GenZ vs Millennials
TONDERAI M.
Co-Founder @ Startup Maniacs with expertise in Scientific Entrepreneurship and New Business Development
A few thoughts and hot takes (on a wide variety of topics):
Every single person should write more. Becoming a better writer is the most sure-fire way to level up in your career and life. Elegant writing is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Some writing is just…beautiful.
Write for 15 minutes a day, on any topic.
Most of the people you look up to and admire are remarkably unremarkable. There are clear exceptions, but as a general rule of thumb, this is an empowering realization. Their success is not due to some intrinsic difference, but some stellar combination of effort and luck.
Second-order thinkers will always be in short supply. The world is filled with first-order thinkers—it’s so easy to do. Asking “and then what?” is a tried-and-true way to dig deeper and stand out—in business, investing, or life. It also might piss some people off, but oh well.
If it seems too good to be true, it probably is (and you should run away). My biggest Ls have always been taken when I jumped at something that seemed too good to be true. “High upside with limited downside” is not a thing. If anyone tells you that, you should run…fast.
Most of us need fewer friends and more intellectual sparring partners. Friends are easy to come by. They are nice and pleasant. Intellectual sparring partners are harder to find. They are willing to call you on your BS, question your assumptions, and push you to think deeply.
You should spend your 20s saying yes and your 30s saying no. Your 20s are a time to say yes to almost everything. Saying yes puts you into new and uncomfortable situations. Your 30s are a time to say no to almost everything. Saying no allows you to focus & build leverage.
Storytelling is the most underrated skill in life. If you aren’t a builder, you have to be a great storyteller if you want to win. Whether you’re convincing investors to back your startup, LPs to give you money, or customers to buy your product—you’re engaged in storytelling.
Intellectual curiosity may become the most important trait in a world where intelligence and energy are increasingly abundant. The willingness to follow a spark of curiosity down a rabbit hole is a common trait of the most successful people.
Curiosity never goes out of style.
We should all spend more time doing things we never regret. A few things I never regret:
Make your list—then spend more time on those.
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Big decisions are better made fast than slow. We are told to methodically consider the pros and cons of every big decision in our lives—but for most this leads to decision paralysis. You're actually better off making them fast—gut and instincts are powerful guides.
There’s never a “good time” or a “right time” for a big change. I spent most of my life assuming that big changes would happen in due course. I was wrong. You have to push—and probably close your eyes and leap. Nothing just happens. That’s for the movies, not real life.
Working hard is simultaneously overrated and underrated. Let me explain: Overrated—what you work on is more important than how hard you work. Prioritize leverage & playing your game. Underrated—people who work hard on something they care about deeply will almost certainly win.
Knowing when to fold them is just as important as knowing when to hold them. We worship people who doubled down with their back against the wall—but most of these are pure survivorship bias. There are far more stories of people who did this and failed, you just don’t hear them.
Everyone wants to be a Ferrari, but there’s more money to be made in being a Camry. It’s fun to be the Ferrari—you get to use the big words and impress everyone with your jargon. But it PAYS to be the Camry—you get too abstract that complexity and help millions get from A to B.
More jobs should ask about your greatest failure in their hiring. You learn far more about someone from how they handled taking their biggest punch than any credential, award, or honour they have received. Give me someone who got knocked out and got back up—my money is on them.
Money is a terrible barometer of happiness. I used to see people with money and assume everything in their life must be amazing. I was wrong. Money is only correlated with happiness up to a baseline level of life—that level is lower than you think. Prioritize happiness.
Slowing down in everything you do is one of the easiest ways to speed up. Example: I used to read books fast. I wanted to “flex” on how many books I read per year. But then I realized I was absorbing 5% of what I read.bIf you slow down, you’ll absorb more and speed up.
Most successful people are genuinely willing to help. The vast majority of successful people I’ve encountered are deeply thankful for their success and realize that they didn’t achieve it on their own. They are willing to pay it forward by helping others.
It’s the best time in history to be a builder. Ideas are cheap—execution is expensive. If you’re a builder, the 2020s are your decade. The abundance of no-code tools, the proliferation of free internet, and the rapid decentralization of hiring hubs are all in your favour.
The walls of credentialism are finally starting to crack. We may be living in an era where a child born on the streets has the same opportunities as a child born in a mansion. More and more companies are hiring based on skills/merit vs. credentials. This is a great thing.
The hype—and crash—around new technologies is an evolutionary feature, not a bug. Hype cycles pull capital and talent into a new area. Crashes happen and are painful, but capital and talent are used to build in the darkness that follows. It’ll happen again with Web3.
It’s really hard to be “too late” with a mega-trend. Every single time I’ve told myself I was “too late” to invest in something, I was wrong—it was still early. Humans are terrible at comprehending exponential growth—if you’re facing a mega-trend, odds are you’re still early.
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