No. 642 – August 17, 2025
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Tiny Thoughts
The person who cares the most beats the person who’s just doing their job.
Success is built in rooms no one would photograph.
The people who change things aren’t at the parties, they’re home on Friday night, obsessed with problems everyone else finds tedious. Their Instagram looks empty because their life isn’t shareable. Just the same unsexy routine, day after day. They aren’t doing anything glamorous. They’re just consistently making steady incremental progress over a long period of time.
Success makes noise. Building doesn’t. That’s the paradox: Exceptional looks boring until suddenly it isn’t.
Telling someone to “work smarter” is useless because it assumes they already know what smarter looks like. If they did, they’d be doing it.
“Work smarter, not harder” is often framed as the opposite of hard work, but working smart is itself a derivative of hard work. You have to work hard just to figure out what working smart means.
Beginners can’t work smart because they don’t yet know what smart looks like. They have to work hard first, building the pattern recognition that makes smart possible. It’s like a chess master spotting the best move instantly; it looks like working smart, but it’s built on thousands of hours of working hard to earn that intuition.
Smarter approaches aren’t universal shortcuts, they’re contextual insights uncovered through deep, sustained effort.
Insights
Physicist Marie Curie on looking to the horizon:
“One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.”
Author Haruki Murakami on acquiring knowledge:
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Author Bob Goff on wanting the right things:
“I used to be afraid of failing at the things that really mattered to me, but now I’m more afraid of succeeding at things that don’t matter.”
The Knowledge Project [Outliers]
Sol Price invented the warehouse club and a philosophy that still runs Costco and Amazon. He’s the most influential retailer you’ve never heard of.
This is the story of how a lawyer with no retail experience created an industry, mentored his competition, and proved that nice guys don’t always finish last.
While I’ve summarized 13 takeaways, I suggest listening to this short episode yourself. You’ll never look at Costco the same way again.
+ Listen now on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Web/Transcript
Thanks for reading,
— Shane Parrish