2

Universal Laws
- How to Harness the 21 Unwritten Laws
of the Universe to Succeed in the Game
of Life -

By Anthony Hustle

For more information go to anthonyhustle.com

3
Why I Wrote this Book ...................................................................................
6
Law #1: Persuasion Machines........................................................................
26
Law #2: The Tree of Knowledge ....................................................................
31
Law #3: The Power of Inductive Experimentation and
Intuition ...........................................................................................................
33
Law #5: The Rational Dream Chaser............................................................
40
Law #6: Setting the BHAGs ...........................................................................
44
Law #7: Be a Contrarian ................................................................................
47
Law #8: Win Time by Harnessing the Power of Delayed
Gratification ....................................................................................................
49
Law #9: Extreme Work Ethics .......................................................................
50
Law #10: Hard Work is Genius .....................................................................
51
Law #11: Be Willing to Die When Nobody is Watching ..............................
52
Law #12: Hierarchy of Decision Making & The Pursuit of
Happiness .........................................................................................................
4
 53
Law #13: Building Habits Through Discomfort...................................
54
Law #14: Be Mindful Of Asymmetric Bets ...........................................
55
Law #15: The Concentrated Punch Card Approach ...........................
56
Law #16: Managing the Monkey Brain ................................................
57
Law #17: Focus (Compounding, Growth Mindset &
Network Effects)......................................................................................
58
Law #18: Experimentation Speed..........................................................
59
Law #19: The Blackbox Approach ........................................................
62
Law #20: Harnessing the Power of People ...........................................
64
Law #21: Emotion Control .....................................................................
66
Concluding Remarks ..............................................................................
68

5
 Why I Wrote this Book

There are sextillion (7x10^22) stars in the

universe. Even if only an extremely small
percentage of those stars hosted intelligent life,
one would still end up with a very large number of
alien civilizations. This would imply that in our
galaxy alone, the Milky Way, we have a vast
number of planets that can host intelligent
civilizations. Second, the universe is 13.8 billions
years old. Even if we assume that intelligent
civilizations were to colonize their star system
using interstellar technologies that are similar to
those currently available to mankind, it would only
take 50 million years to explore the galaxy. Planet
earth is about 4.5b years old. Hence, if we
assume that intelligent life has formed in the time
period from 4.5b years ago until today, we are
begged to ask the question: where are the aliens?
Astrophysicist Fermi originally asked this question
decades ago. Why did he ask this question?
Because it was obvious that even if we cannot
find the aliens, they should be able to find us.
Aliens may have no desire to explore space, but
6
they would still send out probes to explore space.
Every individual is entitled to their own opinion,
but we are all bound to the same set of facts.
Under rational argumentation, it is difficult to
reconcile these statistical facts with the lack of
evidence for alien life. As a matter of fact, the
statistics are so rational that Frank Drake
specified a concrete formula to calculate the
number of alien civilizations that should be able to
communicate with us based on probabilistic
arguments: even for my taste, it’s a funky
equation, but it’s hard to argue with Drake’s
approach. Drake’s equation is the following:

The number of civilizations in the universe that

can communicate with aliens equals the average
rate of star formation in our galaxy, times the
fraction of stars that have planets, times the
average number of planets that support life per
star that has formed, times the fraction of planets
that develop life, times the fraction of planets with
intelligent life, times the fraction of civilizations
that develop detectable communications systems,
times the length of time for such civilizations to
7
release detectable signals into space. If one plugs
a range or reasonable numbers into this equation
(there is an agreed range of acceptable inputs
available), we find out that there should be around
1,000 to 100,000,000 such civilizations in the
Milky Way alone.

8
Again, this begs the question: why have we not
encountered any evidence of alien life?
Attempting to answer this question, we come to
some scary realizations: one possible explanation
is that all civilizations hit a point in their life cycle
at which an extinction event happens and this
occurs before a civilization is capable of
producing technology that enables it to permeate
the universe/galaxy. This is called the Great Filter
Theory: all civilizations hit a filter, some event
during which the civilization is wiped out. It could
be an external event such as a meteor hit, or an
internal event such as a nuclear war or a
computer-dominated doomsday scenario in which
intelligent life becomes slave to an artificial
general intelligence. The Great Filter Theory is not
a new idea. Einstein expressed some form of this
theory in his famous quote: “I do not know with
what weapons World War III will be fought, but
World War IV will be fought with sticks and
stones.” Another obvious argument that we can
make is the idea of living inside of a simulation.
9
What do we mean by that? It’s pretty simple: we
live inside a computer game. We are all some
form of Super Mario and Princess Peach. Seems
unlikely? Bear with me: think back to the
computer games from the 1980s, if you can. They
had games like Pong and Spacewar. Basically,
they were basically monochrome polygons that
we could manipulate using a clunky piece of
hardware. Now compare those games to today’s
virtual reality games and you will understand how
much progress we made simulating reality. If you
can’t picture it, take a second and look at
YouTube videos of Pong and compare that to the
latest Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality games.
It is blatantly obvious that we have advanced
technology far enough so that we can partially
trick our brains into believing that simulated VR is
base reality. By base reality, I mean the reality that
is real and not simulated. Now the two missing
facts that we need to consider is that this
technological advancement has happened in a
matter of 4 to 5 decades. Now let’s put these 50
years of technological advancement in
perspective by comparing it to the fact that planet
10
earth is over 4b years old. As we already know, it
is extremely likely that intelligent life is likely to
have existed since the galaxy was born; hence,
these civilizations had the ability to improve
simulation technology over that same time span. If
you assume any rate of technological
improvement, no matter how minuscule it may
seem, through the power of compounding it would
be inevitable that this technology would be
indistinguishable from reality. Do the math: what’s
a 1% improvement over 4b years? It’s an
astronomical number.

11
Let’s keep going with this argument - what
happens at the limit of this idea? Ray Kurzweil’s
law of accelerating returns dictates that an
advanced intelligent species will eventually be
able to produce computers that are the size of a
few atoms and as powerful as the largest
supercomputers of today, while costing nearly
nothing to produce (we are currently computing
based on silicon substrate, but our next compute
platform will require a technological paradigm
shift: it might be operating based on quantum
computing). Anyway, back to the technological
progress argument: every single being that is part
of a civilization that experienced billions of years
of technological progress would be able to run
simulations that are indistinguishable from reality.
That is, every single human being would be able
to run a computer game that you wouldn’t be able
to distinguish from base reality. The argument
then becomes a purely statistical one. Given that
it is likely that billions of beings in our galaxy can
run simulations that are indistinguishable from
base reality, how likely is it that we are living in
base reality? The answer is: one in billions. We
12
have one base reality and billions of possible
simulations. Again, imagine it like this: if each
human being on planet earth alone was able to
produce one computer game that is just as good
as reality, how sure can you be that you are living
in base reality? Well, since there is one base
reality and 6 billion humans, and therefore virtual
realities, and since you cannot distinguish
between the two, your chance of living in base
reality would be one in six billion. Once you
extrapolate this to a universe in which many
civilizations exist each with billions of individual
entities capable of running simulations that are
indistinguishable from base reality, it becomes
pretty clear that it is very likely that we are
currently living inside a simulation. Scary, isn’t it?
And it is even scarier when you realize that there
are no good arguments against this simulation
theory, other than the Great Filter scenarios I laid
out above. Looking at it this way, we should hope
that we are living in a simulation. The simulation
argument I am referring to was brought forward by
philosopher Nick Bolstrom. I personally would add
something to this entire argument: it seems
13
perfectly human to me to believe that some higher
form of intelligence that we may call god has
devoted its life to create us and the universe. I
think that’s a typical egotistical thought pattern
that humans have depicted over and over again
(remember, we used to think that we are the
center of the universe - I mean, the sun is
revolving around the world at the end of the day).
To me, this type of thinking is equivalent to a
goose believing that it is special among all
animals on the farm just because the farmer
weighs it more regularly the closer ThanksGiving
is.

14
This being said, how does it help us to understand
that we are most likely living in a simulation of
something extremely intelligent that doesn’t give a
crap about us? If we live in a virtual reality that
was created by intelligent life that’s orders of
magnitude smarter than us, then this is already
bad news. Hence, we need to clutch at any straw.
So what do we know that is very likely true. We
know that this reality needs to follow certain laws,
just like a computer program follows laws written
in code. The intelligent being must have
constructed the universe using laws, rules or
algorithms that are based on some form of logic.
At least we have very good evidence that this is
the case: mathematics is eerily good at describing
what is going on around us. We shoot rockets to
the moon based on mathematics and it works
every time. So in a way, understanding the
universe and its laws is the same as
understanding the code a computer program was
written in. And we know, the best way to
manipulate software is to write programs that
15
change the source code: the code that makes up
the game. If you can do that, you can change the
rules of the game.

In a strange way, living in our universe is similar to

an animal that is kept in a zoo or a computer
character that is inside a computer game. Let’s go
with the zoo. The animal may not logically
comprehend that it is being held captive, yet it is
constraint to its cage. The difference between
humans and the animal in a zoo is that our cage
is defined by the laws of the simulation. For
example, we are born with a limited lifespan and
certainly we cannot escape gravity. As a matter of
fact, we don’t even know why gravity exists. Just
like the tiger is unaware of its lack of intelligence
or inability to communicate with the zookeeper,
we might be unaware of our lack of intelligence
and inability to communicate with the universe’s
creator (or, more likely, their lack of interest or
awareness of us). But we are smarter than the
tiger - we are self-aware. If we conjecture that
there are certain laws that the universe follows
because it was created by an intelligent being,
16
then at least we know that even if we may never
fully understand the universe and its laws, we can
deduct some of the laws and gleam important
insights. The best we can hope for is to
understand the laws of the universe better so we
can get closer to the source code of the
simulation. Ultimately, the better we are at
understanding the source code, the better we are
able to influence the simulation and the closer are
to its creator. Einstein expressed this view on god
and the universe as follows:

17
“We are in the position of a little child, entering a
huge library whose walls are covered to the
ceiling with books in many different tongues. The
child knows that someone must have written
those books. It does not know who or how. It does
not understand the languages in which they are
written. The child notes a definite plan in the
arrangement of the books, a mysterious order
which it does not comprehend, but only dimly
suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of
the human mind, even the greatest and most
cultured, toward God. We see a universe
marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but
we understand the laws only dimly.”

All of this is of course philosophical, but it helps

me explain why I wrote this book. The aim is of
course not to explain the universe in its entirety. I
will leave the trivial tasks to others. However, I
hope to make people aware that we are living
inside a simulation. Further, having a dim
understanding of the universe and its laws, an
understanding that is just slightly better than that
18
of the rest of humanity, is not only a moral duty,
but it gives us a huge edge. An edge that we can
use to live a more fulfilling life, a more successful
l i f e a n d m o r e e n l i g h t e n e d l i f e . To m e ,
understanding and seeing at least some of the
universal laws feels like being Neo in the Matrix:
the simulation seems to slow down and we can
manipulate reality, bending it our way. When you
are completely oblivious to what is going on in
their surroundings, like so many others are, life
seems either stressful, fast and confusing, or
people start daydreaming through the simulation. I
don’t think I am on a power trip when I express
my wish for being capable of slowing down time to
dodge bullets or stop them in their tracks: given a
choice, I want to be Neo. I am definitely not smart
enough to unravel a ton of new laws of the
universe that get us closer to deciphering the
source code. However, I am smart enough to
realize that while we are not capable of rewriting
the simulation, we are yet capable of manipulating
it. We are the monkey in the zoo that knows that
he is in captivity, while the other monkeys are
oblivious to the fact. The aware monkey therefore
19
can create advantages for himself: for example,
he knows exactly where and when the zookeeper
comes to drop off food so he can always position
himself perfectly at the right time. To me, the
person that realizes that we are in a simulation
that follows laws is a superhero compared to the
ignorants. We have super powers. It is this
advantage that allows us to excel and achieve our
dreams. Yes, we are still caged in a zoo like a
tiger and we won’t escape the cage. But look at it
this way: if you are the only player without a
blindfold in a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey,
you are still trying to pin the tail on the donkey, but
at least you are winning the game. This is what
this book is all about: explaining to you how to
become better than the rest by pinning the tail on
the donkey. If this sounds like a waste of time, I
can’t blame you. Simply put down the book and
go back to sleepwalking through the simulation.

20
When I first started out writing this book, I had the
chapters cleverly arranged so that they would
build on each other in a logical sequence. I
dismissed that format because I feel it is better to
simply write down the universal laws as they
come to mind. Some of them hang together and
others are removed from each other. I do believe
that some laws are more powerful than others, but
I haven’t ordered them in this book. What is
certain in my mind is that if several universal laws
act together in the same direction, they increase
21
exponentially in power. Charlie Munger called this
a Lollapalooza Effect. As a matter of fact, the
Lollapalooza Effect is a Universal Law.

The other reason I wrote this book is that it is

immensely helpful to think of life as a game or
simulation. Once you regard life as a game with
rules you stop taking it so seriously. You start
controlling your emotions more and this is very
useful because you make decisions that are much
more rational. This is so because humans are
inherently risk averse. This is so due to
evolutionary pressure - it just didn’t pay off to take
risks such as breaking a leg. It could end in death.
However, in today’s society and with today’s
support systems, risk is mitigated. Our monkey
brain just hasn’t caught up with this reality. Let’s
imagine you are playing GTA on your Playstation -
if you don’t know what it is, watch a YouTube
video. What would you do? You would steal cars,
try to get the stripper girl and take drugs. Why?
Because this is how the game becomes fun. You
wouldn’t sit on a park bench, relax for three hours
before you go back to your average life. However,
22
in reality all these activities would have huge
repercussions. Yet, it shows you what you would
do if you were completely free from
consequences. Of course, I am not
recommending to take drugs and steal cars -
never mind the strippers. What I am saying is in
today’s society we are brainwashed into risk-
aversion and prevents us from living a fulfilled life.
We are told to get a good education, marry a
reasonable (not an exciting) person, get a good
job and take a mortgage. This certainly ends in
boredom and definitely does not promote growth -
it’s playing it too safe. In reality, the risk of quitting
your job, starting a new business and creating the
option to get really rich is much lower than it feels
to us. Due to this psychological bias we are
renting out your time to work a boring job for a
linearly increasing paycheck that is never quite
enough to quit. We should consider how bad it
can really get: what’s the worst case scenario?
This is the stoic perspective. You could lose the
person that you had a bad relationship with for the
last 10 years. You could lose the job that you have
hated and you could be unable to pay for your
23
fancy vacations that are truly uninspiring. Maybe
you would have to live in a smaller house, wear
less expensive clothes and mayeh you won’t be
able to talk to your friends about your heroic
promotions year after year anymore? What could
you gain? Time - something you can never get
back. The ability to create a company and work
on something inspiring? So what’s more important
to you: holding on to all those things you dislike or
don’t really need or the freedom to chase your
dreams? Our dreams are way more valuable than
our safe lives that we live because society pushed
us into this zone of fearfulness. Taking the
perspective on life of living inside a simulation
helps us to understand that life is not as risky as
we perceive it to be. Most people would do well
with a little dose of Tyler Durden (Fight Club)
inside them. The only thing you are risking when
not chasing your dreams is sleepwalking through
life.

24
25
 Law #1: Persuasion Machines

I start out with this chapter because I originally

wanted to write a book about persuasion: I
wanted to write up my findings from interacting
with humans and apply them to the broader
concept of persuasion. Why? Because persuasion
is a great teacher for life in general and a lot can
be deducted from it.

Humans are persuasion machines: we persuade

and are being persuaded every day whether we
realize it or not. It’s very much like Poker: if you
wonder who the patsy is, it’s most likely you. We
use persuasion all the time. Whether it is as a
child asking our parents to stay up longer to watch
a movie, or whether it is as a couple deciding
what movie to watch after dinner. It’s a
negotiation. But more than that: after school we
start job interviews, persuade our parents to study
abroad and try to convince the cute girl sitting
next to us in class to come out for a drink later.
But the usefulness of the persuasion skill doesn’t
stop here. From the 20s we start building
26
businesses, climb the job ladder and build wealth
to provide for our families. I think it’s redundant to
mention that persuasion skills are critical for
building a business and climbing the job ladder:
you need to be able to get it your way or else you
will fall behind very quickly in either of these
endeavors. Finally, when we approach retirement
(I hate that word. I will never retire, because I
never worked in the first place), we negotiate how
we will divest our savings and pension fund,
where we will live and how often we can therefore
see our children and grandchildren. Further, as
we have hopefully amassed a lot of wisdom from
making mistakes and observing other people’s
mistakes, we are in a position to advise and
protect our families - the problem is that the young
generation doesn’t want to listen to the old
generation. Clearly, if we have strong persuasion
skills, our probability of influencing our children
and grandchildren is much higher. Since the
happiness and success of our children and
grandchildren is the most precious thing we have
in life, I think it’s quite clear that we are better off if
we harness the power of persuasion. As we can
27
see, the ability to persuade people is one of the
most important skills in life - we use it from the
second we are born a crying baby to our death
bed.

I personally stumbled upon persuasion very early

in life. I wasn’t aware of it, but I was being trained
in persuasion. In particular, I was being trained in
dealing with objections, handling objections and
in handling the randomness of outcome when
trying to persuade people. How is that? The
explanation for that is simple. My parents raised
me in an upper middle-class environment. My dad
made a very solid living and my mom stayed at
home for the kids. As a child, I was given a lot of
material things such as nice holidays, good
clothing and anything else I needed for my
education. However, relatively to my parents
income, I would definitely not consider myself a
spoiled child. I had friends with richer parents -
those guys were wearing $5000 watches by the
age of 18 - I wasn’t. What was quite distinct about
my parents style of raising kids was their lacking
in clear and logical rules and decisions: in
28
general, with respect to going out, partying and
having fun (i.e. all things that did not involve my
parents money directly), my parents were
generally relaxed. However, when it came to
spending money and decisions that involved
material things, I would sometimes be allowed to
do something or buy something and other times I
wouldn’t be allowed. For example, at the age of
16 and older I wasn’t allowed to stay alone in my
parents (“precious”) home when they went on
vacations to which I didn’t want to come. Other
times I was allowed to borrow their car to see my
girlfriend and then again I wasn’t. Every time
something was at stake that I desperately wanted
and for which I needed my parents permission, I
had to negotiate. It was often a clear no, but it
was never a clear yes. Additionally, the decisions
didn’t follow any clear logic. A child needs
principles that it can rely on such as: you can’t do
A, because of B and this will never change. With
my parents the answers to my materially-oriented
demands were randomized. All parents exhibit
this behavior, but with my parents it was distinctly
volatile - I had many friends as a child and even
29
backward looking, this behavior was uncommon.
Of course, as a child you don’t accept no as an
answer. This led to me sometimes being
successful in persuading my parents to get what I
wanted and other times to not being successful.
Today, we know that variable rewards motivate
humans to try even harder - Professor Skinner
researched this area widely. Further, since I only
had to negotiate when something important was
at stake, I felt the losses very heavily. To make
matters worse, I knew I had succeeded before.
This further motivated me to keep trying - Charlie
Munger coined this behavioral phenomenon
deprival-superreaction. Imagine trying to take a
nice big bone out of a pit-bulls mouth and you get
the idea of this behavioral pattern.

30
 Law #2: The Tree of Knowledge

The first book I ever read that really struck a

chord with me was “Rich Dad Poor Dad” by
Robert Kiyosaki. I read this book when I was an
impressionable 17 year old. I devoured the book
in one go on an off-road trip to the Grand Canyon.
I must have read it three times or so. I may
disagree with some of the presentation and
promises made in the book, but to this day, I think
the key lessons from the book are very powerful
and far outweigh anything I ever learned at school
or university. This includes a PhD in Finance from
one of the best universities in the world. However,
the most important lesson I learned from Rich
Dad Poor Dad was not what was actually taught
in the book. Much more important was where it
led me to. Towards the end of the copy of the
version I read there were book recommendations.
There was a reference to Peter Lynch’s “Beating
the Street”. That is the only one I remember. So I
branched out: I went to the public library and
rented the book. I read it, but it was beyond my
teenage level of understanding. However, Rich
31
Dad Poor Dad had sparked a fire inside me - a
very strong fire.

32
 Law #3: The Power of Inductive
Experimentation and Intuition

I was subjected to deductive reasoning for the

better part of my twenties. Everything at university
is derived deductively. Hypothesis testing in the
spirit of Karl Popper is deductive: this is my
general theory, now let me try to find one specific
case to disprove this general theory. Only if I can’t
falsify my hypothesis is my general theory true, or,
more appropriately, not falsifiable. The famous
example is the following: all swans are white, this
is a swan and therefore it must be white. Then,
one black swan comes along and therefore I
cannot claim that all swans are white anymore.
The counterpart for seducing women is the
following: all guys that are older and not
physically attractive cannot seduce young
attractive women. This is an older guy that is less
physically attractive and therefore he cannot
seduce attractive young women. This is how the
deductive scientific process works and, as I will
explain, this is poison when it comes to mastering
any skill and chasing your dreams.
33
Luckily, we are born dream chasers. We are born
learning the right way. Nature is ingenious. In
reality, we learn inductively. A child doesn’t set out
some general theory about how a bicycle may
work and then tries to fail every possible way to
prove that bicycles can’t be ridden. I yet have to
see a mother that says: “Look, Jon, you tried
riding that bicycle for 3 months now. Let’s call it a
day - riding bicycles is just not your thing.” As a
matter of fact, the idea of falsifying hypotheses
goes way beyond this almost reasonable
example. A more absurd and yet appropriate
analogy would be the following: the deductive
scientific process would require the child to learn
to ride the bicycle and then to ride it down the
highway in the opposite direction to traffic - if it
crashes and dies we would have to conclude that
kids can’t ride bicycles. Imagine the mother: “Ok,
Jon, you showed me that you know how to ride
the bicycle in a straight line. Now let’s step it up a
notch. You see that big truck coming your way at
100km/h? Try to ride that way and see whether
you can make it through. If you come out in one
34
piece, I guess we can conclude that you really
learned how to ride a bike now.” Law #4: Outcome
Qualification

Strongly linked to the idea of inductive reasoning

is the concept of Outcome Qualification. The
universe is structured such that it hugely rewards
Outcome Qualification: the more we can pre-
qualify an outcome before we attempt it, the better
off we will be. This is so, because with most
objectives in life, the risk-return is asymmetric on
the upside and the chance of a positive outcome
is small: i.e. if we lose, which we most likely will,
we don’t lose much, but if we win, which we most
likely will not, we win a lot. Think of it as a gamble
with 1 in 1,000 chance of winning and a payoff of
$1,000,000: the expected payoff is $1,000
(1/1000 * $1,000,000), which is great as the bet is
almost free (let’s assume you pay $10 each time
you paly). In expected terms, every time you play
you get a 100x (expected) risk-reward ratio. You
bet $10 to get exposure to $1,000 in expected
payoff. If you played the game 1,000,000 times
you would almost certainly win the $1,000,000.
35
This is due to the law of large numbers. This is
not a theoretical exercise: if you open your mind,
you will see that life is constantly throwing these
bets at you, but you rarely ever swing. Think of all
the attractive women you really fancied but never
approached. Think of all the business ideas you
had, but never worked on because you didn’t
have the courage (also, think about the bet you
are taking every morning in terms of risk-reward
when you go to that office you hate). These are
just two examples. We don’t swing because we
are too busy pursuing other bets - bets that are
most likely bad risk-rewards. But hold on, how do
I judge whether a bet that is now being pitched is
better than the one I am looking at? The answer
is: you don’t. So what’s the solution? The solution
is Outcome Qualification: you need a process in
place that measures and throws out bad bets as
early as possible. Why? Because our irrational
monkey brain uses commitment bias, vividity bias,
social proof. wishful thinking to name a few
handicaps that keep us focused on the bet at
hand, while ignoring all other bets. But if we
adopted a rational approach, we would use
36
Outcome Qualification to assess the risk-reward
ratio of each and then switch bets as soon as we
come to a clear conclusion. And we would do that
in an inductive fashion: starting with the smallest
possible test and working our way up the
achievement ladder. We would start with a small
inductive test such as saying hello to the girl or
writing a small computer program to see whether
a business idea works. Only if that small bet pays
off would we go forward - if it doesn’t we throw it
out. Of course, this is nothing else but inductive
reasoning. However, Outcome Qualification is
further up on the spectrum: Outcome Qualification
requires hard evidence of success at any given
step to legitimize further investment on our side.
So if a business idea shows little signs of working
out, given we have worked on it with passion and
persistence, and given we have put the
appropriate Outcome Qualification in place, we
have to dismiss it. Why? Because the time and
money could be invested in other, higher risk-
reward bets. Look at it this way: it’s great for me
to write this book. However, it’s a million times
better with this book than it was with the first book
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I wrote: I know that I will get paid for writing this
book. I have hard evidence in terms of numbers. I
have Outcome Qualification. I didn’t have that
when I wrote my first book. This also applies to
other start-ups: using inversion, what you want to
avoid is developing a product that costs
thousands of dollars and months of hard work to
test whether anyone is interested in it - this is the
type of thing that happens when people fall in love
with an idea (and all other types of biases are
working their brain to mush). The same for dating
women: I want to date women that reciprocate my
sexual advances: too often are men spending
time with women that have no interest in them
beyond their wallet and the good food they are
being served. What are they missing? Outcome
Qualification: they miss to tell the girl that she is
very attractive, they miss to touch and they miss
to make their intent clear: that’s wishful thinking
and avoiding the harsh truth that she might not be
into us. As the old saying goes: “Denial is not a
river in Egypt.” But when we are in denial, we
waste resources on bets that have terrible risk-
reward ratios; and this time around it is our fault
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because we could simply practice Outcome
Qualification to reveal the risk-reward ratio and
throw such bad bets out immediately. To sum it
up, Outcome Qualification is the process of
measuring a desired outcome every step along
the way in order to dismiss bets with low risk-
reward ratios as early as possible. The reason it is
a Universal Law is that practicing Outcome
Qualification allows us to maximize our expected
payoff from bets with high risk-reward ratios
harnessing the law of large numbers. Outcome
qualification is the only process that allows us to
fully embrace the high risk-reward bets that the
universe is pitching us every day.

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 Law #5: The Rational Dream Chaser

Mae West famously said: “You only live once, but

if you do it right, once is enough.” Life is simply
too short to waste it doing things that are not
important to us, things that we don’t love. Yet,
there are many reasons why we do things in life
that are not important to us. We may have spent a
long time studying a subject that our family more
or less forced us to focus on when we were
teenagers: now we are earning a living off it (e.g.
lawyer, surgeon, architect, engineer, etc). We may
have a wife that depends on our financial support
and we are not happy with the relationship. We
may own things that require us to earn money
(e.g. house, car, gadgets, trophy wife etc.). And
we may enjoy the social status that comes with a
certain profession (e.g. professor, CEO, social
media fame, fashion model etc.). Thinking about it
more deeply, we are prioritizing things in life that
are not really important to us. They may be
important if we want to keep up a socially
acceptable image, but they are not important to
us. However, we do not question those things.
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This is life and it is what it is. We get up every
morning jumping on the iron horse, grinding
through the routine to feed the beast we are
slaves to. Why are we spending time on activities
that are not important to us? The number one
reason is that these activities are symptoms of the
human condition. Symptoms, you may wonder?
Yes, they are symptoms and their root cause is
deeply ingrained into our brain in the form of our
psychological predisposition. The human mind, or
more appropriately, the prefrontal cortex, is much
less in control than we think it is. In reality, our
large rational brain that differentiates us from our
monkey brothers is slave to the amygdala, the
reptile brain. Think about it, almost everything we
direct our logical mind to focus on serves some
rather reptile ends: sex, food, drink, saftey, status
to name a few. Do we do all these things because
we choose to or are they automatic responses?
Let me ask you differently, do you think it is by
chance that a set of large breasts is usually
presented next to expensive items of male desire
(e.g. cars, watches, suits etc.)? Exactly. Your
monkey brain looks at the watch and associates it
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with female breasts. Then your logical brain gets
a direction from the reptile brain: “Want to touch
large breasts. Guy with an expensive watch has
girl with large breasts. Need to buy expensive
watch to get girl with large breasts. Go to Rolex
store and buy watch now.” This is called classical
conditioning and the marketing industry exploits it
to sell us stuff. Of course, we are subject to auto-
responses that determine our daily agendas.
Those auto-responses were hardwired into our
brains over thousands of years of evolution and
as much as we would like to think that we are
making conscious decisions, we are remote
controlled by psychological auto-responses. The
Universal Law that we will derive from this
observation is that a large proportion of our
decision making is driven by auto-responses.
We need to be aware of this or else we will not
make rational decisions. As a matter of fact, we
will not make the decision after all - evolutionary
auto-responses will make the decision for us. Now
I don’t want to tune out the vegetative nervous
system: it’s good to feel hungry and to feel fear.
But, when it comes to logical long-term decisions,
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which is what life’s most important decisions all
are, you can gain an edge by realizing that you
are subject to psychological biases.

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 Law #6: Setting the BHAGs

Once we are on our path to chasing our dreams,

we need to set goals. Goals are odd animals. The
higher you set them the more you achieve. As the
old saying goes: “It’s better to aim high and miss,
than to aim low and miss.” Most people set goals
that are way too mundane. Again, there is a good
reason for that. We are told by our parents to be
humble and considered. The intention is that
people will like you more if you are not bragging
and understatement is a “cool” thing to do these
days anyway. It is, however, undeniable that some
people achieve extreme success by taking on big
audacious goals. That’s why it’s called a BHAG:
Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Look at Michael
Jordan, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos or Donald Trump.
They have all achieved extreme success and all
in different fields. When we talk about these
people with our common peers they are
characterized as follows: genius, talent of the
century, lucky genes, born rich and the alike.
Nobody uses phrases such as: hard working,
persistent, never gives up, always positive,
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winner, failed a million times, loves what he does,
champion and the alike.

We have to be careful with what our friends,

family and parents say about these people. There
are three main reasons why our parents in
particular do not want us to admire and strive after
the achievement of these heroes (most people
would not call Donald Trump a hero, but most
people haven’t built a real estate empire, become
a TV star and the President of the United States
in one life either: never mind his character, in
terms of achievement, he is a hero and that’s
what this chapter is about). First, it’s a natural
human condition to envy others. Admitting that
others have started with the same set of
opportunities, but achieved vastly more hurts us
as we have to admit defeat, which provokes envy.
As a result, we resolve these cognitive
dissonances by re-evaluating the situation: how
can we justify that we are not as far ahead in the
simulation of life as Donald Trump? The simple
solution is to claim that this person started from a
different point in the game. They had better odds
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at winning. They were dealt a better hand and
therefore we cannot compare ourselves to them.
Hence. we are not losers that wasted their
potential. You can tell yourself that, but that’s
absolutely untrue and wishful thinking. Taking this
position is not only inaccurate, but it also results in
stagnation and a fixed mindset. I won’t get into
specifics, but laughing into the face of evidence of
extreme achievement results in a fixed mindset,
which stops us from achieving our potential.

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 Law #7: Be a Contrarian

The second reason we do not achieve our

potential is that achieving your potential requires
going against the grain or the crowd - it requires
being contrarian. Yes, contrarians are outliers.
Yes, these people are uncommon. You want to
achieve your potential? Get comfortable with
being the odd person out. When people tell you:
“You are overdoing it. That’s crazy. That can’t be
healthy.” You know you are on the right track.
Again, those people don’t want to protect you:
they are afraid that you succeed and disrupt their
reality by doing what they don’t have the discipline
and courage to do. Again, jealousy plays a huge
role as well. What’s the best strategy? Tune them
out. There is a great saying by Howard Marks of
Oaktree Capital Management: “You need to think
differently and better.” His book “The Most
Important Thing” is a great read and it fully
explains the perspective of a contrarian. Being
contrarian requires a certain degree of arrogance.
You need to believe that your thinking is not only
different but better than that of 99.9% of the
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people around you. Of course, that’s hard
because there is power in the wisdom of the
masses: it’s called collective intelligence. Being
contrarian is therefore lonely by definition. It
doesn’t make you the most popular kid in school.
If you are wrong, everyone will laugh at you. If you
are right, you will be labelled “smart ass”. As it is
our tendency to strive to be liked by others, most
people don’t like being contrarian. Further, most
people that think they are contrarian, are not
really contrarians. What most people think is
contrarian is in reality an attempt to look smart or
good in front of a lot of others - in reality, that’s
simply seeking admiration. A true contrarian
doesn’t care what others think of him. He only
cares about being right.

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Law #8: Win Time by Harnessing the Power
of Delayed Gratification

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 Law #9: Extreme Work Ethics

50
Law #10: Hard Work is Genius

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Law #11: Be Willing to Die When Nobody is
Watching

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Law #12: Hierarchy of Decision Making &
The Pursuit of Happiness

53
 Law #13: Building Habits Through
Discomfort

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Law #14: Be Mindful Of Asymmetric Bets

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 Law #15: The Concentrated Punch Card
Approach

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Law #16: Managing the Monkey Brain

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 Law #17: Focus (Compounding, Growth
Mindset & Network Effects)

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 Law #18: Experimentation Speed

“The best part is no part, the best process is no

process, if it schedules long it’s wrong, if it
schedules tight it’s right.” Elon Musk

We ended the last section talking about Edison

and his quest for the perfect light bulb. Perfection
in particular is often misunderstood. Perfection is
something worth striving for. Or is it? What are
things that we consider perfect? Often they are
things that we admire greatly such as great
performances of professional athletes, an
amazing product such as the iPhone or the
creation of a new service such as Uber. When
people talk about these extraordinary
achievements they often use words such as
“genius”, “gifted”, “one in a million”, “lucky”,
“overnight success”, “in the right place at the right
time” and the alike. I don’t want to dispute the
achievements and I certainly realize that such
achievements are extraordinary in the sense that
they are rare. What I do take issue with is the
claim by outsiders that outstanding things an be
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achieved “overnight”. This is a simple
misconception - to be accurate, it’s the human
way to deal with cognitive dissonance: it’s envy,
weakness and fear hiding behind passive
aggression. I will get back to that in a little bit.
Further, the word perfection in itself rests on
flawed assumptions. Perfection means that there
is no way to improve something further. Perfection
implies stagnation. In the age of the Law of
Accelerating returns, we know that technology
evolves from paradigm to paradigm in an S-
shaped curve. Once one technology has achieved
global adoption (e.g. mobile phones), the next
technology will come along - the new technology
has a much higher performance per dollar spent
and hence pushes the old technology out (e.g.
virtual/mixed reality platforms). For example, the
once so famous walkman is history today
because we carry music around in our
smartphones. Let’s go back to the so kindly
labelled concept of “misconception” that
innovations get invented overnight. Let’s think
about Thomas Edison’s light bulb. The light bulb is
about as “genius” as it gets. Literally, before
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Edison invented the light bulb, we were living in
the dark.

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 Law #19: The Blackbox Approach

The first day I entered the lecture theatre when I

started my PhD studies, I was anxious. I had
basically no math skills and I was attempting a
PhD in a quantitative field. All my fellow PhDs had
studied math at Oxford, Cambridge or a top
French engineering school. One even had a PhD
in math from a top UK university I remember. The
lecturer started the first session talking about the
separating hyperplane theorem. Naturally, I felt
inadequate at first. The good news was that I had
no chance of catching up with those people - they
had decades of knowledge and experience. I
simply could not make up for it even if I wanted to.
So filling in the gaps was not an option and this
was clear to me from day one. This forced me to
go a different route: if I couldn’t compete, I had to
find a loophole in the game and exploit it. Of
course, math is like a language and if you don't
speak it, you can’t communicate. But I soon
realized that most of my fellow PhD colleagues’
knowledge was excess knowledge. They only
used a small part of their knowledge. I felt that I
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could probably focus on understanding this small
part of knowledge to some degree that would
allow me to pass exams and conduct
experiments. The rest of the PhD was more about
having good intuition and ideas and a strong will
to persist. This is when I first realized that we
don’t need to understand everything - actually, we
can’t understand everything.

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 Law #20: Harnessing the Power of People

The next two Universal Laws we deal with are the

two most difficult constraints that the creator of
our simulation imposed on us. The two aspects
are deeply interlinked, but let’s deal with them in
separation. Here is a fun fact: the mass of all ants
around the world is about as much as the mass of
all humans. So if you put all humans on one side
of a scale and all ants on the other side of the
scale, the scale would balance. The average
human weighs about one million times more than
an ant so I leave up to you to calculate how many
ants are on planet earth. Why am I bringing up
ants? Ants epitomize the idea of organization,
power in numbers and selfless sacrifice for the
sake of the greater good. Because ants adhere to
these principles, they are a formidable force in the
animal kingdom. As a matter of fact, when driver
ants’ food supplies become short entire super
colonies start to march in the search for food.
Anything that gets in the way of the ant army gets
eaten; even small mammals. There are a ton of
documentaries out there on driver ants and they
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are worth watching. The obvious point I am trying
to make is that one ant by itself achieves nothing.
However, when a bunch of ants act in accord this
changes. Tasks are assigned to specialists that
carry out their duty irrespective of personal
consequences. The rigorous organization of this
large number of specialists unleashes an
incredible power: the entire power of the colony is
much greater than the sum of the power of all
ants individually. In this way, while a little ant
individually may get stepped on by a large animal
like an elephant, an entire ant colony is capable of
killing an elephant if it doesn’t run away.

Abstracting from ants to us humans, we can

reveal some Universal Laws that are incredibly
powerful to understand and apply.

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 Law #21: Emotion Control

In a sense, this entire book on Universal Laws is

about controlling yourself so that you can better
deal and influence the simulation we live in.
Whatever is outside the simulation we live in has
ultimate control over our boundary conditions: we
were essentially given a set of rules and now we
have to play according to those rules. What
matters for us is that we are inside this simulation
and as soon as the creator decides to turn off the
tab, it’s game over. Secondly, it is also game over
because once we realize that we are inside the
simulation and that this simulation follows
Universal Laws, we can start manipulating the
simulation to our best abilities. Of course, we will
always be subject to the simulation constraints:
e.g. we can’t escape gravity. But we still observe
cause and effect and we can reveal the laws that
govern our universe. As such, we are in control of
the universe to the degree that we can manipulate
our environment according to the Universal Laws.
Although I am not wildly read I philosophy and
other strands of literature that may deal with this
66
topic, I believe this is the main philosophical
contribution of this book, at least for the
understanding of the general public: we can
change the things around us because they follow
specific Universal Laws. We are not helpless.

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 Concluding Remarks

I have nothing more to add. I will review this book

in due course when I feel that it’s time to check
whether my hypotheses were falsified or not. As I
am about to publish this book, I have already
learned a lot more and I could add more to the
book. I won’t do that though, as I feel like this
chapter of my life is complete now. So instead I
will finish with one of my favorite quotes from
Masayoshi Son of Softbank:

“I don’t have time to waste. One can think as

much as he likes. However, I need to act and
follow through with my ambition. Because we only
live once, I want to do something that will be
remembered in history. If I do the same as others
do, I will never be able to make history.”

For more information go to anthonyhustle.com

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