Ambitious people, 30 pieces of life advice, and compounding skills

Welcome back to the Z Fellows newsletter! Every Monday we share 3 ideas - to help you build companies, ship products, and create your life's work.

1: Ambitious People Need Each Other

Paul Graham on why ambitious people need to be around other ambitious people:

“Ambitious people are rare, so if everyone is mixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people’s lives, then the ambitious ones won’t have many ambitious peers.

When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bloom like dying plants given water.

Probably most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they’d get from ambitious peers, whatever their age.”

Source: The Anatomy of Determination

2: Thirty Observations at Thirty

Delian is a partner at Founders Fund. He is also the Co-founder and President of Varda Space Industries, which is building the world’s first space factories.

He recently turned 30-years-old and shared 30 observations from his life.

Here are 3 of my favorite observations:

1) It’s always possible to learn

“In my early 20s I was surrounded by people only a few years older than me that felt like they had an impossibly better grasp of the world and deeper understanding of a large set of technical fields that I did not.

My assumption was that it was far too late for me to catch up, my mental plasticity was waning, and so it was unlikely I could catch up, I needed to have learned more sooner.

This was wrong. What started as going to an initial aerospace conference at age 23, led to starting Varda at age 27, which led to now having a deep grasp of the entire field, both technically and as an industry.”

2) Embrace mimetic desires

“Envy is difficult to cut entirely out of your life. If you surround yourself with a phenomenal peer set, mimetic desire can provide a very strong motivation to accomplish incredible things.

I feel quite lucky that at age 19 I stumbled into a core set of peers through the Thiel Fellowship / SF that have been my closest friends, but also strongest motivators to accomplish great things, since many of them have accomplished great things already.”

3) Find mentors that can help, and want to

“When I was 19, an older brother in my fraternity told me that he felt compelled to help me, because he always felt I was the cusp of greatness but had critical flaws like a Shakespearean character and would never get to greatness without his help. So he was motivated to help me far more than those lacking flaws.

At an earlier age I would philosophize in my own head when I hit a problem. Now, whenever I encounter a problem, my first instinct is, who can I find that will want to meet with me regularly and is an expert at guiding me to a solution.”

Note: These observations are absolute GOLD and it was difficult to narrow my picks to just three. I highly recommend reading the full blog post below.

Source: Thirty Observations at Thirty

3: What skills are compounding in your career?

A few excerpts from David Perell’s essay on finding work you were meant to do:

• “Early in your career, it's okay to scatter. Try things. Read a bunch of books. Take on a bunch of projects. But expend energy so that you can eventually find the few things you do exceptionally well. But the experimentation phase has to end eventually.”

• “You only need to be good at a few things to be immensely successful. The more focused you are, the easier it is to become world-class at whatever you commit to.”

• “Narrow your focus until your head, heart, and wallet are aligned. Doing less leads to exponential gains in how well you're able to do the things you commit to.”

"A novice is easily spotted because they do too much." — David Senra

Source: Compounding Skills

Best of The Week

See you next Monday,

- Jay + The Z Fellows Team

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