nrao123

If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.

The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.

I always advise young people to become good public speakers (top 25%). Anyone can do it with practice. If you add that talent to any other, suddenly you’re the boss of the people who have only one skill. Or get a degree in business on top of your engineering degree, law degree, medical degree, science degree, or whatever. Suddenly you’re in charge, or maybe you’re starting your own company using your combined knowledge.

Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix. I didn’t spend much time with the script supervisor, but it was obvious that her verbal/writing skills were in the top tier as well as her people skills. I’m guessing she also has a high attention to detail, and perhaps a few other skills in the mix. Probably none of those skills are best in the world, but together they make a strong package. Apparently she’s been in high demand for decades.

For e.g.: Gates - https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Summer-Books-202... Collision : https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf Andreessen - https://www.goodbooks.io/people/marc-andreessen

Btw - I just noticed while googling that this may be what GoodBooks.io is attempting

Thier ROIC is 6.7% https://www.gurufocus.com/term/ROIC/NAS:ADI/Return%2Bon%2BIn...

This is below the SP500 ROIC.

Visa / Mastercard ROIC is >20%

Another measure of Mr. Buffett’s firepower: Berkshire Hathaway’s insurance float, paid in premiums that can be invested until claims have to be paid. Float was about $89 billion on March 31 2016, compared to about $88 billion at the end of 2015. http://blogs.wsj.com/cfo/2016/05/09/at-berkshire-hathaway-ca...

http://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-good-business-...

I am looking at Tiny's portfolio: http://www.tiny.website/ & I am hard pressed to think of any product that has moat. I would suspect that once the founder leaves in almost all of these cases, the products will atrophy.

In the article he outlines the challenges of taking a rules based approach:

The statistical approach is not usually the first one people try when they write spam filters. Most hackers' first instinct is to try to write software that recognizes individual properties of spam. You look at spams and you think, the gall of these guys to try sending me mail that begins "Dear Friend" or has a subject line that's all uppercase and ends in eight exclamation points. I can filter out that stuff with about one line of code.

And so you do, and in the beginning it works. A few simple rules will take a big bite out of your incoming spam. Merely looking for the word "click" will catch 79.7% of the emails in my spam corpus, with only 1.2% false positives.

I spent about six months writing software that looked for individual spam features before I tried the statistical approach. What I found was that recognizing that last few percent of spams got very hard, and that as I made the filters stricter I got more false positives.

False positives are innocent emails that get mistakenly identified as spams. For most users, missing legitimate email is an order of magnitude worse than receiving spam, so a filter that yields false positives is like an acne cure that carries a risk of death to the patient.

The more spam a user gets, the less likely he'll be to notice one innocent mail sitting in his spam folder. And strangely enough, the better your spam filters get, the more dangerous false positives become, because when the filters are really good, users will be more likely to ignore everything they catch.