Instead of chasing random skills, simplify your career development by focusing on mastering one of four core value-creation archetypes: creating things (Make), generating attention (Market), selling (Monetize), or overseeing outcomes for others (Manage). This framework clarifies where to invest your efforts.

In your 40s, resist diversifying into areas you don't understand. Instead, invest 70% of your capital into your core area of expertise where you have an information advantage. Allocate 20% to adjacent opportunities and only 10% to "moonshot" ventures outside your competency.

Frameworks are not an innate way of thinking but a tool developed out of necessity. They arise when you must reteach or reuse a complex thought process so often that you create mental shorthand to avoid re-deriving the decision set every time. It's about crystallizing a process for scalability.

To increase the "memobility" of your ideas so they can spread without you, package them into concise frameworks, diagrams, and stories. This helps others grasp and re-transmit your concepts accurately, especially when you can connect a customer pain to a business problem.

Since the brain builds future predictions from past experiences, you can architect your future self by intentionally creating new experiences today. By exposing yourself to new ideas and practicing new skills, you create the seeds for future automatic predictions and behaviors, giving you agency over who you become.

Constantly creating daily content to stay relevant is a business-killing treadmill. Instead, focus on building foundational, long-shelf-life assets like blog posts or podcast episodes. This evergreen content solves real problems and can be discovered for years, providing lasting value and leads without daily effort.

Product management "range" is developed not by learning domain-specific facts, but by recognizing universal human behaviors that transcend industries—the desire for simplicity, convenience, or saving time. Working across different verticals hones this pattern-matching skill, which is more valuable than deep expertise in a world of accessible information.

Effort is finite and yields linear returns (addition). To achieve exponential outcomes, focus on leverage (multiplication) through four key areas: Code (automation), Content (scalable media), Capital (money making money), and Collaboration (working with people). This shifts your focus from labor to force multiplication.

The most valuable professionals are neither pure visionaries nor pure executioners; they are "step builders." This means they can understand a high-level strategic vision and then map out the granular, sequential steps required to achieve it. This skill is critical for turning ambitious goals into reality.