In terms of pick people to work with that have high intelligence, high energy and high integrity, I find that's the three part checklist that you cannot compromise on.

You need someone who's smart or they're heading in the wrong direction and you're not going to end up in the right place.

You need someone high energy because the world is full of smart lazy people. We all know people in our lives are really smart, but you know can't get out of bed or lift a finger.

And we also know people who are very high energy but not that smart so they work hard but they're sort of running in the wrong direction.

And smart is not a perjure day. It's not meant to be like someone smart someone else is stupid but it's more that everyone's smart of different things.

So depending on what you want to do well you have to find someone who's smart at that thing.

And then energy a lot of times people are unmotivated for a specific thing but they're not motivated for other things.

For example someone might be really unmotivated to go to a job and sit in an office but they might be really motivated to go paint.

Well in that case they should be a painter. They should be putting art up on the internet trying to figure out how to build a career out of that rather than wearing a collar around their neck and going to a dreary job.

And then high integrity is the most important because otherwise if you've got the other two what you have is you have a smart and hard work with a crook who's eventually going to cheat you.

So you have to figure out the person's high integrity and as we talked about the way you do that is through signals and signals is what they do not what they say.

It's all the nonverbal stuff that people do when they think nobody's looking.

With respect to the energy there was this interesting thing from Sam Altman a while back where he was talking about delegation and even saying one of the important things for delegation is delegate to people who are actually good at the thing that you want them to do.

It's the most obvious thing but it seems like you want to partner with people who are naturally going to do the things that you want them to do.

Yeah I almost won't start a company or hire a person or work with somebody if I just don't think they're into what I want them to do.

When I was younger I used to try and talk people into things I was in this idea that you can sell someone into doing something but you can't you can't keep them motivated you can get them inspired initially it might work if you're king with him to be the fifth and you try to get them to just charge in the battle and then they'll figure it out but if you're trying to keep someone motivated for the long term that motivation has to come intrinsically you can't just create it nor can you be the crutch for them.

If they don't have the intrinsic motivation so you have to make sure people actually are high energy and want to do what you want them to do or what you want to work with them.

Reading signals is very very important signals are what people do despite what they say so it's important to pay attention to subtle signals we all know this socially if someone treats a waiter waitress in a restaurant really badly then it's only a matter of time until they treat you badly if somebody screws over an enemy and is vindictive towards them well it's only a matter of time before they redefine you from family.

So you're a different enemy and you feel they're right so angry outrage vindictive short term thinking people are essentially that way in many interactions in their life people are oddly consistent it's one of the things you learn about them so you want to find long term people you want to find people who seem irrationally ethical for example I had one friend of mine who's company I invested in and the company failed and you could have wiped out all the investors but he kept putting more and more personal money in through three different pivots he put personal money in until the next

company finally succeeded and in the process he never wiped out the investors and I was always grateful to him for that I said like wow that's amazing that you know you are so good to your investors you didn't wipe them out and he got offended by that he said I didn't do it for you I didn't do it for my investors I did it for me it's my own self esteem it's what I care about that's how I live my life that's the kind of person you want to work with another quote that I like I would tweet on this figure I read this somewhere else recently so I'm not taking credit for this but I kind of modified a little bit which is that self esteem

is a reputation that you have with yourself you always know so good people moral people ethical people easy to work with people reliable people tend to have very high self esteem because they have very good reputation with themselves and they understand that it's not ego self esteem and ego are different things because ego can be undeserved but self esteem at least you feel like you lived up to your own internal moral code of ethics and so it's very hard to work with people who end up being low integrity and

it's hard to figure out who's high integrity and low integrity generally the more someone is saying that they're moral and ethical and high integrity are less likely there to be that way it's very much like status signaling if you overtly bid for status if you overtly talk about being high status that is a low status move if you openly talk about how honest and reliable and trustworthy you are you're probably not that honest and trustworthy that is a characteristic of con men so yeah picking an industry in which you can play long term games with

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