No. 644 – August 31, 2025
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Tiny Thoughts
Luck writes the first chapter, but your actions write the rest.
Something I try to teach the kids is the concept of ‘one more.’
One more rep.
One more step.
One more minute.
One more revision.
One more practice test.
It’s so easy to stop, but most of the value comes from one more.
School often teaches that correct answers are obvious. Reality is the opposite.
We drill kids on facts that seem obvious once known, never mentioning that almost all of them were buried behind a door of ‘that doesn’t make sense.’ Gravity baffled us for millennia. We didn’t think hand washing mattered, even the idea of germs causing sickness sounded insane.
Every breakthrough started as heresy. But we teach kids to flee from the very feeling that precedes discovery.
Insights
Football Coach Marshall Faulk on effort:
“Effort requires no talent. Hustle requires no talent.”
Estee Lauder on selling:
“It’s easier to get to the top than to stay there. You can have the finest product in the world, but if you don’t go to sell it it’s worth nothing.”
Filmmaker Christopher Nolan on trusting your instincts:
“The only thing you can do is trust your initial instincts. You just have to say, ‘This is what I’m making. This is what I’m doing. This is why I wrote this script. It is going to work. Just trust it.’”
The Knowledge Project [Outliers]
John Bragg controls half the world’s wild blueberries, built North America’s largest private telecom, and did it all without ever leaving his hometown of 1,100 people.
In this episode, we decode the counterintuitive playbook of patient capital, overpaying, and remaining private.
- Bragg turned down a $3,800 teaching job in 1962 because he was already making $4,000 picking blueberries.
- When frost destroyed his entire blueberry crop in 1968, Bragg pivoted overnight to making onion rings for McCain Foods to avoid bankruptcy.
- Bragg was the only applicant for a cable TV license in Amherst (population 9,000) in 1969.
- He left all the money in the company and had no shareholders, so he could think in generations rather than quarters.
- Bragg intentionally overpaid for acquisitions, sometimes double market value, because “it’s only available once,” and his reputation brought him more deals than fighting over pennies.
- Five generations of Bragg family integrity meant a political opponent supported his loan application, saying, “If we can’t lend money to the Bragg family, we can’t lend money to anybody.”
- At 85 and worth multiple billions, Bragg still uses scuffed golf balls and retrieves lost ones from water hazards because waste offends him more than appearances matter. When asked about this, he says, ‘I find they go as far as the new ones.’
- When Bell rejected his partnership proposal, Bragg went all in and borrowed $265 million from twenty banks and built a competitor.
- Bragg gave six executive teams $10 million each to manage real investment portfolios, not for bonuses but for education about how strong companies operate and weak ones fail.
+ Listen now on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Web/Transcript
Thanks for reading,
— Shane Parrish