Planning 2025, two categories are pulling me: the Exceptional and the Weird.

The Exceptional means studying the greats, past and present, learning as much as possible about the very best, top 0.001% companies and people. Almost definitionally, these are consensus. I will not win awards for telling you that SpaceX and Stripe are impressive companies. The game here is not understanding that these companies are exceptional, but understanding why. What is the different that leads to better? Plus, greatness is its own aesthetic. It's pleasing to spend time here. There is always something to learn from the 0.001%, even about yourself.

Then there's the Middle, where most things live. The good company that's growing fast. The talented entrepreneur. This is the land of better, not different. This is the land of playbooks. I want to spend as little time traveling in this land as possible.

Finally, there's the Weird. This is new categories that haven't matured yet, new ideas (or old ones) that haven't gone mainstream. This is the world of consciousness and crypto and zero point energy. The Weird is full of dead-ends, but it also contains hidden doors, like the ones where you pull a trick book and a new world opens up. As Flexner wrote in the Usefulness of Useless Knowledge:

"To be sure, we shall thus free some harmless cranks. To be sure, we shall thus waste some precious dollars. But what is infinitely more important is that we shall be striking the shackles off the human mind and setting it free for the adventures which in our own day have, on the one hand, taken Hale and Rutherford and Einstein and their peers millions upon millions of miles into the uttermost realms of space and, on the other, loosed the boundless energy imprisoned in the atom."

The Weird is where the alpha is. It's where, even if 10 out of 11 ideas are bunk, the 11th changes everything. And it's fun, expansive.

So I want to spend this year among the Exceptional and the Weird, and if things go right, among the Exceptional Weird, the fringe idea whose time is about to come.

Learn from the Best. Take Weird Ideas Seriously. Stay Out of the Middle.