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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Today’s edition:
> Stories: Jorge Paulo Lemann & Nestlé
> High-performance: Claude Shannon on how to solve problems
> Insights: Imposter syndrome
> Tactical: Lifestyle changes for personal growth
> 1 Question: Goal-setting
Cheers,
Alex
P.S. Send me feedback on how we can improve. I respond to every email.
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Stories of Excellence
Person: Jorge Paulo Lemann
banker. In 1971, he founded investment bank Banco Garantia. "I always say, you sell the dream and then you build the reality," Lemann once remarked. His big break came in 1989 when he acquired Brahma beer. He merged it with Antarctica to form AmBev in 1999. Lemann's 3G Capital went on to buy Burger King, Tim Hortons, and Kraft Heinz. Known for his frugal lifestyle, he says, "I'm not in this for the money, but for the challenge." At 83, Lemann remains active in business and philanthropy, focusing on education in Brazil.
Key Lessons from Jorge Paulo Lemann:
On simplicity: "Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated."
On focus: "Do a few things well. Don't try to do everything."
On learning: "I'm always studying. I read a lot and try to learn from others."
Company: Nestlé
Nestlé's journey began in 1866 when Henri Nestlé, a German-born Swiss pharmacist, developed a life-saving infant formula. This innovation addressed high infant mortality rates due to malnutrition. In 1867, Nestlé founded the company in Vevey, Switzerland. The business quickly expanded, merging with Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company in 1905. This merger kickstarted Nestlé's global expansion. By 1918, Nestlé had 40 factories worldwide. The company diversified its product range over the decades, acquiring brands like Maggi (1947) and Nescafé (1938). Today, Nestlé is the world's largest food and beverage company, operating in 186 countries with 276,000 employees.
Key Lessons from Nestlé:
On brand management. Create a house of brands, not a branded house. Nestlé owns over 2,000 brands but keeps most of them separate from the Nestlé name. This allows each brand to have its own identity and target specific consumer segments. It's a more flexible approach than trying to make everything fit under one umbrella.
On corporate culture. Foster intrapreneurship. Nestlé's InGenius program encourages employees to pitch and develop new ideas. It's like having hundreds of startups within a large corporation. This approach keeps the company innovative and agile, despite its size.
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High-performance tool
⎯
Claude Shannon On How To Solve Problems
"Now one other thing I would like to bring out which I run across quite frequently in mathematical work is the idea of inversion of the problem. You are trying to obtain the solution S on the basis of the premises P and then you can’t do it. Well, turn the problem over supposing that S were the given proposition, the given axioms, or the given numbers in the problem and what you are trying to obtain is P. Just imagine that that were the case. Then you will find that it is relatively easy to solve the problem in that direction. You find a fairly direct route. If so, it’s often possible to invent it in small batches. In other words, you’ve got a path marked out here - there you got relays you sent this way. You can see how to invert these things in small stages and perhaps three or four only difficult steps in the proof.
Now I think the same thing can happen in design work. Sometimes I have had the experience of designing computing machines of various sorts in which I wanted to compute certain numbers out of certain given quantities. This happened to be a machine that played the game of nim and it turned out that it seemed to be quite difficult. If took quite a number of relays to do this particular calculation although it could be done. But then I got the idea that if I inverted the problem, it would have been very easy to do - if the given and required results had been interchanged; and that idea led to a way of doing it which was far simpler than the first design. The way of doing it was doing it by feedback; that is, you start with the required result and run it back until - run it through its value until it matches the given input. So the machine itself was worked backward putting range S over the numbers until it had the number that you actually had and, at that point, until it reached the number such that P shows you the correct way. Well, now the solution for this philosophy which is probably very boring to most of you. I’d like now to show you this machine which I brought along and go into one or two of the problems which were connected with the design of that because I think they illustrate some of these things I’ve been talking about. In order to see this, you’ll have to come up around it; so, I wonder whether you will all come up around the table now."
—Claude Shannon, The Father of The Information Age
Insights
Neil Gaiman on success and imposter syndrome:
"The first problem of any kind of even limited success is the unshakable conviction that you are getting away with something, and that any moment now they will discover you. It’s Imposter Syndrome, something my wife Amanda christened the Fraud Police.
In my case, I was convinced that there would be a knock on the door, and a man with a clipboard (I don’t know why he carried a clipboard, in my head, but he did) would be there, to tell me it was all over, and they had caught up with me, and now I would have to go and get a real job, one that didn’t consist of making things up and writing them down, and reading books I wanted to read. And then I would go away quietly and get the kind of job where you don’t have to make things up any more.
The problems of success. They’re real, and with luck you’ll experience them. The point where you stop saying yes to everything, because now the bottles you threw in the ocean are all coming back, and have to learn to say no.
I watched my peers, and my friends, and the ones who were older than me and watch how miserable some of them were: I’d listen to them telling me that they couldn’t envisage a world where they did what they had always wanted to do any more, because now they had to earn a certain amount every month just to keep where they were. They couldn’t go and do the things that mattered, and that they had really wanted to do; and that seemed as a big a tragedy as any problem of failure.
And after that, the biggest problem of success is that the world conspires to stop you doing the thing that you do, because you are successful. There was a day when I looked up and realised that I had become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby. I started answering fewer emails, and was relieved to find I was writing much more."
Tactical reads
⎯
> When considering lifestyle changes for personal growth
5 Lessons Learned Going 12 Months Without Alcohol (Read it here)
> When learning to set healthy boundaries
How to get better at saying no — Andrew Wilkinson (Read it here)
1 question
What assets should I create this week?
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.
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