Self Awareness, Finding Your Own Way
Self Awareness, Finding Your Own Way
Avthar's Weekly Newsletter #3 (5/15/2020)
Hello from my couch in New York City!
Welcome to the third edition of Avthar’s weekly newsletter, where I sharing ideas I’m reflecting upon, experiments I’m trying and lessons I’ve learned, all to help you level up your own life.
I’m your host, Avthar and here’s what’s in this week’s letter:
What to be a successful entrepreneur? Start with Self Awareness
Finding Your Own Way (ft Naval Ravikant, Kapil Gupta and Josh Waitzkin)
The people applying neuroscience and practical philosophy to fitness and health
Please enjoy!
Want to be a successful entrepreneur? Start with self-awareness
Self-awareness can be loosely defined as recognition and awareness of your strengths, interests, passions and skills, and how they change over time. It’s also recognizing and accepting your weaknesses and shortcomings. It’s knowing who you actually are, what you’re good at and being at peace with it.
In an age where the internet enables even niche obsessions to thrive, I believe self-awareness is key for budding entrepreneurs and creatives to create wealth and win.
Self awareness helps you pick the right areas to focus on. It helps you pick the right markets, industries, problems and people to explore and investigate, based on strengths, skills, curiosity and specific knowledge. These are the areas where you will have a disproportionate chance of success. While others pick areas based on what’s hot or where the money is at, you’ll choose areas that you’re naturally curious about, and play while others ‘work hard’. You’ll outlast short term prospectors and find success in the long run.
Self-awareness helps you achieve product-market-founder fit. Awareness of strengths and skills will allow you to build great products that solve problems you care about. Self-awareness helps you be the right person, with the right intuition and compass, to bring a product to market, and delight your customers. Self-awareness helps you achieve product-market-founder fit.
Self-awareness helps you build the best team. Auditing your own strengths allows you to team up with and recruit others who compliment and augment you. This allows you to build an organization where everyone is aligned, engaged and using their strengths in their work.
Self-awareness helps you escape competition through authenticity. In the end, deep self awareness allows you to win by just being your true, authentic self and doing whatever it is you’re good at. You’ll escape the competition through authenticity, because no one is better at being you - than you of course.
Self awareness helps you win by building a personal monopoly. You build self awareness by reflecting and refining the strengths, skills, interests and specific knowledge (knowledge that can’t be taught but can be learned through experience and on the job) that are unique to you. As a result you’ll develop a personal monopoly. Just like a business can have a monopoly over a market, you have a monopoly over 2-4 intersecting areas, in which you can offer value to others.
How to build self-awareness?
Next week, I’ll share frameworks and tools that I’ve found useful in order to become more self-aware. It’ll be under the title, “How to find your strengths?”.
“Go all in on your strengths and don’t give a damn about what you suck at” - Gary Vaynerchuk
Finding Your Own Way
Recently, I've been thinking about self-awareness and its role in living a successful and peaceful life. Self awareness goes hand in hand with the theme of “Finding Your Own Way”. I think this is especially relevant in a world where many people are trying to emulate their heroes, while all the ‘heroes’ are often just giving out their winning lottery numbers.
These methods and hacks, which happen to have worked for the heroes, don’t generalize. Ultimately leading people, who attempt to follow their hero's methods, to failure or unhappiness. A timely example would be people piggybacking on Michael Jordan’s attitudes and methods used to achieve success in basketball, as documented in the TV Series, “The Last Dance” and hailing it as “the way to success”. (My opinion is that what made MJ great was that he did it his own way.)
I want to share two takes on this theme of “Finding Your Own Way” from some of my favorite individuals, one from from the ‘angel (investor) philosopher’, Naval Ravikant and his friend, performance advisor, Kapil Gupta, and the other from Mr Art of Learning himself, Josh Waitzkin.
Naval and Kapil Gupta on Finding Your Own Way
Kapil Gupta: Prescriptions or “How To’s” are hacks. They are techniques and methods, various methodologies to get somewhere.
...The problem is that whenever you venture into the realm of art, in any form (in business or sports or even in the setting of finding peace in your life or freedom or arriving at enlightenment or all of these so called spiritual pursuits) those things cannot be prescription.
...The Buddha attained enlightenment, you have Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods doing amazing things in golf, and Elon Musk, and various individuals who do great things in business and even yourself (Naval). If you take what those people did, and you write a book that said, “These people did X.” If you follow that, you will not become them. You will not.
Naval Ravikant: I’ve found business biographies to be useless for building a great business. They're good for inspiration. I can read Steve Jobs, his bio and be inspired but I can't be Steve Jobs. And if I want to be amazing at something, then I have to find my own way there. For mechanical things, “How To’s” work, but when you're trying to operate at the top of a field, when you're trying to do something creative, “How To’s” don't work beyond the most extreme basics.
...If you want to be the best in the world at anything, you cannot follow a prescription. If you want to be okay at it, then sure, you can follow prescription. If you want to learn how to lose a pound a month and get in decent shape, then you can follow a calorie counting worksheet. But if you want to be a shredded bodybuilder or an Olympic athlete, you're not going to get there through “How To’s”. You're going to have to create and forge your own path that is unique to you.
For more, listen to the full conversation between Naval Ravikant (@naval) and Kapil Gupta (@KapilGuptaMD) on Youtube.
Josh Waitzkin on Finding Your Own Way
Josh Waitzkin: One of the most common mistakes that I see people make, whether you're talking with kids or adults, in the learning curve is trying to do it, like someone else does it. Whether it's your dad, or your hero, or Michael Jordan, or Tiger Woods, or whatever the sport is, there are people who are who are at the top, and you can try to do it like somebody else. But then it's very different from trying to figure out the relationship to the art which is completely your own.
...the path [to mastery] should be different for everybody, depending on what someone's personalities like, what their biases are, what their past is.
If you take investors, there might be an investment, which one from the outside we think is objectively good. But it really isn't objectively good. It has to fit into one's portfolio of investments in a way that emerges from one's own mental models. Otherwise, it is not a form of self expression. Then, when you enter volatility, you're not gonna know what to do with it.
And so, I believe that this theme of self expression, and attunement to oneself and developing one's own mental models, is utterly critical in the learning process. And one of the most dangerous things that anyone can do is to try to copy others’ mental models. It's better to have none than to copy others, because then when the storm comes, you're going to not have a compass to navigate with.”
For more sage wisdom, I compiled my favorite themes from Josh Waitzkin’s book and interviews with Tim Ferriss in The Ultimate Guide to Josh Waitzkin. If you enjoyed this piece on Finding Your Own Way, you’ll also enjoy Don’t Outsource Your Thinking.
Neuroscience and Practical Philosophy applied to Health and Fitness: StrongFit
Although I first encountered Julien Pineau on an episode of crossfit podcast Barbell Shrugged back in 2016, he’s definitely not your average bro-science meathead. Julien, along with co-host Tyler, host Strongfit, a podcast about health, fitness, nutrition and training, but through the lenses of biology, neuroscience and practical philosophy. Julien and Tyler have a comedic quality to their deep conversations, similar to Jocko Willink and Echo Charles on the Jocko Podcast.
It’s unlike any health podcast you’ve ever heard, I guarantee you. Here are some of my favorite episodes to get started with:
Food and Behaviour (#025): How we use food to fix moods, rather than taking action. How the emotional connection to food becomes a dangerous and destructive thing to hang on to.
Sympathetic Fixes (#028): How people avoid taking action, the pain of learning, and dealing with issues in their lives, by using external fixes. And why that’s disastrous if you’re trying to learn and be your healthiest, strongest self.
Effort, Learning And Systems (#082): How systems build upon themselves (in both city planning and diet), the neurological mechanism that connects learning to effort and its implications in training and life, and how ego is ‘listening to your head over your body’ why that’s a bad idea.
No Fix November (#050): What happens if you give up all stimulants, including sugar, coffee, carbs, social media etc for an entire month? That’s the premise of the “No Fix November” challenge, where they talk about how you should change your behaviour in order to change your state, rather than relying on external input.
The Sympathetic State, Muscle Gain and Fat Loss (#066): How reaching sympathetic states might be a requirement for muscle gain and fat loss, as well as the Melanocortin Axis and its role in fat gain and loss, regardless of calorie intake.
You can find all episodes of the Strongfit Podcast on Youtube or on your favorite podcasting app.
That’s all for this week!
If anything from this week’s newsletter resonated with you, let me know by replying to this email or tweet me at @avthars.
You can find more of my work and writing on my online home avthar.com
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