Nov 1 • Announcements & Introductions
Traits of Founders?
The key is how do you model their actual behaviors— some are geniuses, us mere mortals have no chance of being that smart. So, here is my first take at these behaviors; this is open to discussion. I am sure I missed some. The idea is how we change ourselves to be more like the Founders? Curious to get everyone’s feedback. Once you have a clear set of traits, you can build out training, testing, and feedback loops to make the habits stick.
I. Direction — How They Choose What to Work On
1. Focus
They lock onto one mission and remove everything that dilutes it.
Practice: Run a weekly audit: What directly advanced my mission? What distracted me? Eliminate the latter.
2. Information Arbitrage
They don’t chase novelty; they exploit unnoticed value. They steal brilliance from unrelated fields and apply it faster.
Practice: Study one “irrelevant” domain weekly and extract a working idea.
3. Avoid Stupidity
They prevent failure more reliably than others chase genius.
Practice: List the five dumbest mistakes people in your position make. Build guardrails against them.
II. Thinking — How They See the World
4. First-Principles Reasoning
They rebuild understanding from fundamentals, physics, math, psychology, not tradition.
Practice: Write down each assumption and test it through data, not opinion.
5. Causal Mapping
They think in systems, not stories. Everything is a chain of cause and effect.
Practice: Diagram problems until you can trace how each link produces the next.
6. Ruthless Cognitive Clarity
They strip emotion from decisions and see incentives as the true map of behavior.
Practice: Replace “why” with “what caused this?” and chart it visually.
III. Execution — How They Move
7. Iteration Discipline
They prototype fast, fail cheap, and learn faster than anyone else.
Practice: End every project by scheduling the next version. Nothing is ever final.
8. The Art of No
They master subtraction. Saying no keeps velocity clean.
Practice: Track how many hours you spent on what didn’t move the mission forward. Then stop doing them.
9. Feedback Engineering
They build systems that surface errors automatically.
Practice: Create metrics that make failure visible in real time.
IV. Judgment — How They Balance Vision and Control
10. Controlled Paranoia
They treat comfort as a risk.
Practice: Run “Kill-the-Company” drills quarterly. Plan how you’d destroy yourself.
11. Asymmetric Patience
They move fast on actions and slow on conclusions.
Practice: Be impatient with inputs, patient with results.
V. Craft — How They Create and Refine
12. Taste as a System
They treat aesthetics and utility as one.
Practice: Compare two designs weekly, pick one, and explain why.
13. Feedback through Use
They live with their own creations.
Practice: Be your harshest user. Your complaints mirror the market’s.
VI. Leverage — How They Scale Impact
14. Systemic Leverage
They replace charisma with process.
Practice: Every time you repeat yourself, turn it into a playbook.
15. Compounding Flywheels (T.O.C. In Action)
They build feedback loops that strengthen with use.
Practice: Map your flywheel and fix the weakest arrow each month.
VII. Character — How They Sustain It
16. Anti-Fragile Identity
They define themselves by verbs, not titles.
Practice: Replace “I am a founder” with “I build systems that last.”
VIII. Velocity — How Fast They Move
17. Pattern Recognition Speed
They see analogies instantly. Munger spots patterns in finance; Jobs saw Xerox PARC’s potential in minutes.
Practice: After reading any new or different method, tech, etc., apply it to three unrelated fields.
18. Learning Compression
They acquire expertise in months, not years, because they know what to ignore.
Practice: Before learning anything, ask a master what 80% to skip.
IX. Resource Allocation — What They Do
19. Ruthless Subtraction
They protect attention like capital.
Practice: List every yes this month. Kill the bottom 40%.
20. Capital Efficiency Instinct
They feel ROI in their bones — time, money, attention all measured alike.
Practice: Track hours and dollars spent effectively. Show me your calendar and how you spend your money, and I will tell you your future.
The Pattern
They turn personality into structure.
They don’t rely on inspiration — they engineer behavior.
Focus replaces frenzy. Systems replace moods. Results replace stories.
Each trait is observable, trainable, and measurable. Together, they form a reproducible blueprint for building something that outlasts you
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Traits of Founders?
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