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.
If you enjoy this, feel free to forward it along to a friend or colleague who might too. First time reading? Sign up here.
Today’s edition:
> Stories: Ken Griffin & Rolls-Royce
> High-performance: William Deresiewicz in his speech delivered to the United States Military at West Point in October 2009
> Insights: Loss and love
> Tactical: Designing your ideal life
> 1 Question: Cultural bias
Cheers,
Alex
P.S. Send me feedback on how we can improve. I respond to every email.
| Faster Than Normal |
What would you ask 350 of history's greatest founders?
Faster Than Normal is a searchable library of the strategies, mental models, and decisions behind the world's most consequential leaders and companies. Every answer cited to the source material.
Warren Buffett read every book in the Omaha public library before he turned twenty. This library makes that kind of cross-domain knowledge searchable in seconds.
| Start your free trial → |
Stories of Excellence
Person: Ken Griffin
Ken Griffin is a financial powerhouse. He founded Citadel, now the world's most profitable hedge fund, just four years after trading from his Harvard dorm room. But that's not all. In 2002, he launched Citadel Securities, a market-making firm that's become a Wall Street force. Griffin moves fast. "Ask me anything," he said, moments before a recent interview. His views span global politics to work culture. On China relations, he advises: "We need to turn the mutual temperature down." He's bullish on Miami's future in finance, suggesting New York might one day be "Brickell Bay North." Griffin's no fan of Trump's style: "You can't run the largest economy in the world as a name-calling bully." His focus? Building economies for aging societies with growing debts.
Key Lessons from Ken Griffin:
On tension: "I want tension in my business. Tension creates change. Change is necessary to evolve and prosper. I am never satisfied."
On remote-work: "What worries me in a hybrid work environment or work-from-home environment, the cultural or social contract that holds people together in a company is unquestionably weaker."
Company: Rolls-Royce
Rolls-Royce was founded in 1904 by Charles Rolls and Henry Royce in Manchester, England. Rolls, a car dealer, and Royce, an electrical engineer, met through a mutual friend and decided to create luxury automobiles. Their first car, the Rolls-Royce 10 hp, debuted in 1904. The company quickly gained a reputation for quality and reliability. In 1907, they introduced the Silver Ghost, which set a new standard for smooth, quiet operation. Rolls-Royce expanded into aero engines during World War I, a move that would shape its future. By 1931, the company acquired Bentley Motors. Today, Rolls-Royce is a global power systems company, with revenues over £15 billion and a workforce of 50,000 people in 50 countries.
Key Lessons from Rolls-Royce:
On symbolism: Create lasting icons. The Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament. The Pantheon grille. These became more than car parts. They're symbols of luxury. As sculptor Charles Sykes said, "A graceful little goddess who has selected road travel as her supreme delight."
On customer service: Treat buyers like royalty. Rolls-Royce provided white-glove treatment before it was a thing. They made owning their cars an exclusive club. "The quality remains long after the price is forgotten," Royce said. This philosophy extended to customer care.
Something New
You read the newsletter. Now search the library. Faster Than Normal has 350+ founder playbooks and 380+ company breakdowns — every one structured, searchable, and cited to the source.
Try asking: "How did Steve Jobs think about product focus differently than his peers?"
Try it free for 7 days →Accelerants
High-performance tool
⎯
William Deresiewicz In His Speech Delivered To The United States Military At West Point In October 2009
"We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don’t have are leaders.
What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision."
—William Deresiewicz, American author and essayist
Insights
Steve Jobs on loss and love:
"I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle."
Tactical reads
⎯
> When intentionally designing your ideal life
5 steps to designing the life you want | Bill Burnett (Read it here)
> When performing an annual self-assessment
Anthony Gustin Annual Review (Read it here)
1 question
What do I think is a universal truth but is actually just a norm unique to my own culture?
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.
|
The greats studied the greats. Now you can search what they learned. fasterthannormal.co → |
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.
Send us your feedback and help us continuously improve our content and achieve our mission. We want to hear from you and respond to everyone.
Interested in reaching Founders, Operators, and Investors like you? To become a Faster Than Normal partner, apply here.
Bald Labs Inc. [email protected]
fasterthannormal.co
