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Larger than Yourself

No. 671 – March 8, 2026

Welcome to Brain Food, a weekly newsletter full of timeless ideas and insights you can use in life and work. (Read the archives). Not subscribed? Learn more and sign up.

Tiny Thoughts

Prepare as if this is your only opportunity, and perform as if nothing can go wrong.


Effort is a choice. If it’s important to you, there is no excuse for someone putting in more effort than you.


One of the most beneficial skills you can learn in life is how to consistently put yourself in a good position.

Insights

Charlie Munger on patience:

“The big money is not in the buying and the selling, but in the waiting.”


Investor Vince Hankes on balance in thinking:

“I think if you’re too qualitative, you miss a lot of details that are important, and if you’re too quantitative, you miss a lot of the details that are qualitative.”


Hall of Fame basketball coach Phil Jackson on our need to be part of something larger than ourselves:

“With the Bulls I’ve learned that the most effective way to forge a winning team is to call on the players’ need to connect with something larger than themselves. Even for those who don’t consider themselves “spiritual” in a conventional sense, creating a successful team—whether it’s an NBA champion or a record-setting sales force—is essentially a spiritual act. It requires the individuals involved to surrender their self-interest for the greater good so that the whole adds up to more than the sum of the parts.”

The Knowledge Project

Vlad Tenev, CEO and co-founder of Robinhood, reveals how he rebuilt a company that lost 80% of its market value in a juggernaut.

From surviving the GameStop crisis to deploying AI across every function, Tenev offers a masterclass in founder resilience, operational intensity, and the architecture of modern financial services.

If you’ve heard enough about GameStop (I don’t blame you), start at this spot.

I also did something different with the show notes, including key takeaways, and I’d love to know what you think.

A few of the Tiny Lessons I took away:

  1. “A juicy falsehood is more powerful than a boring truth.”
  2. “Success is creating dramatically more value for the world than you create for yourself.”
  3. In a downturn, there are three options: quit, hide, or build.
  4. Imitation is the first stage of mastery. You earn the right to break the rules only after you’ve internalized them.
  5. Stop one-on-one meetings. Use larger meetings to share context with everyone at once.

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

Want more?
+ All the Tiny Lessons from this episode.

Thanks for reading,

— Shane Parrish

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