Miika Lehtinen

I'm writing about the mental frameworks of two people I sample the most: Naval Ravikant and J Dilla.

Most of you don't know who those are, but some of you will. If you know them both, we should grab a coffee!

Reality is not something you should just passively consume. It is something you can filter and sample from all the noise.

In economics, noise is called epsilon, the most annoying variable in most models: all the information under the rug that has not been dissected.

It makes it hard to find Alpha, which, in simple terms, is riskless bets = free return, but I like to call it: leverage + judgment.

The more you minimize epsilon, the better your models start to work, so you can use your judgment to build leverage and produce alpha.

The funny thing about noise is that in theory, the average is zero. So if you consumed all the bullshit in the world, you could eventually find real judgment - but with current tools, that is not realistic.

So you have to be selective about whom you listen to in order to build your judgment.

1. Give attention to people who operate at the level you aspire to reach. Filter out the rest.
2. From thinkers and doers, I extract the fragments that resonate most and discard the rest.

You don't follow complete frameworks or copy entire strategies.

You sample with your mental Akai MPC:

• a principle from one domain
• a tactic from another
• a pattern from somewhere else

Then update your samples based on feedback from real data (because you are often wrong).

Piece by piece, that trains the muscle known as judgment, which might be the best superpower in life.

Naval Ravikant

He is the main reason I'm on X/Twitter.

He speaks directly to ambitious people in their twenties and compresses complex ideas into simple, usable frameworks. Here are my favorites:

Leverage: the core idea

Naval explains that wealth doesn't come from working more. It comes from leverage.

• Code → scales without humans
• Media → scales without capital
• Capital → scales with labor

If you're not building leverage, you're trading time for money.

Judgment > hard work

Hard work alone is not enough.

When you combine:

the right judgment + leverage
= exponential outcomes

You only need to be right once!

Three most important decisions in your twenties

1. Where you live?
2. What you do?
3. Who you do it with?

These three shape everything that follows.

Learn to build & sell

If you can do both:

• you create value
• you distribute value

That combination is rare, and it makes you very hard to compete with.

Favorite quotes

Naval gives me the tools and Dilla the system.

J Dilla

"King of drums." – Kanye (being an idol for Kanye is crazy)

To me, Jay Dee is the greatest artist of all time.

What makes him different is how he listens. He does not hear a song as a finished product. He hears pieces — small fragments and moments others ignore - then rebuilds them into something completely new.

You can hear it here. He made this on his deathbed:

dont-cry.wav

He doesn't care about technical perfection or over-optimizing. The timing isn't perfectly on grid. The sample isn't used "correctly." But that's the point.

He takes something familiar and distorts it just enough to make it something new. You recognize it, but it hits differently. Almost like a new reality built on top of the old one.

That filtering and sampling, to me, is Judgment.

It is wild that a track from his deathbed album was filmed in Lahti, Finland, aka Finnish Detroit.

I honestly do not know what he would have thought about that, but here is the video: Watch the video

Extra

I will never have a career in music, but I love making it.

It is the art form I respect the most, and it affects me like coffee or warm sun.

I'm such a music geek that I cannot hear a song without noticing the samples behind it.

I have over 10,000 liked songs on Spotify, and there is nothing I enjoy more.

My favorite meme is from a former boss whom I respect and was honored to work for a while — usually the extremes are the same, and the middle is where people differ.

J Dilla'ed that

A reminder that opposite ends often agree, and most arguments happen in the middle.

Weird times like this, where no one knows where the technology is moving, the biggest risk is not taking it at all.

There is nothing more annoying than seeing your judgment being right without using any leverage on it.

There is nothing more self-defeating than not doing something on your own with all the grit, drive, and judgment.

Life should be a fun game: mess around, find out, and stay on the bleeding edge, guided by intuition built through sampling.