Building Lessons From The First 2 Weeks Of Lyceum

This is actually about the theory constraints and how to build things that matter.

We invest in business education, not because we can't find info online, but because we find it beneficial to walk the path with other people. If I am a catalyst to your business, and you are a catalyst to mine, we both win, and we both made a friend while we walked the path together. Besides community, we join programs so that the instructors can help pull the "aha" moments out of us that unlock our potential. In other words, we invest in education to make us better at seeing the world through a lens of constraints. Let me explain.

As per the theory of constraints, a business will grow until it reaches a constraint, and it will only grow again once the constraint has been removed.

So if you are an incredible CEO or operator, that's just to say that you are really good at identifying and removing constraints. It's easy to feel like there are 1,000 important things to build and fix in a business at any given time, which is why businesses can become bottlenecked for years or fold. It's pretty darn shocking once you realize how common it is for people to work really hard on many things that don't matter. As an employee, I could never see it, but as an owner, it's a paradigm shift when you're paying people to work on projects alongside you, only to find that the business does not grow despite all of your efforts. Working on the *right* things matters. A lot.

Focus and discernment are super powers. If you want to be the best, if you want to win, then you find the constraint and you stick to solving it until it's gone *without getting distracted*. To do this, you have to embrace first-principles thinking, which is just "what is the smallest basic truth about this thing, that could be explained from an evolutionary standpoint" and then building on that small truth. When you think this way, it unlocks the ability to see beyond conventional wisdom and find the cracks in the system (hint: that's where the money is).

This applies to everything, not just business.

For example, when I was healing my gut, I was told by doctors to eat more fiber, which is really bad advice if you have severe autoimmunity. I listened to doctors for 15 years and did not get better. In fact, I started to feel crazy because everyone has an opinion about how health works, and I could not make sense how everyone could be right and yet I was still sick.

To cure my gut, I had to find the constraint that was keeping me unwell. Finding the constraint meant I had to study the basics of gut functioning. For example, I had to learn about how food breaks down, so that I could make sense of what was happening in my body that was causing all these symptoms. After a long time of obsessively searching for the constraint, I started to find patterns. The more I studied the patterns I found, the closer I got to a solution. As an important note here: I only figured out how to heal my gut because I STOPPED listening to conventional wisdom and began to think about the patterns for what they were. If the doctors say "eat fiber" and eating fiber isn't producing the result of getting well, then that tells me the doctors are wrong, or at least missing a piece of the puzzle.

It would take a 50 page paper for me to tell you all the ways that I now disagree with the western view of what health is. Most people would not agree with my take, and that's kind of the point. If you want to play it safe, just take everything at face value. But if you're not getting the results you want, please step back and look at your beliefs. We get constrained because of our beliefs, which are often inherited either culturally or from our parents, and we don't even know why we believe them. All of the strong opinions I now have about health came from looking at the parts of western medicine that didn't make sense to me, and demanding that it actually make sense before accepting it as truth. Here's an example of just one thing that came up during my search for truth...

In western culture, we tend to think we are entirely unique as individuals. We forget the things that make us largely the same, such as the fact that we're all about 65% water. So how different can we really be, considering that our hardware looks 99.9% the same in every person? Just about everyone I talk to that has health issues thinks they have an incurable disease, as if their body is just naturally broken. Many attribute their health issues to bad genes and assume that there's nothing they can do about their problems except take medication to mask their symptoms. We have doctors reinforcing the helpless world-view at every step, so it's no wonder that people feel like a victim to their circumstance.

To be clear, the problems with western medicine are not because of conspiracy--these doctors aren't maliciously dolling out bad advice. It's that we, as a society, are so incredibly off base about what health is and how we, as organisms, actually work. The people who study medicine aren't being given the full picture. But the missing links don't exist because someone is trying to hide them (a common assumption when things don't make sense at this scale), but because we are simply naive. Consider that western medicine, as a science-based form, is only 150-200 years old. In other words, it's a baby! Or maybe a toddler now. In any case, we have a long ways to go before we have discovered all the discoveries. After all, it was only a few decades ago we were still doing lobotomies, and only a few years ago that we mapped the clitoris, because it was said to have been "too fragile" to do before that--that it would just fall apart on dissection.

Q: What pieces in the paragraph above could be attributed to first-principles thinking, that allowed me to de constrain my health problem? A: it's that western medicine as a study is young, which means we have a low volume of work completed, in the grand scheme of things. Any new system, business, organization--what ever you want to call it--will evolve over time, as a deeper understanding develops in the people creating that system. The sheer volume of work created allows the creators to see what holds up and what doesn't hold up over time, for all the assumptions they make. If you look at a system that's roughly 175 years old, like western medicine in this example, and compare it to a system of the same vocation that's 2,300 years old, such as eastern medicine, you will see that one is developed and one is not. The break throughs that western medicine has made in it's early stages do not negate the fact that we've really only just begun exploring health through the modern scientific framework. Old and new systems alike can have creators with high conviction that what they're building is right. But in the case with western and eastern medicine, one of those systems has a volume of work behind it, and the other is still very much testing. For example, it's no surprise that many studies in western medicine have shown that acupuncture, a practice that was studied and perfected for thousands of years in Chinese medicine, is in fact effective.

The reason it's counterintuitive that western medicine could be so off base is because we've made incredible progress in health and technology otherwise. We've been to the moon! We can perform open-heart surgery! This progress makes us believe that there aren't so many gaps in our understanding of health--a dangerous mindset to have because being naive has actual consequences. If society is naïve to how the gut works, people will be sick. And sadly, it is very hard to stop being naive when you've been given specific, relentless messaging about how something works for your entire life. It is absolutely bat-sh*t crazy that over 50% of Americans are living with a health problem because they have no idea how to navigate a diseased body state. From a western lens, we just don't understand how we work, as organisms. If we did, people would be healthy. I will die on this hill.

Now, back to business. It may be just as hard to figure out how to become a multi-millionaire-billionaire-empire-owning-whatever as it is to cure autoimmunity. In all complex problems, we take the same approach and we find the constraint that is holding back the whole system. But how do we find the constraint *directly*? How does one go after that which they don't see? The answer is that you look for clues. You look for cracks.

There are a lot of things that we take as fact at face value. If you're solving a really hard problem, like how to cure autoimmunity, or how to become a millionaire (hard in the sense that less than 1% of people manage to figure these things out), you HAVE to learn to see the world as it is, and not as people tell you it is. This is why entrepreneurs like Elon and Bezos have made it so far. If you can see reality clearly, you can de-constrain any system as long as the laws of physics allow it. So when you find something that doesn't add up--that doesn't make any sense, that's a thread to pull. Pulling that thread until you find the other side of it is HOW you see through the cracks and find actual truth.

With that said, here's what we've done in Lyceum so far. These are not new lessons to me. Rather, the concepts were just presented to me in a framework that gets me an "aha" moment with the help of my instructors and my peers. I have already made two big adjustments in my business model that I would not have made without being in the rooms and talking with other people. Or at least, I may not have made those adjustments for a long time. All we have is time, and time is the greatest asset, so I'll choose to pay for speed every chance I get.

LYCEUM LESSONS:

Week 1: Identify your bottlenecks (pending or current constraints)

Week 2: Identify your MVP at the absolute simplest form

Simple to say, hard to actually do. Again, that's the beauty of programs--they help you see the big picture and connect the dots, which is 100% what is needed to be successful. Podcasts, youtube videos, even books--they're all great but nothing replaces walking the path with other humans.

Good luck on your builds this week, everyone!

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Building Lessons From The First 2 Weeks Of Lyceum