Mark Zuckerberg’s 4 steps to approach life

This week, Lenny Rachitsky spoke with Naomi Gleit, Meta’s Head of Product, who joined as employee #29 back in 2004 when Meta (then Facebook) had just one million users. Today, Meta has nearly 70,000 employees — and over 3.2 billion daily users.

The conversation dives into Meta’s historic rise, principles of strategic decision-making, and how shared team goals drive success. But for me, the standout moment in the conversation was Naomi’s personal anecdote of Mark teaching a middle-school class in 2014, in which he shared four essential life lessons — a set of principles Naomi has carried with her ever since.

Key quote: “The lessons were: 1. Love yourself. 2. Only then can you truly serve others. 3. Focus on what you can control. 4. For those things, never give up. That was his fours steps on how to approach life. We even made stickers with these steps for students to place on their composition notebooks as a reminder. I think that has helped me over time. In that, you can see what we all see in Mark. Never give up—that aspect of him. For me, number 3 is really the hardest, focusing on what I can control; I often feel like I can manage more than I actually can.”

Writing clearly = thinking clearly

One recurring themes of this newsletter is my belief that clear writing is essential for clear thinking — and clear decision-making. The investor Paul Graham articulates this concept in a clever new essay, Writes and Write-Nots.

In the piece, Graham argues that AI will reduce the necessity to learn writing — a skill deeply connected to the art of thinking itself. And over time, the world will bifurcate into two camps: the “writes” and the “write-nots.”

“AI has blown this world open,” Paul writes. He continues:

Key quote: “Almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work. The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots. There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can’t write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers, ok writers, and people who can’t write, there will just be good writers and people who can’t write. Is that so bad? Isn’t it common for skills to disappear when technology makes them obsolete? There aren’t many blacksmiths left, and it doesn’t seem to be a problem. Yes, it’s bad. The reason is something I mentioned earlier: writing is thinking. In fact there’s a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.

A few more links I enjoyed:

Investing in a Crazy Election Year – via Alliance Wealth Advisors

Key quote: “‍In the past two presidential elections, there were many ‘expert’ predictions claiming that electing both Donald Trump and Joe Biden would cause a significant stock market correction. Yet, both presided over stock market highs at various times. Anyone who made changes to their portfolio based on those election outcomes suffered a serious opportunity cost that will impact them for a long time.” 

Machines of Loving Grace – via Dario Amodei

Key quote: “In fact, one of my main reasons for focusing on risks is that they’re the only thing standing between us and what I see as a fundamentally positive future. I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be. In this essay I try to sketch out what that upside might look like — what a world with powerful AI might look like if everything goes right.”

AI Data Centers, Part 2: Energy – via Generative Value

Key quote: “Among the many bottlenecks for AI data centers, energy might be the most important and the most difficult to address. If estimates of data center energy consumption turn out to be true (or even in the vicinity of truth), our current energy infrastructure will not be able to support those demands. Before the AI boom, data center power consumption was expected to grow consistently. Compute demands would continue to grow; data center centers would grow to meet that demand.”

From the archives:

Winning at the Great Game with Adam Robinson – via The Knowledge Project (2018)

Key quote: “We play many games in life. The game of job, or career, or starting a business, or the politics game, or the education game. Everything is a game. Games suggest something that’s not serious, but of course, games are intensely serious. If you want to find someone who is ferociously intense and focused, watch someone playing a game, especially something competitive.”