Startup operator at PermitFlow Practitioner of discipline
Bend, OR
Joined March 2018
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Ben's one of the guys that count
Ben Wilson (@BenWilsonTweets) has stage 4 cancer and 4 kids under the age of 5.
I want to help him as much as possible, so I invited him on the podcast to talk about his work studying history’s greatest leaders and what it’s like getting told he’s going to die at 38.
He’s a good guy, a close friend, and one of my favorite podcasters.
His work has benefited millions of people all across the world.
Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine, introductions, or donations.
0:00 What Ben has learned from making How to Take Over the World and studying history’s greatest leaders.
55:51 Living like you're dying. Ben on facing cancer.
Sometimes I don't realize I opened X to the For You page and spend a minute trying to figure out who I possibly follow that is resulting in all the view-driven TRASH on my feed
Britain Jacobson retweeted
This show didn't get enough love: The Plastic Detox.
Couples who couldn't conceive for years were told to use less plastic for 90 days.
Plastic food containers, plastic wrap, utensils, underwear, clothes, etc.
90 days later 3/6 got pregnant.
youtube.com/watch?v=Esd8PEWl…
Britain Jacobson retweeted
Pattern Recognition is the form of intelligence that causes the most stress.
You will see things that others do not.
You'll feel crazy.
Things will be *so obvious* to you, and others will just deny it.
Britain Jacobson retweeted
You can restore your attention span at any time by reading books.
Lock the phone away for 2 hours and make serious headway in a book. Do this multiple days in a row. Start with short books because you’ll enjoy finishing them rapidly.
Scrolling brain can be reversed.
Britain Jacobson retweeted
"Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen." - Michael Jordan
Go out and make things happen.
Britain Jacobson retweeted
🎯 Aim Higher
The word “success” has been twisted.
When we say that someone is “successful,” it’s understood that we’re talking about their career—and more specifically, money.
I spent 20 years in the upper echelons of the business world:
> C-level at 3 public companies
> Startups backed by top-tier VCs
> Deals with billionaires and icons
Here’s a sobering observation:
In all that time—working directly with hundreds of “highly successful” people—I can’t think of a single person who had a life I wanted to emulate.
It’s almost by definition. To operate at the highest level in anything, you have to be one-dimensional, with a single-minded focus on “success.”
So it’s no surprise that most of those people become deficient in other areas, with broken families, poor health, and no interests outside of work.
Elon Musk, the world’s MOST “successful” person, has referred to his life as a tortured existence.
I like money as much as the next guy, but I don’t want to live a tortured existence.
So I punched out of that world, walking away from an obscene amount of money. Some would say that makes me less ambitious than my former peers.
But over time, I realized it’s the opposite:
Conventional success is pretty common. There are lots of rich people out there.
The much rarer breed are those who have plenty of career success but also a great, multidimensional life, with:
A lasting marriage
Exceptional fitness
A thriving family
Passionate interests
Spiritual peace
To strive for that form of success isn’t less ambitious. It’s more ambitious—a much harder needle to thread.
🎯 Ambition is like an arrow. It strikes the target it’s aimed toward.
What are you aiming for?
Most people have never taken the time to clearly define their target, so they default to society’s definition of success.
I developed an exercise to help you with that. It’s called the Ideal End State. See the comments for more details.
🤙
We just joined yesterday....seems like a sick opportunity!!
Come work (directly) with me!
This is a life-changing opportunity for the right person. @JoinCrowdHealth is a 🚀—one of those rare opportunities to disrupt a massive, broken, universally-hated industry.
I’m looking for someone to run the CrowdHealth Crew, our new member and influencer referral program. It’s the #1 priority in marketing and already the primary driver of growth.
Experience scaling similar programs is a requirement. POSITIVE VIBES ONLY!
Learn more and apply here:
joincrowdhealth.com/careers/…
Britain Jacobson retweeted
Peter Thiel on why the name of your startup is predictive of success or failure
“This is a slight aesthetic thing that I believe in very strongly: the names of companies are often very predictive of future failure or success.”
PayPal and Napster are the first example Thiel gives:
“PayPal was a very friendly name — it was the friend that helps you pay. Napster was a bad name — you nap some music, you nap a kid. That sounds like a bad thing to be doing, and it’s no wonder the government then comes in and shuts the company down within a few years.”
“You want to be very careful of how you name companies,” Thiel warns founders. In the context of the sharing economy, he likes Airbnb more than Uber:
“Airbnb sounds very innocent like this virtual bread and breakfast — this very light, non-threatening sort of company. Uber sounds like a bad name from Germany sometime in the 1930s. What are you exactly above? Maybe the law? This is probably something that, again from a regulatory perspective, I think Airbnb is a vastly better name than Uber.”
And on the social networking side, Thiel likes Facebook more than MySpace:
“You can say that all these social networks involve both reading and writing… Over time, reading dominates writing. Facebook was about learning about people around you — about their real identities at Harvard. MySpace started among wannabe actors in Los Angeles, and it was about them coming up with fictional narratives around themselves and a lot of other people in LA who are generally like that. And because reading dominates writing, Facebook would ultimately dominate MySpace. There’s a certain version where the whole arc of the company and the whole product arc was implicit in the names.”
Source: @mercatus (Apr 2015)
Well said!
Don't join a startup just because you feel, the corporate life looks boring and you're not moving. You will be surprised, startups also have politics, manager drama and pointless meetings. And for a long time, you won’t know whether the company is early, growing or running out of money. Your job description will change every few months and it will confuse you. You may be hired for marketing but will be asked to do cold calling and reply to customer support and you've to leave your ego in your closet before getting to work. Nobody will give you complete instructions because nobody has complete answers. You need high agency and low entitlement which means you must pick up problems that don’t may not belong to you. Choose the founders more carefully than you choose the startup. Watch how they behave when things go wrong, because things will go wrong. Choose a honest founder, they may share genuine and useful stuff online. And not the ones doing video reels. Join them because you want to learn how to think, build, sell like them. The greatest upside of working at a startup might not be the equity but the person you become while earning it. A startup is not a smaller corporate. It is a half built company where your job is to help finish building it while everything looks like a struggle. Choosing the right people you are willing to struggle with is your decision.
Britain Jacobson retweeted
Breaking: The House just voted to block the release of congressional sexual misconduct reports
They voted 357-65 to block it
182 Democrats & 175 Republicans voted to block it
Britain Jacobson retweeted
Hannibal nearly broke Rome.
His name alone inspired existential fear.
His secret weapon wasn’t elephants.
It was an obsession for information.
Here’s how 🧵
Britain Jacobson retweeted
The only thing that matters in consumer software is velocity of shipping. You will regularly be wrong about what people want: no one is a perfect psychologist. But if you are out at the frontlines with concepts everyday, your team will have their finger on the pulse of users and know where to add fuel.
#buildwithPermitFlow
Love being apart of our team!
Jeff Bezos says bureaucracy as we know it won’t exist in 5 years
In a fascinating conversation, Jeff Bezos talks with Francis Suarez, the Mayor of Miami, and completely dismantles the idea of traditional bureaucracy with a bold and surprisingly simple AI vision.
🤖 The vision: building permits in seconds
Bezos outlines how AI could transform the entire permitting process:
•Today: Getting a building permit takes months, even though the answer is almost always “yes.” People are just forced to wait.
•Tomorrow: An AI reads the plans, knows every regulation, and gives a decision in about 10 seconds.
•Smart feedback: If the answer is “no,” the AI instantly lists the exact changes needed to turn it into a “yes.”
💰 Why time really is money
From an entrepreneur’s perspective, the cost of delay is absurd:
•Large construction projects in Miami are multi-billion-dollar investments.
•Interest and running costs alone can hit $200,000–$400,000 per day.
•Every day an application sits on a desk literally burns money and patience.
🤝 The deal that didn’t happen
•Suarez immediately calls it a “$100 billion idea” and jokingly tries to recruit Bezos to build it together.
•Bezos laughs and declines. He says he’s too busy and sees this as a massive opportunity for startups to solve the problem for cities worldwide.
The takeaway is hard to ignore:
This isn’t about faster paperwork. It’s about removing friction from society itself. Once AI handles decisions that are already rule-based, bureaucracy stops being a bottleneck.
My take: systems that exist purely because “that’s how it’s always been done” are living on borrowed time. Five years might even be generous.
Britain Jacobson retweeted
Responsibility is an Honor.
True in your professional life -> responsibility over your team, your employees, your work & craft.
True in your personal life -> responsibilities with your spouse, family, or home.
The weak shirk it.
The strong embrace it as an honorable position.
Britain Jacobson retweeted
Earlier in the year, I was praying about a series of particularly difficult challenges and some tough upcoming conversations. My heart was anxious and troubled. As God often does, something came up in me.
I felt God kindly reminding me that every day I have 10,000 blessings, so many blessings that I could literally spend all day and night thanking him for them. And, I will always have 10 problems, many of which are worries over the blessings I’ve been given. When those problems are solved, more will pop up.
The question I have to ask myself daily, or perhaps even hourly, is which do I focus on? 10 problems, or 10,000 blessings? We’re told that in this life we will have trouble. But we’re also told to fear not, for God is with us and for us.
I don’t know what next year holds for any of us. I do know what I’m hoping for you: that you’d receive good gifts in the form they actually arrive – often small, often ordinary, and often disguised as a hard conversation, a needed boundary, or an unexpected kindness.
May you be given the kind of success that doesn’t hollow you out, and may you be protected from the success that does. May you have the rare desire to want less of what doesn’t last, and more of what does.
Heard this on a Tim Ferriss episode YEARS ago (I think with Michael Phelps) and couldn't agree more. One of my favorites
