Good morning to all new and old readers! Here is your Wednesday edition of Faster Than Normal, exploring one short story about a person, a company, a high-performance tool, a trend I’m watching closely, and curated media to help you build businesses, wealth, and the most important asset of all: yourself. 

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Cheers,
Alex

P.S. Send me feedback on how we can improve. I respond to every email.

Iman Abuzeid is the CEO and co-founder of Incredible Health, a career marketplace for healthcare workers. She's a Stanford-educated physician turned entrepreneur who saw a problem in healthcare staffing and decided to fix it. Incredible Health uses AI to match nurses with hospitals, speeding up hiring and addressing the nursing shortage. The company has raised over $100 million and is valued at $1.65 billion. Abuzeid's approach is data-driven but people-focused. "We're obsessed with our customers," she says. Her background as a doctor gives her unique insight into the healthcare industry's challenges. Abuzeid's success shows the power of combining domain expertise with tech innovation to solve real-world problems.

Key Lessons from Iman Abuzeid:

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Intel was founded on July 18, 1968, by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, both former employees of Fairchild Semiconductor. With initial funding of $2.5 million from Arthur Rock, they set up shop in Mountain View, California. Their first product was the 3101 Schottky TTL bipolar 64-bit static random-access memory (SRAM) chip. In 1971, Intel introduced the world's first microprocessor, the 4004. The company went public in 1971, raising $6.8 million. By 1992, Intel became the world's largest semiconductor chip maker by revenue. As of 2024, Intel's annual revenue stands over $55 billion.

Key Lessons from Intel:

Read More.

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1. Understand the urgency of the situation. Half-measures simply won’t do. The only way to grow is to abandon your strategy of doing what you did yesterday, but better. Commit.

2. Remarkable doesn’t mean remarkable to you. It means remarkable to me. Am I going to make a remark about it? If not, then you’re average, and average is for losers.

3. Being noticed is not the same as being remarkable. Running down the street naked will get you noticed, but it won’t accomplish much. It’s easy to pull off a stunt, but not useful.

4. Extremism in the pursuit of remarkability is no sin. In fact, it’s practically a requirement. People in first place, those considered the best in the world, these are the folks that get what they want. Rock stars have groupies because they’re stars, not because they’re good looking.

5. Remarkability lies in the edges. The biggest, fastest, slowest, richest, easiest, most difficult. It doesn’t always matter which edge, more that you’re at (or beyond) the edge.

6. Not everyone appreciates your efforts to be remarkable. In fact, most people don’t. So what? Most people are ostriches, heads in the sand, unable to help you anyway. Your goal isn’t to please everyone. Your goal is to please those that actually speak up, spread the word, buy new things or hire the talented.

7. If it’s in a manual, if it’s the accepted wisdom, if you can find it in a Dummies book, then guess what? It’s boring, not remarkable. Part of what it takes to do something remarkable is to do something first and best. Roger Bannister was remarkable. The next guy, the guy who broke Bannister’s record wasn’t. He was just faster … but it doesn’t matter.

8. It’s not really as frightening as it seems. They keep the masses in line by threatening them (us) with all manner of horrible outcomes if we dare to step out of line. But who loses their jobs at the mass layoffs? Who has trouble finding a new gig? Not the remarkable minority, that’s for sure.

9. If you put it on a T-shirt, would people wear it? No use being remarkable at something that people don’t care about. Not ALL people, mind you, just a few. A few people insanely focused on what you do is far far better than thousands of people who might be mildly interested, right?

10. What’s fashionable soon becomes unfashionable. While you might be remarkable for a time, if you don’t reinvest and reinvent, you won’t be for long. Instead of resting on your laurels, you must commit to being remarkable again quite soon.

—Seth Godin, Best selling author

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> When developing internal metrics for success
Warren Buffett: The Inner Scorecard (Read it here)

> When applying expected value calculations to decisions
Expected Value: Millionaire's Math (Read it here)

That’s all for today, folks. As always, please give me your feedback. Which section is your favourite? What do you want to see more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know.

Have a wonderful rest of week, all.

Why Faster Than Normal? Our mission is to be a friend to the ambitious, a mentor to the becoming, and a partner to the bold. We achieve this by sharing the stories, ideas, and frameworks of the world's most prolific people and companies—and how you can apply them to build businesses, wealth, and the most important asset of all: yourself.

Faster Than Normal is a ‘state' of being’ rather than an outcome. Outlier performance requires continuous, compounded improvement. We’re your partner on this journey.

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