is one of the most beautiful, underrated, and under discussed topics in modern society in my opinion.
Survival of the Fittest 2.0: In my opinion Darwin’s famous Theory of Evolution: Survival of The Fittest, has an addendum that should be added but I never hear discussed. In Robert Axelrod 1980’s Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments ‘Tit for Tat’ emerged as the clear winner. A clear ‘eye for an eye’ system. However, a very important fact of life is missed here: Existential Threat. Even the strongest agent, at some point will be at a disadvantage and will lose. At this most important point - you need friends, family, tribe to come in and protect you when you are at ‘0.1 health’ before you die.
In a world with one strong agent and many medium strength agents… the medium strength agents who band together to protect each other will always win. This is why the family unit is one of evolution's best 'inventions’. The ability for a group to subvert resources from personal gain to the benefit of the weakest party provides a safety net that allows a player on the verge of extinction time to recover and then to pay back the ‘favor’ to others in their family/tribe NOT because they are doing them a favor in exchange but because they genuinely love and trust them. It’s critical that this is not done as a favor for favor but as a ‘I will always defend you and come to your aid no matter what’ system because this is what allows the trigger for friends to defend you even if you are the first attacked or the first to suffer a grievous woe. It’s what allows your friends to step in for you when you face a calamity of a size and scope none of you have experienced before. The trick is that there needs to be a real bond formed within the group first and that all trust each other. Interestingly you can create many such relationships with individual others without them being linked to each other. See later in the essay why I am enamored with the character of Kaladin Stormblessed - it’s not that he’s the ‘strongest’ or ‘smarterst’ or ‘best’ it’s that he gives love first… sacrifices for others first “Strength before weakness.”
The insight here is that you can generate such relationships with others by taking actions to aid them, take care of them, invest in them, before they take such steps for you. An easy way to do this is to always be the first person to say “goodby! Love you.” To a friend - when you genuinely feel that closeness with them. You may be scared, ‘ohhh they will think i'm weird’ it’s too cheesy. It's not: For some people, this will be one of the most meaningful things that happens to them - a true loving emotional connection with a member outside their family. For some, they may not even hear the word ‘love you’ inside their family often. What a beautiful thing, for them and for you. That you get to invite them into such a relationship. Always give love first. For those who don’t respond positively, it’s their loss for passion on the offer: Beautifully, you can still offer them your loyalty even when they don’t offer theirs in return… when a time comes when you can be there for them it is likely you will be one of the only ones there. After that, they will either become your most loyal ally, or still spurn you in which case you know it’s time to stop giving them your energy.
One flag is that I am both biased and at the same time extremely rational/fortunate in being able to share these thoughts. I have never, ever, experienced true betrayal - life is life, so sadly one day I will and I am afraid of that. But, so far, I never have. Even more incredibly, I’ve never even had a romantic relationship that ended with me feeling betrayed. Loving fully, with no guardrails is the most beautiful thing in life. But it is dangerous. You open yourself up to being hurt, hurt badly. However, I am able to engage in this type of love and am able to give people quick trust for two reasons:
1/ I have a family of 7 that love me no matter what. After 30 years I know they will always be there for me. There is a level I can never drop below. I know that even if I lost everything: my body, success, looks, ability to speak, they would STILL always be there for me. This is not just me being fortunate. This is me having wealth beyond measure. This type of emotional security is so rare and is what I credit the majority of my happiness and success to. It’s my safety net that allows me to be ‘daring.’ As a result, I seek to always be the one who provides this safety net to others wherever I can. When one day I will experience true betrayal - a punch in the solar plexus unprotected - my family will close in around me and protect me, my friends will, my team will. I know they will [4]. AND I will be able to say “this moment? This is an anomaly… remove it from the data set. Ignore it. It was bound to happen once or twice as an aberrant deviating from what is true. Don’t let this one moment color your perspective of people and the world” I have had moments where I felt betrayed but I am lucky that none were life shattering.
2/ Protect the downside: As trusting as I am, I still don’t walk around sharing everything unprotected. There are things I keep on a need to know basis - I am fortunate that I can share everything with my brother Tyler [5]. I am a big champion on IC - Individual Contributor work. So especially in a large organization like Speechify, I am proud that Tyler and I can step into the shoes of almost any role in the company.
Social Safety Net Breaks When System Is Too Large: There is an interesting connection here to communism/socialism that is illustrated: This system stops working when the group of people involved is too large, such that real interpersonal feelings and connection cannot be formed between each member and every other member. The largest group I know of where this system works for is the Israeli Kibbutz system which came about truly during a time of existential threat, unity, and love, and familia brotherhood shared within the group. As groups get bigger this system stops working. At this point you need another medium of ‘trust’ and the one that has proven most successful is currency: Dollars. Everyone trusts in the value of the dollar since it’s backed by the government (sadly no longer by a real tether to value but today effectively by the might of the U.S. military force). Thus promises are kept and upheld according to the value of currency. The other crucial element here is protection of personal property and the judicial system which in the United States (which based its systems on Lock’s conception of Property) are the best to ever be erected among so many people in the history of the world. But sadly, today, are starting to fray at the edge as the judicial system becomes weaker and more convoluted and as the central government plays more and more games with inflation.
Mudita: Mudita is a Sanskrit and Buddhist term that refers to the feeling of joy derived from the happiness, human flourishing, and well being of others. Mudita the joy derived from the thriving of others is derived from the German schadenfreude joy from another person's pain or misfortune. I also view Mudita as the antidote to envy.
Envy: “Comparison is the thief of joy,” and envy is often the scourge of gratitude. Where gratitude, I find, is often the root of joy. The best antidote I’ve found for envy/jealousy (other than cultivating Mudita) is to live by the maxim that: you may not be envious of someone unless you would be willing to change everything, 100% of your life with theirs: You must trade bodies, brains, souls, family, ailments, intellect, interests, everything. You may not be envious of one element of someone else’s life but must take their life as a whole. And the challenge is, you never know what someone elses’ internal feelings are, how their mental health is, how their family life is. Envy is a pointless pursuit for it is rooted in stories you tell yourself that are by definition incomplete and can never be verified. Instead, admiring others and being inspired by others is a gift… the more you can admire someone else the more you will love them, support them, and eventually become like them. If someone else has better athletic performance, mental faculties, family life, take that as inspiration that if they can achieve that you can too! Learn from them and people like them. Learn and practice to develop as they have. It’s a nuanced difference, but it does make all the difference. For, in the end of the day, it allows you to be incredibly motivated while keeping your gratitude aka joy, fully intact.
Ubermensch: A concept that pairs well with Eustress, which impacted my views and I only learned about later from Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ is the Ubermensch- a person who does not take their values from society, the pulpit, their parents or school. They evaluate everything from first principles themselves. There is tremendous power in being able to define your own values. It can be exhausting, so it does not need to be pursued for every definition in life. But for the important things being able to come to your own conclusions from first principles is freeing and in my opinion a key to happiness.
State of Flow/ Mastery- I have friends who have practiced piano for many years. As a result they can play any song by ear, a pleasure I wish I have but sadly do not possess. I perceive this level of mastery where a very complex task where one is expert, becomes play, to be one of the most enjoyable ways to spend time. It’s like a perfect game. One where the outcome is beautiful and the practitioner can push themselves to the edge of their ability at will. I’ve been singing for 26 years and love to sing. I sing every day to myself as I walk around. I would not call myself a master, but playing with my voice makes me happy. Similarly, I would not call myself a master at tricking/parkour but I’m very advanced at the sport: Dreaming of a move then doing it… or practicing towards a move I cannot yet achieve but is in reach to me is one of the most enjoyable pastimes, especially as I improve and get better… stronger… more flexible… and more able as I play towards my goal. This state, of being a near master (or at least very advanced) and meeting a challenge that is commensurate with one’s skill level… is called being in a ‘state of flow.’ Often used in relation to video games or programming, when one is in a state of flow the person can stay ‘locked in’ for hours. In many ways we feel at our best self, our most refined, self actualizing the pinnacle of our current ability. I sometimes feel this when writing music, sometimes when doing public speaking, sometimes when playing chess, or bench pressing, and I very much feel this when I’m fully engaged in working on speechify - learning something on the edge to help us get new users, recruiting teammates, leaning into a new strategy, working with the team, pitching perspective partners on working together. That, likely, is the skill I have perfected most over time. The image to the right is a graph representing the spectrum of states people experience in the intersection between challenge and skill. I first observed this when watching my brother Tyler and my friend Max play the piano and later learned more about it from YouTube talks on Video Game design. I aspire to improve so that I have a state of mastery in more areas of play such that I can be engaged in a state of flow for as much of my day as I can be. Interestingly, one state of flow where I often feel ‘locked in’ is when I am listening at the maximum speed I can bear ~800 words per minute, with non lyrical music playing at 30% volume (fast classical music for example) to a book or paper I find very interesting and dense with information. The music distracts my brain enough that my ADHD is kept at bay and I can remain glued to my screen for hours… if someone tries to talk to me the only thing I can do is gesture with my arm and shout “ahh!!” to indicate I can’t give them even an ounce of attention since I am fully locked in. I LOVE those moments. However, it is rare for me to find something that a/ I love learning so much and b/ where the entire document is as interesting and flows at the same pace… the ability to dynamically change speechif’s text to speechify voice speed helps a tremendous amount with this and is one of my favorite features we have ever created (in fact it was the second one after the keyboard shortcuts themselves).
In video games design this concept described
Perceive a high challenge and match it with high skill.
Email notes
Expectations - Reality = How you Feel
Relationships Are Exponential: One principal I’ve come to live by is that relationships are exponential: Your closest ones (family) will have an order of magnitude more impact on your life than the next level (close friends) which will have an order of magnitude more impact than the next level (friends) which will have an order of magnitude more impact than the next level (acquaintances), and strangers have little impact on your life. As a result, taking action or shifting your feelings based on the opinions of strangers is almost never the right move. Relationships at lower levels of closeness are important because they can graduate to being closer, and those close relationships are the Magic of life.
Financial Freedom As A Value Scale: A thought I often have is that each person is morally obligated to give to the world value commensurate with that which they consume. If one can indeed create value in the world (as the PPF curve in economics shows us), then each person has the ability to apply their thought to matter, rearrange atoms in a certain way, and create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. We can create value in that way with science and invention or by our direct actions as a doctor or teacher would.
When you are born from the start the world gives to you: Food, clean water, gas to heat the home you stay in and to power the car trips you take. As one grows, one starts to be able to create value. People to me become “free” when they have created more value for the world than they have consumed. In a manner, money reflects that value you’ve created… if you impact 1M people positively enough that each would get value by paying you $100 and consuming the good you create then you earn $100M. If to supply that good you must pay $90M to others, you’ve personally created $10M worth of value in the world. A thought I’ve had is that at that point you may “retire” not just from working, but also in the sense that you have given back… the value you created (as measured by what others were willing to trade you for) implies that you have met the good from the world that you will consume in your lifetime.
Since we do not have any perfect manner with which to measure value/the economy — as Friedrich Hayek would say “No one man can hold all the knowledge of the economy in his head at once,” money becomes the measuring stick we all agree upon. Money is not a perfect tool for the value one creates in the world (there are negative and positive externalities as well as uncompensated acts of kindness), but it is the best one we have.
It is not by coincidence that Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos became the richest man in the world as arguably they did more to push the world forward and give to others (in a way that can be captured and recorded) than arguably anyone else in their generation — this point can be attacked and disproven in many ways so would require a much longer conversation: Massive contributions like the invention of penicillin for example are not financially captured. Even the impact people mentioned above had, like Gate’s work on Polio eradication and Musk’s impact on the environment are not captured by their wealth. But, wealth accumulated is sometimes a good heuristic for value created. Continue
Systems: Disproportionate results come from systems. You can build a system that will run the same cycle over and over again, yielding profit, and for the most part self managing, you have to set it up initially (which is a lot of work) but once it’s up and running you just have to maintain it, which takes less work. If you can use code, a remote team, and the internet, you can multiply this system to run 1,000 or 1 million times a month and benefit from the outcomes. Most people who ‘create’ disproportionate amounts of value (measured as wealth) do so by building systems that run over and over (like an algorithm) even while they sleep. There are a few elements that make for exceptional systems:
1/ Invention: If you invent something a new that is a key part of the system you erect you will end up with a new more efficient system that will generate more disproportionate results than others. Classic examples include the invention of the steam engine, automobile, moving assembly line factory, semiconductor chips, iphone, deep learning algorithms created using large scale training (AI) etc.
2/ Team: Most large systems with massive impact require people to shepherd them along. The more people involved the more degrees of freedom there are for failure and the less likely the system is to work. A smaller team of higher quality teammates often yields the strongest results partly as a result of easier communication and less moving parts. However, high quality specialized operators are extremely rare to find and to keep. Assembling such a team that will create and run a powerful system is very advantageous and highly rewarded by the economy.
3/ Need: The more accurate the pain your system is solving the more each output of the system will be valued
4/ Scale: The more people/companies your system solves a problem for or creates value for, the large the system's impact.
5/ Speed: The faster a system runs from identification of an individual users problem to solution and the more cheaply the more times a system can run and the more outsized it’s returns.
6/ Longevity: In economics there are no “Free Lunches” an ‘inefficiency’ in the world that is bridged by your system is not likely to last long if your system is very profitable since others will copy it. Being able to form a monopolistic situation as a result of unique data, access, or distribution is an unusual but very profitable situation.
7/ User Acquisition: A key for an exceptional system is to be able to find every hour many new problems to solve (or users to solve problems for) such that the system is always ‘on’ and creating more value. Continue
In my life, when systems work: 10k new paying users a week. Remove college loans, hire great ppl en masse. Real life examples of amazing systems
Obsession With Superheroes: As a kid, I loved super heroes and wanted to be one. Similarly I loved fantasy and Magic.
Religion / Faith
The world feels smaller the more you travel: The more you travel, the smaller the world feels, and the more interconnected you realize it is.
The World Is Getting Better - Optimistic Opportunity: Every year there are new inventions in medicine, food, transport, consumer electronics, software etc. The quality of life a normal person enjoys is 100x that of kings many years ago. 2024 is the best year in the history of the world to be alive.
There is far more freedom afforded to humans in the U.S. today than any people in history: Immaculate protection of personal property, $250 plane ticket to almost anywhere in the world, all of the continental U.S. is developed, you can do a remote job, you can meet doctors online, facetime allows you to stay close to family in a way never before possible even if you are far away.
Money vs Autotelic adventures: Seek autotelic acts- things that you udo for the sake of doing the thing not for an ulterior goal. I do gymnastics and tricking because I love to do them and enjoy the progress not because it will make me money or advance my social standing. I cuddle my girlfriend because it brings me joy in the moment and swells my heart not because it will lead to something else.
If you see someone getting bullied and you don’t step in, your psyche is getting bullied bc from that point on you believe it can happen to you. If you step in every time you know it can never happen to you without complete and utter resistance.
The Scientific Method: One of the things that has the biggest impact on my ability to succeed with speechify is the scientific method applied to real life. The Lean Startup.
4 Journeys
Fitness
In 2018 I had an umbilical hernia surgery and could not workout for 10 weeks. I felt out of shape. I learned about macro nutrients and started tracking my diet. I went back into shape within 8 weeks and learned that the body is a science equation I can change as needed.
Building a company is really hard. No matter how hard you work sometimes people don’t respond as you expect and neither will the market. So, sometimes you don’t make progress for months. It’s like you are running in place. It is very hard to keep going when you feel you are not making progress. But you have to keep going even though you are demoralized and frustrated. Because this time you are putting in IS important, it’s what sets you apart from all those who came before you. As you sow all your seeds some will grow but just not yet. You can’t see it yet. It’s even harder when you feel that you are both not learning new things and you don’t feel like you are making progress – no growth in any sense of the word. Building a business is the most ‘real’ thing you can do because the environment is the real world. There are so many degrees of freedom.
So, to keep going in such conditions it is critical to have a hobby with fewer degrees of freedom where when your work life is not giving you the growth you need to stay sane, this other hobby will show you growth, where what you get is exactly equal to what you put in. For me, that hobby is fitness. Especially during the years when Speechify was going through tough times I was meticulous about counting macronutrients and tracking my workouts, using a DEXA scan machine to study the amount of muscle and fat on my body every month or two, and progressive overloading exercises over time.
I didn’t only do this for me: For the first 20 or so teammates at Speechify I helped each one dial in their nutrition, sort out their macros, and stay consistent with the gym. 8+ teammates got six packs, more than 15 people gained 10lb of muscle or more. I’d go to DEXA with multiple teammates at a time - we would book out the DEXA office for an hour or two at a time - and I got to learn not just from my progress but from others. I learned that for my body (and for friends as well) eating 1.3g of protein per 1lb of body weight resulted in the most muscle gain, that lifting heavy weights worked the best for muscle gain, and that eating more carbs than fat resulted in more gains. I’d read PDFs about body composition, muscle gain, and athletic research and developed my own approaches that I found worked best. Fitness taught me about overcoming plateaus and sticking with something for years. In many ways I applied everything I learned in fitness to performance marketing, team building, creative iteration, and product development inside of Speechify itself.
AudioBooks
Outliers, Predictably Irrational, Cialdini, etc. and most importantly The Four-Hour Work Week.
Ender’s Game, Tales of the Solar Clipper, sookie stackhouse,The Lean Startup, Hatchet
After starting with Harry Potter and after moving to the United States, I started checking out audiobooks from the public library at a rapid pace. I went from hating books to realizing that even if I were in an accident and entered up in a vegetative state where I could not move or communicate, I would want to stay alive as long as I could continue listening to audiobooks. By my sophomore year of high school, I was ploughing through books like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, the Game of Thrones series by George R. R. Martin, and everything I could find by Ken Follett while riding my bike the three miles to my high school and back. As I got older, my appetite for books only increased.
In 2015 I listened to 765 hours of audiobooks - the equivalent of 31.8 days worth of time, which translates to roughly 100 books. I read roughly 25% fantasy books, 25% biographies, 25% business/self improvement books, and 25% science/economics/philosophy books. As a result of my audiobook consumption I believe I am at least four or more times smarter and more capable today, than I ever could have been without audiobooks.
Listening to a book is like having a conversation with the author except that for every minute they spend talking they’ve spent hours figuring out what they wanted to say and condensed it into the most efficient phrasing. For example, last week I read a 6-hour book written by Barack Obama, narrated by Obama, about his vision for America. In the case of biographies, it is as if for every hour of the “conversation,” the subject has lived a year or more, and reports back to you in detail what their experience was and what the outcome of each one of their major decisions and actions resulted in during that year. At the moment I’m 20 hours into a 40-hour biography of Alexander Hamilton. I’ve had the same 40-hour conversation with the Wright brothers, Walt Disney, Einstein, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Washington and many more. From “conversations” with so many great people, I’ve grown to feel as if I know them, and my worldviews have been shaped by listening to their ideas and the progressions of their lives.
Below, I will focus on the change to my worldviews brought about by the two books that have affected me most: How to Make Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie and The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. I first listened to How to Make Friends and Influence People in my sophomore year of high school. After listening to it once I immediately listened to it again. The book advocates thinking from the other person’s point of view whenever you interact with other people. I applied everything I learned in the book to the bus driver on a line I frequently used. I developed a genuine interest in him and his life and was rewarded with fascinating stories and a view of the world from his perspective. I adopted the practice of being genuinely interested in other people and their life stories by default, and learned so much from the conversations that ensued.
While reading this book I was in the supermarket with my mom, when I pulled a shopping cart out and gave it to an old lady who was standing behind me in line. My mom commented, “Cliff, that was nice, but if you had looked that woman in the eye and smiled as you had done that you would have made her day.” I started attempting to make eye contact with and then smiling at every stranger I saw on the street and the result was astounding. I became so much happier every single day. Your brain associates a smile with being happy so when you move your face muscles into that shape your brain is ready to be happy. Then as you do this. Almost every single time, the strangers’ face will crack into a wide grin and you will be able to tell you made their day. This in turn, will make you smile more and feel even more happy. Learning to be genuinely interested in other people and learning to smile at strangers reinforced my already optimistic worldview and strengthened my trust in other people. It made me feel that in general other people will help me when I ask for help, and that if given the chance, people will help me succeed. Two years later, while my car was in the shop, I took the same bus line I used to frequent. The same driver as the one I had developed a genuine interest in was driving the bus that day. He was so happy to see me that he refused to let me pay for the bus ride and chatted to me the whole way to my destination.
In The 4-Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss lays out the idea that today, there is no reason for people to work a normal 9-5 job they don’t love and to only pursue their dreams outside of work. Ferriss advocates founding your own business and running it to the point where it can give you the financial freedom to spend most of your time on your passions. Alternatively, one can found a business and use it as the vehicle for achieving one’s goals and passions. This book gives incredible advice on the practical side of how to found a successful company and is the best book on entrepreneurship I have ever read. One of the concepts introduced by the book are “comfort challenges” - mini challenges that you can do to put yourself out of your comfort zone for example: Go lie on the floor in the middle of a mall for 90 seconds and even when you feel weird or that people are staring at you stay there, call a superstar potential mentor and ask them to get coffee with you, etc. I’d believed in the virtue of putting myself outside my comfort zone for a long time but these challenges let me practice it more frequently.
Money
On Money: What most people want is freedom and security, money is the tool for that.
What you want us freedom & safety, not money
Creating Value
In my economics class in my senior year of high school, I learned about the PPF (Production Possibility Frontier) curve. Given two goods, one represented on the X and one represented on the Y axis, the PPF curve shows the maximum number of units of good X an economy is able to produce while making Y units of good Y (and vice versa), given the current resources and technology in that economy. PPFs are generally convex and bulge upwards and to the right from the origin. Essentially, this graph represents the amount of value an economy is able to produce if the economy only had two goods. If a point on the graph lies on the curve, it indicates that the economy is working at full efficiency, if a point lies beneath the curve then the economy has some inefficiency in how it’s operating. It’s impossible to plot a point to the right of the curve since that would indicate working beyond the means of the resources available in the economy. If the economy becomes more productive, through the introduction of new resources or new technology, the entire PPF curve can be shifted to the right. When I first learned that it is possible to shift the PPF curve to the right, I started bouncing up and down in my chair in excitement and a big smile took over my face. It seemed to me that anything that would cause the PPF to shift in this way would add value to the economy, and the people operating within it, without having to take away value from anyone. Everyone wins, no one loses. In my mind, an understanding for how value can be added to the world started to develop. But I still only had an abstract view of this concept and lacked the right language to express it.
In the summer after I finished high school, while reading The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, I got a little closer to finding the right language. One of the best things I took out of that book, is a definition for entrepreneurship by Jean-Baptiste Say which Ferriss brings up – the word “Entrepreneurship” comes from a Latin root, meaning to elevate economic resources from an area of low yield to an area of high yield. I thought this was a beautiful idea and a beautiful phrase. It resonated with me so much. My understanding of how value can be added to the world grew.
The real change to my worldview came in the second semester of my freshman year at Brown, when I took a philosophy class on “Life and Money,” taught by visiting professor Dieter Thoma from Germany. The most valuable concept I gained from this class was the idea that wealth can be created. I got this idea from an assigned reading, the essay On Wealth by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Emerson begins this essay by explaining that wealth is derived from the application of man’s “mind to nature”. For example, Emerson writes that "Steam is no stronger now, than it was a hundred years ago; but is put to better use." When Thomas Savery invented the steam engine in 1698, he applied his thought to matter and created something that was more useful than the sum of its parts. Savery created value, out of thin air, that to this day benefits the lives of billions of people. To me, that’s magic – and it’s what I hope to do with my life.
I like the term “create value" better than the term “create wealth” because of the link between wealth and money. While wealth is generally associated with money (though it can be defined differently) “value” is anything that adds to peoples’ lives, regardless of its financial association.
Changing from wanting money and attention to wanting to create and add value
I like attention, and I like being admired. This is something I know about my character and about the way I function. When I had these epiphanies about money and the creation of wealth I stopped and took a good look at the reasons why I wanted to be wealthy. I realized that I had changed. During my first year of college I had started founding startup companies and working on side projects. In that year, as a freshman in college, I’d won 1st place at Startup Weekend Providence out of 131 adult participants, I won 1st place at MIT’s Startup Pitch Night, and 2nd place at Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Bootcamp pitch competition. This final competition held special meaning for me because the participants were the top 100 student entrepreneurs chosen and flown in by Stanford from a pool of over 7,100 applicants - undergrads, graduate, and PhD students from all over the world. My itch to be respected and admired had subsided a lot. I realized that there was a threshold for how much attention and respect I needed in order to make me happy. Yes, I wanted to be more well-known and have more people look up to me, but the level of acclaim I had already achieved was enough to make me happy. In the process, the essential thing I found out was that that the thing I enjoyed most was inventing and making things that would add value to peoples’ lives. That was my real passion - the creation of value, not the making of money.
At this point, I added “creating value” to my table of values, and changed my goal from “becoming a billionaire” to “creating value”. Yes, I still wanted that $12 million so I could have all the material goods I wanted, but I recognized that when people create value, money comes to them. Further, when judging my wants, I could easily tell that my desire to create value far outweighed my desire for a fancy car or a fancy house. I would be more content having added a tremendous amount of value to the world but only having enough money to survive and support my family, than I would be in a lavish house with a lot of money but having missed my opportunity to create value on a massive scale.
At this point, the worldview of creating value was fixed into my mind. It was a lens from which I began to see the world. Should I do this action or that action? One of the ways I could decide was by judging which one created more value in the world. For example, if I chose to work as an investment banker I might be able to create a lot of money for myself. However, the amount of actual value I would be adding to the world would (most likely) not be great because finance is generally about the optimization of resource allocation, and there are already many people in finance doing that resource allocation. Every additional person’s contribution to the value created is limited due to diminishing marginal returns. Instead, if I went and founded a startup company that created a new product that people needed but was not yet available, then I would be creating a lot of value in the world because I’d be meeting an unsolved need that no one else was addressing. As a startup founder it did not matter if I was the inventor, the engineer, the CEO, or the marketing person, because every single one of those roles creates value. This is because unless the product actually gets into people’s hands it has not actually created any value, and all those people are essential for getting the product to people. On the same token, as a Startup founder, unless I’ve actually gotten a product to people that adds value to their lives, I’ve effectively accomplished nothing. This was an incredibly valuable lens for me to add to my collection of worldviews. It helped me clarify and answer many questions I was considering like the one just mentioned, of whether to go into investment banking or startups.
Next, Emerson’s writing brought up an argument of why money is important. Wealth, Emerson writes is “the greatest possible extension to our powers, as if it added feet, and hands, and eyes, and blood, length to the day, and knowledge, and good-will.” The real benefit of being wealthy, much more than the prestige of it, is the ability to execute on one’s designs as a result of the power that comes from wealth. I’d thought about money in this way before, but once more, not at this level of clarity. I thought of whether I should add money back into my top goals but easily decided against it. After meeting my desire for recognition and severing in my mind my financial net worth from my social net worth, the reason I wanted money was so that it could allow me to create more. Thus, there was no reason to add another line to my list of top goals. It was like the moon wishes – the desire for money (for the sake of allowing me to create more) could be collapsed into the desire to create. Making money for my material wants is also a goal on my list, but it only appears further down the list.
Finally, Emerson wrote, of those men who create, “Power is what they want,—not candy;—power to execute their design, power to give legs and feet, form and actuality to their thought which, to a clear-sighted man, appears the end for which the Universe exists.” I read “candy” in this phrase as a metaphor for the “fun” I identified as the answer for “why am I alive?” when I was six years old. I resonated with the dichotomy Emerson was pointing out between momentary, fleeting, blissful fun, and the longer-term happiness derived from creation. Often it seems as though we need to choose between one and the other, since we can choose to dedicate every unit of time to either pleasure or “work.” I now think both can be achieved, because while at Brown I’ve experienced enjoying the happiness from both. But, in almost every instance where I do have to choose between the joy I gain from momentary fun, or the long-term joy I gain from creating (or the joy I gain from self improvement which is what powers my creating), I put creating or self improving before momentary fun. [3] [4] [5]
[3] The more intelligent, the more creative, the more innovative your mind, the greater your ability to act and thus the greater your power to shape the world around you.
[4] Another influential passage that affected me from my Life and Money class, came from the essay Human Requirements and Division of Labor Under the Rule of Private Property by Karl Marx, this time from how much I disagreed with the sentiment. When describing the transaction between a merchant and a customer, Marx writes, in the voice of the merchant selling a product to the customer “Dear friend, I give you what you need, but you know the condition sine qua non; you know the ink in which you have to sign yourself over to me; in providing for your pleasure, I fleece you.” I was outraged at this misrepresentation. The idea conveyed in this passage is that in every transaction there is a winner and a looser. Marx is implying that in commerce it is not the case that both sides benefit. This can also be rephrased to say that Marx is arguing that it is impossible to create value (at least, in this context through transaction). Thus, the idea he is espousing is that economics is a zero sum game. Before reading this sentence, it did not occur to me that some people see the economic world as a zero sum game, while other see it as a place where value can be created and where both sides benefit. After reading this sentence, it seemed to me, that one of the major differences between capitalism and communism is that communism sees the amount of value in the world as static (a zero sum game) while capitalism sees the value in the world as dynamic (a world where it is possible to create value). After reading this sentence, and On Wealth by Emerson, I had the language to express what I thought in much better words. I adamantly believed that it was possible to create value in the world, and it was a virtue I held with the highest esteem possible. It is important to note here that wealth/value can be created by more means than invention alone. Value can also be created through the arbitrage of skills, or the arbitraging of goods, etc. For example, if you bring peaches from the village to the town and people are willing to pay more for them in the town you have added value to those peaches. Since, to the people in the town the peaches are worth more than to the people in the village, for in the town the peaches are more scarce and thus more valuable.
[5] I wrote my final essay for my Life and Money class on Money and Happiness. My hypothesis was that money cannot “buy” happiness directly, but that it can facilitate happiness by helping us acquire tools and experiences for self improvement, and resources for accomplishing our visions. Two weeks after submitting this essay I had a one-on-one lunch with Jack Dorsey (the founder of Twitter, and of the payments company Square) who at the time was the 3rd youngest billionaire in the world. I talked to him about my essay and my hypothesis. This was a good opportunity for me to run my new worldviews by someone who was further down the line from me – who had both made a lot of money and created a lot of value. In our conversation, Jack confirmed that for him money was a tool for accomplishing visions and that beyond a certain point it does not matter at all how much money you have. Though I had reasoned the same on my own, getting confirmation from someone who had already achieved my goal was a valuable data point.
Clarifying Phrasing
I made one final change to my top three goals – clarifying the phrasing. Instead of merely writing “create value” as my goal I wrote “creating as much value as possible in the world and raising the collective quality of life world wide.” I wanted to set out, not merely to create value, but to create as much of it as I could. The method I chose for measuring value creation (though it is up for debate) was the amount I improved people’s quality of life. I am still trying to figure that last part out. This view comes from a not-yet-fully-flushed-out, but present, utilitarian view in me, influenced by the ideas of Jeremy Bentham. According to this view, I judge “value” in the world by the collective quality of life in the world (i.e. the quality of life of every person in the world added up).
The reason I added the word “in the world” at the end of this goal was to remind myself of the developing world. I believe that I can add the most value to the world by raising the quality of life of people in the most impoverished positions. Since, according to diminishing marginal returns, they would gain the most utils of quality of life, from every unit of “value” presented to them. I knew that given that I live in the U.S., and that there is more money to be made from creating value for people who live in the U.S., I may be tempted to built things that affect only the U.S. market. I added “in the world” to the phrasing of my goal, to make me think twice before dedicating my life to a project that affects only the U.S.
While editing the wording for my third goal, I clarified the phrasing of my first and second goals as well: Instead of aiming to “have amazing kids,” I changed my goal to “having kids who are greater than I am.” I decided that the word “amazing” is incredibly vague, and means very little – except for indicating something positive and out of the ordinary. Including the phrase, “greater than I am” puts the burden on me to educate them, and help them achieve greatness. “Greater than I am” is also vague, but in a good way. I don’t want to pigeon hole my kids by saying I want them to be smarter than me, or that I want them to create more value than me, etc. there are many ways to be great, I just want the next generation for which I am responsible to be better than the current generation. There is an issue with this phrasing in that there is an implication that I could achieve this goal by not being great myself, and then it’s easy to accomplish. Of course, I will always strive to be the best I can be and to grow as much as I can, but this misalignment in my stated goals is sloppy and dangerous. I need to find a way of fixing it. Luckily, I don’t need to deal with raising my kids for many years to come so I have time to calibrate this goal, but this is something I am working on.
I prioritize the goal of having kids who are greater than me above all my other goals because from my experience observing my parents it seems that raising my siblings and me to flourish has been the thing that has brought them the most satisfaction and happiness. Last summer I had a chance to spend a lot of time with 30 to 50 year olds at an internship I was doing. I took the opportunity to ask each of them, “what in your life has brought you the most happiness and what in your life has damaged your happiness most?” Every single person I talked to said that their kids were the number one source of joy in their life. For the second part of my question, the only consistent answer was that for almost every person who had gone through a divorce, their divorce was the thing that damaged their happiness most. Of course, gaining the most happiness from your kids is different than gaining happiness from raising them to be greater than you are, so still have an open mind about this goal.
Finally, I changed the phrasing of my second goal from “having an amazing wife” to “maximizing the love in my life – through my partner, family, friends etc.” As with cases before, the first stated goal can be collapsed into the second goal. The first goal is also a major contributor to the kids related goal so it is emphasized twice within my first two goals.
Another reason for the expansion of this goal is a new appreciation I developed in college for the value of non-familial friends. During college I was lucky enough to make some of the best friends I could wish for. These friends came from all over the globe. I met some at Brown, and some at entrepreneurship events I attended in different parts of the world. Our friendships have generally sprung up over a shared ambition for something like creating value and bettering the world, self-improvement, intellectual curiosity, or the spreading of happiness. These friends are people with whom I resonate and who make me feel like the best version of myself. Thus, I had to include my connection with these friends and the constant seeking out of these types of relationships into my list of goals and I had to include the value of these relationships into my worldview.
As I grow and gain more experience in life I hope to be able to answer the question of “Why is love so important?” more adequately. From knowing myself, I know that it is something that is vitally important to me. One quote from my Speech and Debate Coach from High School, Steve, that has always stuck with me on this topic is this: "Love is one of the only things in the universe that doesn't diminish as you give more of it. In fact, as you give more of it, you have more to give."
Conclusion
I imagine, that in one of the many times eight-year-old Cliff fell asleep in the library while trying to learn how to read he had a dream that he could. He dreamed, that like all the other kids he could read fantasies and enjoy them. He dreamed, that he could read biographies of great people, that he could glean inspiration from their lives and learn from their stories. He dreamed, that he could read self-help books on how to overcome his social troubles and how to become the man he wanted to be. He dreamed, that he could read the works of great philosophers and that he could consider their ideas when shaping his worldviews. When he woke up, what would he have thought if someone had told him that when he would be 22-years-old he could write a twenty-six-page paper by himself with practically no spelling mistakes? What would he have thought if he could read this essay, and learn that his worldview was shaped predominantly by reading books and by his experience overcoming dyslexia?
I think, he would smile.
People Learn from | Admiration, Biographie | Not books, People | People My Age: Founders/YouTubers
Omer Adam
Logan Paul
Richard Branson Video
Simeon
Lin Manuel Miranda
By far the most exciting part of May for me was seeing Hamilton. Some background is in order to fully explain how big of a moment this was for me. I first heard the first song from Hamilton two years ago while walking to class at Brown and it made me cry. Once I got to class, instead of paying attention I listened to the song over and over again on loop. Between that biotech class and my philosophy class I found a piano and learned how to play and sing the song. In philosophy class I decided I had to write a song like this. But who could I write it about? Abraham Lincoln? Teddy Roosevelt? Elon Musk? Type
Then I got it, Arnold Schwarzenegger. I’d listened to his biography recently and was blown away by his story. Then I spend the rest of philosophy class writing a Hamilton style song about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s life. I proceeded to listen to that song on loop for the next month. Then I learned that this song was not a single. It was part of a musical and there were 45 other songs from the musical.
Before listening to the Hamilton sound track I never understood how people could be such huge fans of The Beatles. Now I totally got it. The Hamilton soundtrack is the best piece of art I've ever experienced and Lin Manuel Miranda who wrote it and plays Hamilton in the play is true genius in my opinion. This sound track moves and energizes me to no end. I once ran a half marathon (with very little preparation) entirely from the energy of this sound track, I've also cried at 6 different points in the story - and once simply while trying to explain to someone over lunch just how much I admire Hamilton's journey. I have every single word of the 71 minute sound track memorized. But I never got the chance to actually see the play live.
While messaging back and forth with a Speechify use who lives in the bay to help her solve an issue she had we started a side conversation about Hamilton. Her family was going and they had an extra ticket so they invited me to join.
Alexander Hamilton
Elon Musk
So, now I had in my mind the hypothetical idea of what I wanted to do with my life (aside from focusing on my kids and love). I wanted to create value. However, this ambition was slightly abstract. Yes, Thomas Savery had created massive amounts of value by inventing the steam engine as mentioned above. But that was in 1698, who was doing this today?
When I read about Elon Musk while browsing Wikipedia towards the end of my first semester at Brown, my jaw dropped from how impressive I found this one man. Now it clicked for me why I admired him so much. Of all the people I knew of on earth, he was actively creating the most value. After graduating college, Elon Musk founded Zip2, an online map + yellow pages hybrid before Google Maps was conceived. After working on Zip2 for 4 years Musk sold the company, at age 27. This “extended his ability” and facilitated his creation, allowing him to accomplish more. Next, he founded PayPal, which created a tremendous amount of value by facilitating safe payments on the internet. After selling PayPal, instead of retiring, Musk used the money he had earned to found SpaceX, a rocket company whose goal is to colonize Mars. SpaceX now makes more space missions than NASA and all other government entities. They build rockets at 3% the cost NASA consumes per rocket, and recently, they were the first company to ever send a rocket into space, and landed it back on earth, whole. This means that the rocket can be reused, and that the only variable cost is gas. While running SpaceX, Musk founded Tesla. Tesla is now the world’s leading electric car company, made breakthrough discoveries in battery technology, broke every car safety record in history, sold over 100,000 electric cars, and recently began presales for a $35,000 electric car model which makes their cars available to middle class consumers. In addition, while running SpaceX and Tesla, Musk also founded SolarCity, which is now the number one solar panel installer in the U.S., and funded and publicized plans for the Hyperloop – an emissions free, new mode of transportation that can get passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 35 minutes.
The fact that Elon Musk can create this much value, excites me to no end and has opened up and widened my world view, because his actions prove that it is possible for one person to create this much value in the world today. That, is exactly what I strive to do.
Jimmy Donaldson (MrBeast):
Another one of my best friends is jimmy Donaldson aka MrBeast. Jimmy just turned 26 (he’s 4 yrs younger than me). Jimmy skipped University and spent the last 12 years working on YouTube full time. His YouTube Views over time have looked like this
12- 15k
13- 7k
14- 41k
15- 125.6k
16- 202k
17- 5.48M
18- 122.4M
19- 464.3M
20- 2.1B
21- 3.33B
22- 8.184B
23- 13.265B
24- 19.135B
25- 32.686B
He has 240M subscribers on YouTube and 95M followers on TikTok it took him ~3 years to amass that TikTok followership. When jimmy and I first became friends his line to me was that money is fuel to get more views… or to build what you want. Jimmy operates very much in a post scarcity mindset. I do not. And I’ve been wrestling with this challenge for several years now. My brother Tyler who is the person who thinks the most like me is the same. We cannot get out of this ‘protect the downside’ mindset.
Ali Abdaal:
My friend Ali, like me is more conservative, Ali has ~6M YouTube Subscribers and makes ~$2M a year. Like me he travels, has a team that works with him, just got engaged to his girlfriend and overall lives a very inspired life.
Ammar Kandil:
There is a lifestyle you can lead that is adventure first, happiness first, love first, childhood wonder first, money and future planning second.
One of my best friends Ammar Kandil has a YT channel called YesTheory with 8.9M subscribers. No one I’ve ever met initiates adventures like Ammar – loves with their whole heart as much as him, or cares as much. He really does lead with his heart first.
In comparison, I think about money, I protect the downside. Ammar and I are very similar people and met because so many people told us that we are similar. We both give love first, we are both always down for an adventure, both very spontaneous and make friends easily, but I live my life thinking how do I achieve financial security while Ammar lives it thinking how can I make something beautiful.
One of the biggest questions I’ve been asking myself over the last 3 years is how much is enough? I know that it does not make sense for me to optimize for making money yet I can’t seem to stop myself. Ammar is exactly my age 30
Barish:
My friend Barish, like jimmy, is very financially successful and will spend his entire year’s salary in that year while making large charitable donations or gifts for those who are needy. My brain cannot fathom doing this it’s so risky.
Valentin Perez:
Tyler Weitzman:
Lauren Holly Faulkner AKA the Lozzalina:
One class I was very lucky to take was AP Micro and Macro Economics. Everything in these classes came naturally to me. We used graphs and equations to represent the real world: Diminishing Marginal Return, Potential Possibility Frontier, Inelastic Demand, Negative Externalities, profit converging to zero as markets mature etc.. It was so refreshing to have the words to describe these concepts in the same way I could describe natural phenomena with equations from physics.
A Note On How to Make Friends: Bond over vulnerability and ambition.
Introductions
Phone number
The IC Manifesto:
What to do when you get distracted:
Everything else is subordinated
“This” is what I really want
Confidence:
How to get confidence, competence, & up adversity quotient
How to Get Energy:
When you can’t do anything about it:
Brute Force:
Make the horse drink, or at least, add sugar to the water
Five pieces of advice for ambitious 22 year olds:
5 Cliff Goals Today
What I yearn for is an experience like David Beckham had, conquer the different soccer teams around the world, or that napoleon, caesar or alexander the great had.
On Fame?
On Sex:
When I was 16, I was curious about sex and wanted all the girls to want me. I was 5’ 5” at the time and weighed 120lb. With time I learned how to talk to girls, how to text, and be confident but it was hard while being small. When I got to college hitting on girls became relatively easy: I’d gained 4 inches and 25lb, people made new friends quickly and everyone wants to get to know each other. Instead of ~100 girls to choose from there were suddenly 3,000. 750 in my grade alone. For the first two years of college, I explicitly did not want to be in a relationship. One day I woke up at the end of sophomore year feeling so grateful, so thankful for the life I was living. I felt a little bad, how could life get any better than it already was at Brown? “Cliff, you haven’t even been in love yet” my suite mate Kyle pointed out. Good point Kyle. I decided I would find a girlfriend:
I was in a relationship for 2 years with Taylor, then single for 2 years, 2 years with Annie, then single for 2 years, ~2.6 years with Laurie.
In every relationship I learned things about myself and grew. As I’ve gotten older the fear of missing out about sex has decreased but has not gone away. Here are the things I’ve learned over time:
1/ The best sex is with a partner you trust and know for a long time.
2/ Before a date you have natural fantasies about what you are going to do with that person. If you go just as far as those fantasies but not further you are ensured to have a wonderful time and not to regret anything. The next time one can go further after new fantasies arise.
3/ The biggest joy in life is waking up next to someone you love in the morning, and holding their head on your chest while sunlight streams through the window.
30 Rules for Turning 30
I want my goals to be 100% mine and not in any way generated by others. I never want to be going after goals that others set for themselves and I adopt for myself just because someone else wanted that thing for themselves.
Investing time in helping people younger than you can sometimes benefit you even more than it does them: keeps you young, gives you new ideas, reminds you why you started in the first place.
Working with your siblings is the best blessing you can ask for: I’m grateful for my 4 amazing younger siblings and that I was blessed with partners for life who are so smart, morally driven, focused, and loving.
‘You are so kind’ becomes a much more meaningful compliment than ‘you are so smart’ at a certain point in life.
If you give love to people first, by and large they will give it back to you 2x.
Start counting the sets after you are already fatigued
Go up to the best person at your gym, dojo, court, studio, and ask them if they do 1:1 coaching and how much would they charge to teach you 1:1? If they say no or are too pricy ask the next person. You rate of improvement will 3x with a 1:1 coach.
High energy = 1:1g of protein / 1lb of body mass, gratitude, big dreams.
I didn’t get into Stanford, I didn’t get into Exeter. I applied 2-3 times to each. Still didn’t get in. My life didn’t end and I did not die.
The real life hack is figuring out how to be there for your family when they need you.
Didn’t find where to put it, cliff parkour Video1 SummerTime2 Till I Collapse3 Freerunning4 Magic-Movement5 Video6
How To Make Friends
This is the list right now, there are pretty great stories linked to all of them:
Here are the friendship principals: How to make friends
1 have value to give: fitness, business, medicine, fashion, spirituality - they need to be able to learn something from you or be inspired by you
2 be intentional - write out a list of 10 people in your community that you know or who you think are cool that you want to be friends with. Send them a message sharing your appreciation and inviting them for a workout coffee lunch to a party or to hangout
3 never miss a chance to get a phone number
4 ask for introductions
5 host events
6 say I love you first
7 use the intent
8 fly places
9 pay for other people’s flights
10 pay for the Airbnb then venmo request ppl. If they don’t respond no need to followup, let it slide but don’t trust them like that again
11 have 10 good stories you know how to tell and tell them often
12 smile. And practice smiling.
13 remember names. How? Add descriptions to their contact in your phone & use a date based contact app
14 turn enemies into friends
15 have a mission you are on
16 be spontaneous
17 practice opening a cold conversation in person and online
18 find your people
19 trust your gut / have core values and beliefs that you write out. Go back to these to guide who to Street against
20 trust but verify
21 keep friends accountable and have them keep you accountable
22 people bond over shared vulnerability and shared ambition
23 be loyal and seek loyalty
24 use a card game
25 find recurring activities that benefit you both even if the other is not there but more if they are. Meet outside the house. Then instantly ad events like lunch or dinner. Workout / soccer / basketball / Gymanstics are the best ones
26 offer to pay for coaches who are expert - quickly they will become your friends outside of practice
27 offer to trade notes
28 know how to introduce yourself in a sentence. 3 sentences, 30 seconds, 1 minute, and 5 minutes
29 play the life biography game phone facing down
30 text people random appreciation / practice gratitude
31 respect other people and respect boundaries
32 on dating if your shy - use the world ‘hangout’
33 have an online profile that tells your story and shows value
34 suggest a clear place and 2 days / times within the first text - boba team is a bit winner
35 have good spots to take ppl which have a view
36 do things where the core reason is making friend
37 find the right events. Attend, talk, host, stay up late
38 you don’t need alchohol or weed or drug. Ever.
39 do comfort challenges
40 get on stage
41 post value online for free
42 respond to DMs
43 use voice notes
44 read books
Advice to Ambitious 19 year Olds:
I’ve spent the last 10 years figuring out what are the things that give the most joy in life and that result in “The Best” life. I’ve read every