NOAH
JACOBS

TABLE OF CONTENTS
2025.02.09-On-Overengineering
2025.02.02-On-Autocomplete
2025.01.26-On-The-Automated-Turkey-Problem
2025.01.19-On-Success-Metrics
2025.01.12-On-Being-the-Best
2025.01.05-On-2024
2024.12.29-On-Dragons-and-Lizards
2024.12.22-On-Being-a-Contrarian
2024.12.15-On-Sticky-Rules
2024.12.08-On-Scarcity-&-Abundance
2024.12.01-On-BirdDog
2024.11.24-On-Focus
2024.11.17-On-The-Curse-of-Dimensionality
2024.11.10-On-Skill-as-Efficiency
2024.11.03-On-Efficiency
2024.10.27-On-Binary-Goals
2024.10.20-On-Commitment
2024.10.13-On-Rules-Vs-Intuition
2024.10.06-On-Binding-Constraints
2024.09.29-On-Restrictive-Rules
2024.09.22-On-Conflicting-Ideas
2024.09.15-On-Vectors
2024.09.08-On-Perfection
2024.09.01-On-Signal-Density
2024.08.25-On-Yapping
2024.08.18-On-Wax-and-Feather-Assumptions
2024.08.11-On-Going-All-In
2024.08.04-On-Abstraction
2024.07.28-On-Naming-a-Company
2024.07.21-On-Coding-in-Tongues
2024.07.14-On-Sufficient-Precision
2024.07.07-On-Rewriting
2024.06.30-On-Hacker-Houses
2024.06.23-On-Knowledge-Graphs
2024.06.16-On-Authority-and-Responsibility
2024.06.09-On-Personal-Websites
2024.06.02-On-Reducing-Complexity
2024.05.26-On-Design-as-Information
2024.05.19-On-UI-UX
2024.05.12-On-Exponential-Learning
2024.05.05-On-School
2024.04.28-On-Product-Development
2024.04.21-On-Communication
2024.04.14-On-Money-Tree-Farming
2024.04.07-On-Capital-Allocation
2024.03.31-On-Optimization
2024.03.24-On-Habit-Trackers
2024.03.17-On-Push-Notifications
2024.03.10-On-Being-Yourself
2024.03.03-On-Biking
2024.02.25-On-Descoping-Uncertainty
2024.02.18-On-Surfing
2024.02.11-On-Risk-Takers
2024.02.04-On-San-Francisco
2024.01.28-On-Big-Numbers
2024.01.21-On-Envy
2024.01.14-On-Value-vs-Price
2024.01.07-On-Running
2023.12.31-On-Thriving-&-Proactivity
2023.12.24-On-Surviving-&-Reactivity
2023.12.17-On-Sacrifices
2023.12.10-On-Suffering
2023.12.03-On-Constraints
2023.11.26-On-Fear-Hope-&-Patience
2023.11.19-On-Being-Light
2023.11.12-On-Hard-work-vs-Entitlement
2023.11.05-On-Cognitive-Dissonance
2023.10.29-On-Poetry
2023.10.22-On-Gut-Instinct
2023.10.15-On-Optionality
2023.10.08-On-Walking
2023.10.01-On-Exceeding-Expectations
2023.09.24-On-Iterative-Hypothesis-Testing
2023.09.17-On-Knowledge-&-Understanding
2023.09.10-On-Selfishness
2023.09.03-On-Friendship
2023.08.27-On-Craftsmanship
2023.08.20-On-Discipline-&-Deep-Work
2023.08.13-On-Community-Building
2023.08.05-On-Decentralized-Bottom-Up-Leadership
2023.07.29-On-Frame-Breaks
2023.07.22-On-Shared-Struggle
2023.07.16-On-Self-Similarity
2023.07.05-On-Experts
2023.07.02-The-Beginning

WRITING

"if you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently."

- Charles Bukowski

Writing is one of my oldest skills; I started when I was very young, and have not stopped since. 

Age 13-16 - My first recorded journal entry was at 13 | Continued journaling, on and off.

Ages 17-18 - Started writing a bit more poetry, influenced heavily by Charles Bukwoski | Shockingly, some of my rather lewd poetry was featured at a county wide youth arts type event | Self published my first poetry book .

Age 19 - Self published another poetry book | Self published a short story collection with a narrative woven through it | Wrote a novel in one month; after considerable edits, it was long listed for the DCI Novel Prize, although that’s not that big of a deal, I think that contest was discontinued.

Age 20 - Published the GameStop book I mention on the investing page | Self published an original poetry collection that was dynamically generated based on reader preferences | Also created a collection of public domain poems with some friend’s and I’s mixed in, was also going to publish it with the dynamic generation, but never did.

Age 21 - Started writing letters to our hedge fund investors, see investing.

Age 22 - Started a weekly personal blog | Letters to company Investors, unpublished. 

Age 23 - Coming up on one year anniversary of consecutive weekly blog publications  | Letters to investors, unpublished.

You can use the table of contents to the left or click here to check out my blog posts.

Last Updated 2024.06.10

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On Exceeding Expectations

2023.10.01

Lindy Expectancy: 28 Weeks

I’m grateful to be writing this during a week in Lisbon–it’s a lovely city with lovely people, food, espresso, wine, architecture, and weather. It is safer than most major US cities; you can easily walk or take public transport everywhere and everything is cheap… why do I rent in the states, again?

Lisbon exceeded my expectations by a lot; this post, however, is about how exceeding expectations by even just a little can go a long way.

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Lisboa

Before we talk about expectations, a bit about the city: it’s downright gorgeous. Here was the view of the sunrise from the apartment we stayed in:



Caption: Don’t worry, I wasn’t cool enough to stay up clubbing til sunrise; this was after I woke up, not before I went to bed.

Right in the heart of Bairro Alto, I fell asleep with open windows, allowing the gentle sounds of debauchery drift up and lull me to sleep… as I said, the weather was phenomenal, between 65 and 90ish the whole time, so we let the breeze run through the apartment at all hours.

The food in the area was great and inexpensive–I enjoyed too many €2 double shots of espresso and some €5 breakfasts. While we splurged a bit on a few of the dinners, that overstates it compared to the US: two meals at Michelin Star restaurants each came out to about €50 a person each.

If we extended our 8 day stay out to a month, the “rent” per person would have still been significantly less than what anyone who I know in Manhattan is paying. The median rent in Manhattan right now is over $4k a month; I couldn’t find the median for Lisbon, but the average for a one bed in the city center is around €850.

For someone who can largely work remotely, these are pretty attractive numbers… I do promise that the rest of this note, though, is not just me talking myself into moving to Portugal.

Obrigad(o/a)

It may come as a surprise to some of you, but I’m not Portuguese. I also don’t speak Portuguese, and have never been the best at picking up languages. However, something that I’m coming to understand as really important is making a good faith effort at learning the language of any country you’re visiting.

This feels pretty obvious, and I think it is. If you’re in the US and attempting to speak with someone who doesn’t know English, if you don’t exercise patience and empathy, it’s not hard to see how you might get frustrated. While you should always exercise patience and empathy, you can’t necessarily expect that everyone else will, too.

The question becomes, how much of another language is it enough to learn?

In Portugal, adding ‘olá’ (hello) & ‘obrigado’ (thank you, obrigada for the feminine form) are the low hanging fruits–they're relatively easy to remember and add just a little bit of color to your English. Adding them to your lexicon is a great start.

I’d argue that going just one step above this, throwing in something like ‘Todo bom,’ which is the equivalent of ‘everything good?’ can go incredibly far.

Signal vs Noise

Queue the part where we get more technical than we need to: a concept from information theory is the difference between signal and noise. Signal is meaningful information; it is something that you don’t already know, it is additive. Noise, on the other hand, is effectively not information–it is random variation in some stream of data.

An important distinction, though, is that something that might at first be signal can become noise.

Let’s say you’re going on a hike. Take the following strings of 1’s and 0’s. A 1 means you hear a waterfall, and a 0 means you don’t.

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Obviously, the one’s stick out pretty plainly here. Based on the series, it looks like you were walking and passed a waterfall. The sound of water falling tells you that the waterfall is there; it’s signal.



Caption: Cool waterfall at the end of a Templar tunnel complex

Now, keep the same definition, 1’s as hearing a waterfall, 0’s as not hearing a waterfall. Now you’re at the end of a hike, however, and you’ve decided to stand by a waterfall.

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Having a string 1’s is no longer surprising; it is no longer signal. Of course the water is still falling! At some point, it effectively becomes background noise. We could just as easily rewrite this series as the inverse:

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

The signal, the relevant information, would be something that required you to update your understanding of reality, such as if the water stopped falling… after all, what would cause that? Likely something that would warrant your attention. So, we’ll make that the 1; we’ll make that the signal.

Signal is conditional on what expectations are.

Exceeding Expectations

A great sentiment that I am going to attribute to my dad, because I heard it from him first and the most frequently:

Under promise, over deliver

  -Dad

As a foreigner in Lisbon, the implicit promise is that I don’t speak the language but can maybe say thank you. For me, someone who never hears anyone speak Portuguese, if I start my sentence with olá and intersperse an obrigado maybe in the middle of the sentence and another one at the end, each of those Portuguese words certainly registers as signal:

1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1

However, from the perspective of a Lisbon local, this may not be the case. If the average foreigner picks up on obrigado and olá, those words stop containing as much information value. From their perspective, that interaction may look more like this:

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

While it’s still nice to throw in obrigadoa and olá, they become the expectation, the baseline. A useful definition of signal:

Signal is variance from expectation.

If my very existence as a foreigner implies that I’ll learn hello and thanks, that’s the expectation. What I might think is signal may be noise.

In a waterfall of foreigners, obrigado and olá are more drops of water.

Over Deliver

The whole point of this is that it’s not terribly difficult to go one step above whatever everyone else is doing; you can do just a little that can really help raise the bar and make someone smile.



Caption: The three glasses of wine on our sunset cruise made the whole experience exceed expectations; clearly Nick (half visible behind Renuka), didn’t think so.

One of the baristas at the coffee shop I went to multiple times a day (yes, my caffeine addiction is a problem) taught me a few phrases that seriously made all the difference: just by saying ‘Todo bom,’ roughly equivalent to the English “all good?”, the tone in conversations was quite different.

The string of 0’s changes more than just by the additional phrase… I’d argue that it makes the other couple of words feel less obligatory and turns them back into signal:

1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1

One of the guys in my group also would ask for the bill with ‘conta.’ Again, that always put a smile on the waiter or waitresses face.

It’s not a whole lot of work, and it is a little scary… what if you look like a foreign dumbass for saying the words wrong? But, empirically, I can tell you that saying the words wrong to learn how to say them correctly is far better than not saying them at all.

If you know what people have come to expect of you, every time you deliver just a little more, they’ll be pleasantly surprised.

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Why even worry about pleasantly surprising other people? In a case like this, it just feels like a nice thing to do.

If you’re enjoying someone’s country & culture, I think it’s a nice token of appreciation to show that you’ll do a little bit of work to express your gratitude for being able to visit.

Obrigado,