Learning Without Mentors (and a Stack of Books) • Olimp Run

I often find myself thinking (almost with a bit of regret): I don’t really have anyone I can learn from.

Not because I’m exceptional. It’s mostly environment and access. In my circles, I’m usually the person who gives — explains, solves, teaches, carries. That’s not a humblebrag. It’s just how the local topology looks: I don’t have consistent proximity to people who are clearly ahead of me and would pull me upward in a “mentor / symbiosis / sparring partner” way.

That’s one reason I extract a lot from LLMs. Strictly speaking, not “life experience” — but constant prompts: what’s worth attention, what doesn’t make sense in my reasoning, what I’m missing. If I’m honest, LLMs probably influence my thinking more than most people around me (again: in the sense of nudges and framing, not lived reality).

Fortunately, I do have one human who reliably upgrades my inputs: Janusz, my daughter’s godfather. He tends to show up with recommendations that are not random. They fit my mind.

Before Christmas he brought me six books. Three immediately grabbed me:

How to Live an Incredible Life — Anthony Pompliano
The Great Mental Models — Shane Parrish
The Principles of Economics — Saifedean Ammous

I started reading the first two in parallel and got surprised by a detail that hit me right in the chest: both Pompliano and Parrish wrote with their children in mind — as a direct transmission of what they consider their most important wisdom.

And that resonated because I’ve had the same impulse for years.

I’ve always wanted to collect what I learn — the things I wish I had earlier — for my daughter. Not to make her “better than others,” but to give her a massive accelerator: ideas and principles that compress years of trial-and-error into something usable.

Pompliano: life density, and the weird joy of alignment

I finished Pompliano first. The book is essentially 65 letters to his kids.

The first thing that grabbed me was the density of his life. The amount of experiences, risk, work, creation, movement — how much he did in a relatively short time. When I compare his tempo to mine, it’s hard not to go: wow.

But what made me happy (weirdly) is that I didn’t walk away with 50 “new” lessons.

Not because the book is shallow — because my last years have been converging with a lot of what he believes. So reading him felt like watching a high-performing mind articulate things I already discovered (sometimes painfully), and that is a good sign.

A long list of agreement — with personal roots

Pompliano’s letters hit many themes that are already part of my operating system. What matters to me is not just the ideas, but also where they came from — what shaped them in me.

So here’s the “agree” list, but with my own attributions kept intact.

Today as training for tomorrow. I’ve been thinking like this for a while, but Pompliano reinforced it. Jim Rohn also pushed this frame hard: you’re not “doing a day,” you’re building a person.
Personal ethical code. This is something I’m building explicitly through Jesus’ teaching and the New Testament — not as “religious vibes,” but as constraints that shape a stable identity.
Patience on the road to excellence. I didn’t get this early. I had to mature into it.
The power of habits. I internalized the first layer from Charles Duhigg, and then years later I sharpened it with James Clear and practice.
Finish what you start. I arrived at this one myself. Completion is a form of integrity.
Stop over-crediting luck. That’s also my lived observation: a lot of “luck” is consistent positioning and reps.
Reading matters. Jim Rohn again — he basically hammered this into my mind years ago.
Don’t compare down. Compare up. I’ve done this my whole life: the benchmark should be the best, not the worst.
Identity not fused to job title / role. James Clear articulated this beautifully (“identity-based habits”), but I’ve felt it for a long time.
Power laws. I knew Pareto, Pompliano talks 95/5. Label aside: the world is lopsided.
Own your schedule. I had to build this intentionally, but it’s a core part of my functioning now.
Destroy clutter. This one made me smile because I’ve never really had a clutter problem — but it’s still a good principle.
Be a magnet. Jim Rohn implanted this in me: become the kind of person people want to be around.
Call people “for no reason.” I do this. Random check-ins, no agenda. It compounds relationships.
Let people talk about themselves. Thank you, Dale Carnegie — still one of the highest-ROI social skills.
Actually care. People can smell indifference. I learned this the hard way and through practice.
Face-to-face matters. Fisher & Ury made this painfully obvious in negotiation contexts, but I also knew it intuitively long before.
Surround yourself with accumulators. I always felt this, but it’s hard to find those people consistently.
Nobody is thinking about you as much as you think. This is one of those liberating truths I keep relearning.
Don’t stay with people who pull you down. I came to this myself.
Respect time. Non-negotiable.
Ask. Because you won’t get what you don’t ask for. Jim Rohn made me see this clearly, and it’s still easy to forget.
Don’t complain. This one is personal: my grandma Ola taught me that. Complaining trains weakness.
Don’t focus on problems. Focus on solutions. Jim Rohn again. He was annoyingly right.
Theory is theory, practice is practice. I learned this painfully. Knowing is not doing.
Simplicity is the final form of competence. I’ve watched this pattern too many times to doubt it.
Don’t argue with idiots online. I extracted this lesson about 10 years ago and I’m strict about it.
Ability to change your mind. I’m proud of this. I matured into it earlier than most people around me.
Drop pointless disputes. Thank you again, Carnegie. “Win the argument, lose the relationship” is not a win.
Satisfaction depends on comparisons. I’ve seen it: if everyone around you has more, you can be objectively wealthy and still unhappy.
Write down valuable ideas. I built this habit, and Jim Rohn reinforced it.
Spend less than you make. Learned, internalized, boring — and essential.
Photos / memory capture. Not universal, but I see his point.
Black swans shape the world. Taleb made this obvious to me.
Sitting on the couch is life leakage. I used to live that way years ago. Then I woke up.
Live as if it’s a documentary about you. Joe Rogan once said this and it stuck — it’s a surprisingly sharp filter.
Memento mori. Marcus Aurelius forced this into my awareness in a way that actually changed behavior.
The power of walking. This is personal: I built it into my daily recovery between deep work blocks. Walking is a reset button.
Training (physical, running). Same category: not “fitness,” but nervous-system maintenance and identity building.
Attack the day with positive intent. This one I trace to Tommy Robbins (Jim Rohn’s student): start with energy, not dread.
Sleep is the foundation. This is one where I read it and went: yes. Exactly. I know it in my body.
Intuition as a great algorithm. I trust it more now than I did earlier.
Writing letters. Which is why I write this blog / diary — and it’s not really public or indexed. It’s mainly a memory system.

That list is long, but the point is simple: Pompliano’s “letters” are basically a compacted worldview. Reading it is like getting a guided walkthrough of someone’s operating system — and checking where yours already matches.

The entrepreneur angle — where we differ (and where it hurt)

There’s a whole set of recommendations that are clearly “entrepreneur mode.” This is where Pompliano’s life path diverges from mine, and where I felt both inspiration and a bit of self-critique.

Create and act — don’t build your life around working for someone else. He understood this early and oriented around it.
Switch jobs multiple times rather than stagnating. He argues that five job changes with ~2-year cycles can build faster than wasting 10 years in one place.

This one hit me personally.

I think I made this mistake twice. Staying too long, “being loyal,” telling myself I’m learning — and later realizing I paid with time. That “eh, I was losing” feeling is real. It’s also a lesson I don’t want my daughter to learn the hard way.

Another place where we differ is investing.

Investing: sell early vs hold long (my disagreement)

Pompliano leans into the idea of selling earlier instead of obsessing over catching the peak. I understand the intent — avoid greed, avoid round-tripping paper gains — but my default stance is closer to Morgan Housel: time in the market beats timing the market. And even more bluntly, the old Andrew Carnegie line: don’t treat investing like speculation.

What’s interesting is that Pompliano partially circles back later — he also talks about buying high-quality, long-term assets and, in some cases, holding “forever.” That version resonates with me much more.

So my current synthesis looks like this:

If you’re holding something with weak fundamentals, “sell early” is a useful antidote to wishful thinking.
If you’re holding durable assets, optimizing for the peak can be a trap — but so is flipping too soon. The edge often comes from not selling.

I’m keeping this tension in mind, because it’s easy to rationalize either side depending on mood. The real question is: am I acting from a model — or from dopamine.

Other entrepreneur-mode points I found genuinely useful:

Reduce the amount of work you place on your manager’s desk. “Super hint.” It’s counterintuitive, but it maps to leverage and trust.
As a leader, be ready to change rules when they’re illogical. Don’t confuse rigidity with principle.
Ask others: “Can I help?” It’s funny because Carnegie also teaches the same move — but Pompliano frames it through network compounding.
Spend time with people at your level. Not as arrogance, but as network dynamics: those people also rise, and you rise together.
Invite interesting people. This is actionable. It’s not “networking,” it’s creating collisions with high-signal humans.

A direct disagreement: childhood can be a disadvantage

One thing across the 65 letters bothered me.

Pompliano pushes a narrative that childhood is not a ball and chain. I understand the intention: don’t outsource responsibility to your past.

But there’s a blind spot here: some childhoods are objectively heavy baggage.

Not everyone starts equal. Some people start the 100m sprint from 400m behind.

Pompliano says he didn’t have an easy life, but from my perspective he still doesn’t fully grasp what genuinely hard childhood can do — and what implications it has years later.

And here’s the part I find risky: his kids will grow up in an ideal environment. They are not the target audience for “don’t blame childhood.” If you teach this message to privileged kids without nuance, you risk training them into a shallow moral lens — judging people who had a brutal starting condition as weak or lazy.

So: yes, don’t use childhood as an excuse. But also: don’t pretend the playing field is fair.

Three ideas that genuinely sharpened my thinking

Even with lots of overlap, there were a few points that upgraded my internal model.

1) The Chinese Farmer story (Alan Watts)

The lesson: in the moment, you often cannot know whether something is “good” or “bad.”

Second- and third-order effects dominate. Judging early is often just arrogance wearing a mask.

I’ve seen this in life — in my own trajectory and in other people’s. Things that looked like disasters turned into rescue. Things that looked like wins turned into traps.

It’s also a correction to the urge to blame God immediately: sometimes you simply don’t see far enough down the causal chain.

2) A Socratic lens on suffering

Paraphrasing:

If everyone put all their misfortunes into one pile, and each person had to take an equal share, most would take their own problems back and leave.

Yes. Exactly.

I’ve always felt that many people would gladly trade for my problems — because at least my problems are solvable with discipline. Most people underestimate what others are carrying.

3) A “content diet” as seriously as a food diet

This one came from Pompliano’s wife and it’s a clean frame:

You guard your nutrition, but you don’t guard your inputs.

Why feed your brain junk and expect clarity?

Even if some “news” has value, most of it is short-lived noise. It’s probably better to build the mind on long-lived inputs: books, durable principles, mental models, skills — rather than outrage cycles.

I need to remember this more often, especially when my brain reaches for “quick dopamine info.”

Closing

Overall: a strong book.

It reinforced a lot of convictions I already hold, it articulated some things more cleanly than I would, and it gave me a few mental handles that I want to keep actively accessible.

Next: Shane Parrish — The Great Mental Models: Think Better, Live Better.