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: Walt Disney & Roku
> High-performance: Bill Gurley in his famous runnin' down a dream speech
> Insights: Curiosity and intuition
> Tactical: Goal-setting system
> 1 Question: Virtue pretense
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: Walt Disney
Walt Disney was a pioneering animator and entrepreneur who transformed the entertainment industry. Born in 1901 in Chicago, Disney showed an early talent for drawing. He founded the Walt Disney Company in 1923 with his brother Roy. Disney's breakthrough came with the creation of Mickey Mouse in 1928. "I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing - that it was all started by a mouse," he famously said. Disney went on to produce groundbreaking animated features like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the first full-length animated film. He expanded into television, theme parks, and live-action films. Disney received 22 Academy Awards during his lifetime. He died in 1966, but his legacy lives on through the global entertainment empire he built.
Key Lessons from Walt Disney:
On perseverance: "All the adversity I've had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me."
On vision: "If you can dream it, you can do it."
On belief: "When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable."
Company: Roku
Roku was founded in 2002 by Anthony Wood, a serial entrepreneur who had previously created ReplayTV, one of the first digital video recorders. The company initially focused on developing a streaming media player for Netflix, which was then pivoting from DVD rentals to online streaming. In 2008, Roku launched its first streaming device, the Roku DVP, priced at $99.99. The company received early funding from Netflix, but the streaming giant divested its stake before Roku's IPO. Roku went public in 2017, raising $219 million at a valuation of $1.3 billion. As of 2025, Roku has expanded beyond hardware into advertising and content, with 70 million active accounts and $5 billion in annual revenue.
Key Lessons from Roku:
On open ecosystems: Embrace inclusivity. Roku's platform supports all major streaming services, unlike competitors who limit content. Wood stated, "We want to be Switzerland - neutral and open to all."
On hardware as a gateway: Use devices to build a larger business. Roku's inexpensive players led to a massive user base for advertising. Hardware isn't the endgame.
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
⎯
Bill Gurley In His Famous Runnin' Down A Dream Speech
"These are the five profiles that I shared with you. I would highlight a couple of things about this. First of all, in the first three if I said to you, “Hey.” You say, “I’m going to MBA school. I want to do something inspiring and have a great career.” You wouldn’t think I would mention opening a restaurant or being a basketball coach or a folk singer. Those aren’t things you would say. Yet, it didn’t stop these people from being successful.
The other thing that I would highlight is all five of them, I don’t think a single one of them started what they’re doing for money. In each and every story they were chasing a passion and a dream that allowed them to want to study, going back to Bobby Knight saying about having the will to practice. They all did it on their own. Danny uses a phrase, “Professional research,” in his book constantly, which I think is an interesting phrase because most of us think about the studying and research we do around curriculum and a teacher. You don’t think about if you’re in finance or marketing or accounting, do you go home at night and study for yourself, like, to improve your own skillset? Most people don’t do that. I think that’s interesting.
For those of you who have decided your dream job is consulting, they say you’ve got to tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them, so this is for you. Pick a career about what you’re passionate. Be obsessive about the learning. Lean on mentors, lean on peers. Give the credit to someone else, and pay it forward. For those into music, that like music, you know I stole the title of this speech from Tom Petty who, unfortunately, passed away this year. He was once asked what advice he’d have for people if he were giving it. While it’s not as ambitious as what I’ve told you, it’s almost the exact same thing on the exact same vector. I’ll let you read that yourself. That’s it. Thank you for allowing me to do that. I really appreciate it."
—Bill Gurley, Benchmark
Insights
Steve Jobs on following your curiosity and intuition:
"...much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."
Tactical reads
⎯
> When implementing a goal-setting system
This is the simple system I use now to set big goals -- and stay on track for years. (Read it here)
> When planning for long-term life objectives
How I set and execute 50-year goals (Read it here)
1 question
What do I believe is true only because believing it puts me in good standing with my tribe?
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
