FS | BRAIN FOOD

June 14th, 2026, #685 - read online - Free Version

Welcome to Brain Food, your weekly signal in a world full of noise.

Tiny Thoughts

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You can get the answer without effort, but you can't get the understanding.

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Aim for accuracy, not approval.

Nobody wants a doctor who never gives them bad news, but that's effectively what we do in life when we optimize for people liking us.

It's better to have the sting of honesty than the blindness of flattery.

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Your inner monologue becomes your outer reality.

Too much self-criticism, and you stop ambition. Too much arrogance, and you miss things.

The most powerful story in the world is the one you tell yourself (about yourself).

Insights

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Psychologist Albert Ellis on owning your problems

“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the President.”

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Businessman Stephen Schwarzman on determination:

“When people ask me how I succeed, my basic answer is always the same: I see a unique opportunity, and I go for it with everything I have. And I never give up.”

I get this might sound cliché, but I don't think it is. The important part of the sentence is "I go for it with everything I have." How often have you done that? What would happen if you gave 100% of yourself 100% of the time?

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Josh Waitzkin on being at your best when it matters most:

“The grit that matters most is learning to be your best when you’re at your worst. This is really the difference between elite-level performers and everyone else. And you have to train this kind of grit on its own, as a separate skill. But, if you can do this, what you discover is real power. There’s real power there—and it’s power you probably didn’t know you had.”

The Knowledge Project

Bill Gurley spent years on Wall Street, built his career as a partner at Benchmark, worked through Uber’s hypergrowth era, and now serves on the board of the Santa Fe Institute, where he studies complexity and systems thinking.

In this episode, Bill shares the mental models he returns to most often, including systems thinking, second- and third-order effects, and the importance of understanding both the bedrock of your field and the bleeding edge.

He explains what separates great founders, why storytelling and product instincts matter, how he uses AI across different models, and what he sees coming in open source, China, tokenization, payments, and venture capital.

+ Listen and Learn: YouTube - Spotify - Apple Podcasts - X - Web/Transcript

Tiny Lessons

1. Trajectory matters more than the starting place.
2. "Success requires balancing a deep knowledge of history with an obsessive focus on the technological edge where disruption happens."
3. "I think more people would benefit by studying the history of whatever field they’re in."
4. "If it’s tedious to learn, it isn’t a passion. I don’t think you’re in the right lane."
5. "I think that anybody in any field should want to be curious about the bleeding edge and what happens."
6. "You should understand the really old stuff, the history, because it’s differentiating and shows a passion and it gives you a great frame of mind, but you also want to really understand the new edge. If you do both of those things, I think you’re a power player in your field."
7. "Bezos believes that if you have to write it out and make it stand alone and be cogent, you’ll think through more of the problems and it’ll be more cohesive and you’ll figure out the loose ends and you’ll tie them up."
8. "I would describe complex systems as multivariable nonlinear systems. And multivariable nonlinear systems are very hard to predict. They can behave one way for a long time, and then one variable can switch and they can behave another way—the weather, stock markets, all these things. There are consequences that can be first, second, or third-order. You can’t just think with a linear model or just think about one variable because things can go way off the path. You need to be aware that if you make a change here, it could change something here, which could change something there, and it has to be the whole system."
9. "You’ve got to be really conscious of the consequence and not get too deterministic about a single metric or a single variable."
10. "I’ve always thought of Wall Street as the buyer of the product that venture capitalists create because the eventual liquidity is either an M&A (merger and acquisition) or an IPO (initial public offering)."
11. One question to ask before hiring or investing in someone: Is this person going to do this no matter what?

Favorite Moments

Here are a few of my favorite moments from my conversation with Mark Pincus.

1:44 Looking for Heat / True Signal
10:49 Fired (again) at 28 "his life sucked." How he turned it around.
15:03 What if everything goes right
16:56 Your instincts are right, but your ideas are (likely) wrong
22:29 Is copying others bad?
27:41 The process for deconstructing something
38:55 Chips on shoulders put chips in pockets
45:45 Only two companies survived Facebook
48:53 How to determine if your idea is good
53:05 The MVP Trap
54:40 Founder Mode and the right to be wrong
58:50 Companies should be "democratic dictatorships."
1:03:43 Learning from Jeff Bezos

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Thanks for reading. I'll see you next week.

— Shane Parrish

P.S. Anyone who has read The Great Mental Models v2 knows the answer.

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