Welcome to the first edition of The Vault.
Every week, I spend 30-40 hours diving deep into books, long-form articles, podcasts, and obscure corners of the internet—unearthing hidden gems and timeless lessons on winning in business, sports, and life.
Every Sunday, I’ll send you the 10 most valuable insights I’ve discovered that week. All signal, no noise.
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Chung Ju-yung on Diligence:
“If you are diligent for a day, you will sleep comfortably for a night. If you are diligent for a month, the quality of your life will noticeably improve. If you are diligent for a year, two years, 10 years, your whole life—your accomplishments will be recognized by all. The diligent lead lives 100 times more productive than the lazy.”
Chung Ju-yung is the founder of Hyundai. He grew up so poor his family ate tree bark, and ended life as one of the richest men in Korea. In his book (h/t Founders podcast, this episode), he talks about the importance of “diligence” and leading a diligent life as a cornerstone of his success. I wasn’t 100% sure what that meant, so I looked it up:
Diligence is the consistent and careful application of effort and attention to a task or goal, often over an extended period of time. It involves working persistently, paying close attention to detail, and maintaining focus despite challenges, distractions, or fatigue. It’s the combination of consistency, focus, thoroughness, and persistence.
Robert Greene on his Writing Process (paraphrased):
“My writing process is 98% pain, and maybe 2% ecstasy. I always start with a story, and it is so bad, I can’t believe how bad, how flat it is, how it sucks, I’m so embarrassed I hate myself. Then I go and I dig into it and I start changing the words and making it a little bit better. The second version is kinda palatable but it still sucks. If I let it out into the world it’d be very embarrassing. I’m a miserable being when that happens. Everything looks black to me at that point. I’m anxious, and if I gave into that anxiety, I would just put out that second version, which isn’t very good, it isn’t thought through. You have to go deeper & deeper and harder & harder. So I don’t just give up and say ‘here’s the chapter’, I say ‘it’s gotta be better, it’s gotta be better’ until finally after 2 months of struggling it’s gone to the place that I want it to be in. I use the anxiety to make it better and better. The feeling of fulfilment when I finish a chapter is pretty great. When I finish a book it’s better than any kind of drug experience anyone could ever have. It’s such a wonderful feeling of accomplishment.”
Lesson: If you want to do great work, honour the feeling of “this ain’t it”. It’s not easy, because “this ain’t it” = there’s a problem and I don’t know how to solve it. This creates anxiety, and the default response is to release the work—to label it ‘finished’ and move on to the next thing. Train yourself out of this. Trust the gut feeling that it can be better, and have faith that you’ll figure out how.
— Robert Greene on the Huberman Lab podcast (queued up at the right time).
John D. Rockefeller on Destiny:
“The only truth is that as long as you work hard enough, you will succeed. I firmly believe that our destiny is determined by our actions, not by our origins.”
“In the beginning of my career as a bookkeeper, I was only earning a weekly salary of 5 dollars. But it was only through unremitting efforts that have enabled me to establish an enviable oil kingdom. In the eyes of others, this may seem to be a legend, but I think it is the reward for my perseverance and hard work from the god of destiny.”
“In the eyes of ordinary people, luck is always innate. As long as they find out someone has attained success or have been promoted, they will say casually, with contempt: “This man's luck is so good, it is luck that helped him!” Such a person can never have a peek into the truth that makes one successful: everyone is a designer and architect of his own destiny.”
“Only by relying on oneself can a person then not let himself down and increase his chance to control his destiny. Smart people will only make things happen.”
I just finished reading the 38 letters John D. Rockefeller wrote to his son from his mid-50s to his early-90s. They are a goldmine of insight, and you should definitely check them out.
One of the themes that comes up over & over again is man’s ability to shape his own destiny. He acknowledges that starting “higher up the mountain” increases the likelihood of living at the peak, but “it does not guarantee them a victory in the end”. One of my favourite lines from the book actually emphasises the advantage of growing up poor:
"People of poorer backgrounds will actively develop their creativity, abilities, while also cherishing and seizing various opportunities because they urgently need to rescue themselves.”
Tim Grover on Winning:
“Winning is everywhere. Every minute, you have the potential to recognize an opportunity, push yourself harder, let go of the insecurity and fear, stop listening to what others tell you, and decide to own that moment. And not just that one single moment, but the next one, and the next. And before long, you’ve owned the hour, and the day, and the month. Again. Again. That’s how you win.”
— Tim Grover, Winning.
Bill Gurley on Picasso:
“This is a painting called ‘First Communion’, it was painted by Pablo Picasso when he was 15 years old. Most people are brought up and they’re told about Picasso in their first art class and you look at these cubism pictures and someone will say “ahh, a 7 year old could do that”. What they don’t know is that Picasso was a trained classical artist and had mastered it by the time he was 15, and he had spent time studying the way you would if you had set out to be the greatest painter in the world. Greatness isn’t random, it’s earned.”
Reminds me of a quote from Michelangelo:
"If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all."
Lesson: Greatness only seems mysterious when you don’t understand the insane amount of work that went into building it. Once you do, it’s a tangible thing you can work towards (if you choose).
On The Mundanity of Excellence
This is from a study by Daniel Chambliss conducted in 1989 on Olympic swimmers, but the findings apply today, in all fields:
"This analysis suggests we have overlooked a fundamental fact about Olympic athletes; and the arguments may apply far more widely than swimming, or sports. I suggest they apply to success in business, politics, academics and perhaps even the arts."
1/ Excellence is a qualitative phenomenon
"Doing more does not equal doing better. It is qualitative improvements which produce significant changes in level of achievement - the characteristics or nature of the thing itself. It involves modifying what is actually being done, not simply doing more of it."
"At the micro-level, simply increasing the number of hours one works each day will not produce a major change in status if the kind of work done remains the same."
2/ Talent is a useless concept
"Varying ideas of natural ability ('talent) tend to mystify excellence, portraying it as the inherent possession of a few and masking the concrete actions that are required."
"Talent is no more than a misrepresentation of particular things done (...) it transforms particular actions that a human being does into an object possessed."
3/ Excellence is mundane
"Excellence is accomplished through the doing of 'ordinary' actions, consistently and carefully, until they are habitualized and compounded over time."
"There is no secret; there is only the doing of all those little things, each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit, an ordinary part of one's everyday life”.
(H/t Jay Alto on X)
On hard fights:
— Alex Hormozi (@hormozi)
On the 2 kinds of failure:
“Think of it this way: There are two kinds of failure. The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time. This kind of failure you can never learn from, and such timidity will destroy you. The second kind comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn. Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done.”
― Robert Greene, Mastery
Reminds me of:
"All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer."
— Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
On chasing your dreams:
Lesson: One act of extreme agency can change your life forever. Quitting a job, leaving a relationship, moving country, or finally starting the project you’ve always dreamed about. Don’t wait. Time waits for no man, and every second you delay is a second you could be living your dream.
— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais)
On willpower:
“Will-Power, then, may be defined as the ability to keep a remote desire so vividly in mind that immediate desires which interfere with it are not gratified.”
— Henry Hazlitt
I like this definition because it implies how to acquire more willpower: imagine your end goal (remote desire) in such vivid detail and bring it to mind so often that immediate desires lose appeal in contrast.
(H/t Jash Dholani, @oldbooksguy)
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