I don’t care what people say, I love Shia LaBeouf. First, he’s an incredible actor who often gets overlooked because people mostly remember him from movies like Transformers. But I’ll never forget seeing him in Fury for the first time and genuinely thinking he was outshining Brad Pitt. Second, I’ve watched a lot of his interviews, and you can see the struggle in him. You can also see someone who keeps trying to understand himself, become better, and move forward. I genuinely believe there’s a good person in there, and I hope he eventually finds peace and happiness.

This is a critically important tip from @jockowillink. A lot of boys today are insecure. Modern culture gives them plenty of reasons to doubt themselves. One surprisingly effective antidote is cockiness, not arrogance, but the kind that’s funny, deliberate, and just ridiculous enough to take the pressure off. I started doing this with my son when I taught him to ski. Here’s the problem: I’m afraid of skiing. I cofounded one of the biggest ski websites on the planet, but I suck at skiing. So how do you teach your kid something when he can plainly see you’re terrible at it? How do you project confidence when you’re about to eat shit directly in front of him? Cockiness. Find ONE tiny aspect of the activity you can dominate. Then own the hell out of it. “NOBODY takes a fall like me.” Say it with complete conviction. Eventually your kid asks the obvious question: “Dad, why should I listen to you?” “Well, son, someday you may be a better skier than me. But you will NEVER take as many spectacular faceplants as I have.” He’ll laugh. You don’t. Then you fall. You get up, look him dead in the eye and say: “TOLD YOU.” Ask if he got that EPIC faceplant on camera. If he didn’t, chastise him for missing the shot. We have the most fun doing this with mini golf. I’m decent at mini golf—usually a little under par—but I act like I’m Tiger Woods on Sunday at Augusta. We spent a weekend at Lake George and played something like two dozen rounds. Why am I good but not great? Because I know one secret: EVERY. HOLE. MATTERS. I’m locked in on every single putt. It drove my son insane. After a dozen rounds, he’s nearly broken. “You’re too good, Dad. I can’t beat you.” Next course? Kid shoots FIFTEEN UNDER PAR. That’s the other reason cockiness works: it’s FUN. You can’t perform at your best when you’re terrified of looking stupid. A little ridiculous confidence removes that fear. Suddenly you’re laughing, competing and pushing yourself harder. And here’s the best part: EVERYONE wants to correct a cocky guy. I was at a rifle competition last month acting cocky. Nine guys enjoyed the show. The best shooter there did not. Eventually he pulls me aside. “You think you’re so good, but you screwed up X, Y and Z.” Then he proceeds to explain, in excruciating detail, every mistake I made and exactly how I should fix it. So I pulled out a notebook and started taking notes. Afterward, I found him again. “Can you show me?” He gave me 30 minutes of personal instruction. The best shooter there had just become my private coach. The same thing happens constantly on X. Post something timidly and people scroll past. Post it with absolute confidence and suddenly experts pour out of the woodwork to explain—in extraordinary detail—every single thing you got wrong. Perfect. Take notes. Cockiness doesn’t have to mean believing you’re better than everyone else. Sometimes it means being confident enough to look ridiculous, confident enough to fail spectacularly, and confident enough to let someone prove you wrong. And if you’re going to faceplant anyway? Make damn sure somebody gets it on camera. P.S. how do you know when you crossed from cockiness to arrogance. People stop laughing. When you are cocky you’ll piss a few people off but when you are arrogant then everyone will tire of you. Remember I’m not saying I’m better than you at everything, and I’m open to criticism at what I got wrong, but I am saying I am better than you at something specific.

Elon Musk says he underweighted one trait in hiring and learned it the hard way. For decades, talent acquisition built its scorecards on three pillars. Skills. Experience. Cultural fit. Resumes were ranked accordingly. Then the bad hires happened anyway. "Generally, I think it's a good idea to hire for talent and drive and trustworthiness." Talent. Drive. Trustworthiness. The first three felt obvious. The fourth had cost Musk careers. Hires he'd defended. Hires he'd promoted. Hires he eventually fired. Then Musk named the trait most rubrics skipped. "And I think goodness of heart is important. I underweighted that at one point." Musk named the trait: **goodness of heart**. Polished. Predictable. Almost useless without it. Musk, who had interviewed the first few thousand SpaceX hires himself, knew the longest training set. A high-talent, high-drive, trustworthy employee with bad intent could ship more damage to a company over a quarter than a low-output engineer could in a decade, because the same competence that delivered the win also delivered the harm. "Are they a good person? Trustworthy? Smart and talented and hard working?" You can teach domain knowledge. You can teach a process. You cannot teach a person to be kind. Or to mean well when nobody's watching. After Musk made the correction, his hiring filters added a layer most rubrics never named. Goodness of heart became a yes/no gate. Musk, on the four traits that can't be unlearned: "Those fundamental properties, you cannot change." What's the trait you keep meeting in great hires that doesn't show up on any resume? P.S. I made a playbook breaking down 100+ most powerful decision making mental models used by history's greatest thinkers. 5,000+ downloads. 113 five-star reviews. Grab a free copy here: — Elon Musk ( @elonmusk ), CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, on Dwarkesh Patel's ( @dwarkesh_sp ) podcast

STANLEY DRUCKENMILLER RAN 30 YEARS WITHOUT A LOSING ONE AND SPENT 15 OF THEM THINKING IT WAS AN ACCIDENT "I would literally like throw up like once or twice a week just from anxiety when I'd have a drawdown." He says he eventually learned that he would keep making mistakes and keep getting emotional, and that the record was long enough by then to stop being random. "Just stop torturing yourself for 48 hours or maybe longer over this." Asked directly whether he had imposter syndrome for 15 years, he said yes. Then added, "maybe longer." "When you have these drawdowns, if there's money managers listening to this and you're good, it's easier said than done. Just get over it and move on."

A man in his 40s finds himself still living at home with his overbearing mother. Whenever he comes close to meeting a girl he might consider settling down with, his mother always manages to mess up the relationship. Her excuse is that no girl is good enough for her precious son. As the years tick by, he eventually realizes that unless he does something soon, he will end up living at home forever, so one evening he gets up the courage to announce: “Mother, I have fallen in love and intend on getting married. I’m going to bring three ladies to the house tomorrow evening, and you have to guess which one I’m going to marry.” The mother is deeply unimpressed, but agrees to it, and so the following evening the son brings three attractive women into the living room and asks them to sit down on the sofa. “Right,” he says to his mother, “which of these young ladies do you think is the one that I’m going to marry?” Without hesitation, the mother pointer finger and replies: “The one in the middle.” “That’s right,” says the son. “How did you know?” The mother replies, “Because I don’t like her!”

Elon Musk left South Africa at 17 partly to avoid being conscripted into the South African military. At the time South Africa still enforced mandatory military service for white males. Elon would have been required to serve in an army enforcing apartheid, a system he wanted no part of. He didn't have a plan. He had a Canadian passport through his mother who was born in Regina, Saskatchewan. He booked a flight. He landed in Montreal with approximately $2,500. He had no contacts. No job. No accommodation arranged. He called a great uncle who wasn't home. He spent his first nights finding his way across a country he had never visited. He eventually showed up unannounced on a second cousin's doorstep in Waldeck, Saskatchewan. A farming village so small it barely appears on maps. He worked on the farm. He moved west. He cut logs. He cleaned boiler rooms. He enrolled at Queen's University. He transferred to Penn. He dropped out of Stanford after two days. He started Zip2. The rest is history. But the origin of the entire trajectory was a 17-year-old deciding he would rather show up alone in a foreign country with no plan and no money than serve in an army enforcing a system he found morally bankrupt. The decision to leave was not entrepreneurial. It was ethical. The entrepreneurship was what happened after the escape. Every biography frames his departure as the beginning of an ambition story. It was first an escape story. A teenager fleeing a country that would have forced him to carry a gun for a government he despised. The empire was built by a refugee. Not in the legal sense. In the moral sense. He left because staying meant becoming something he refused to be.

A man deposited a fake junk mail check for $95,000 as a joke. The bank cleared it. Six lawyers told him it was legally his money. He gave it all back anyway. – Patrick Combs was 29, living in San Francisco in 1995 with $200 in his bank account when a junk mail letter arrived offering him a get-rich-quick scheme. – Inside was a promotional fake check made out in his name for $95,093.35. Printed across the front in clear letters: NOT NEGOTIABLE. – In a moment of dark humor he signed the back with a smiley face and deposited it at an ATM. – He expected the bank to call him laughing. They never called. – Ten days later he checked his balance. $101,217.34. The check had cleared. – The promotional check was so close in design to a real check that it legally qualified as one under banking law. – By the time the bank realized what had happened it was legally too late to recall the funds. – Combs called his brother who told him to move the money immediately. – He tried to withdraw $95,000 in cash. He learned three things. All the large safe deposit boxes were taken, $500 bills no longer existed, and $95,000 in $100 bills did not fit in a small box. – He got a cashier's check instead and locked it in a safe-deposit box. – When the bank finally came for the money a month later they accused him of fraud and threatened police. – He refused to return anything until they admitted in writing that they had made the mistake, not him. – Six different lawyers reviewed his case and told him the money was legally his to keep. – The bank and Combs went to war for five months. He gave interviews on television and in newspapers. The public loved him. – He eventually gave every dollar back. All he wanted in return was a signed letter clearing him of any wrongdoing and lunch with the bank president. He got the letter but not the lunch. – He turned the entire story into a one-man show called Man 1 Bank 0 and performed it 2,000 times across the world. A man deposited a fake check as a joke with a smiley face signature. The tenth-largest bank in America cleared it.