On this episode of the Knowledge Project Podcast, I chat with Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of the leading online payment processing company, Stripe. If you’ve purchased anything online recently, there’s a good chance that Stripe facilitated the transaction.

What is now an organization with over a thousand employees and handling tens of billions of dollars of online purchases every year, began as a small side experiment while Patrick and his brother John were going to college.  

During our conversation, Patrick shares the details of their unlikely journey and some of the hard-earned wisdom he picked up along the way. I hope you have something handy to write with because the nuggets per minute in this episode are off the charts. Patrick was so open and generous with his responses that I’m really excited for you to hear what he has to say.

Here are just a few of the things we cover:

• The biggest (and most valuable) mistakes Patrick made in the early days of Stripe and how they helped him get better
• The characteristics that Patrick looks for in a new hire to fit and contribute to the Stripe company culture
• What compelled he and his brother to move forward with the early concept of Stripe, even though on paper it was doomed to fail from the start
• The gaps Patrick saw in the market that dozens of other processing companies were missing — and how he capitalized on them
• The lessons Patrick learned from scaling Stripe from two employees (he and his brother) to nearly 1,000 today
• How he evaluates the upsides and potential dangers of speculative positions within the company
• How his Irish upbringing influenced his ability to argue and disagree without taking offense (and how we can all be a little more “Irish”)
• The power of finding the right peer group in your social and professional circles and how impactful and influential it can be in determining where you end up.
• The 4 ways Patrick has modified his decision making process over the last 5 years and how it’s helped him develop as a person and as a business leader (this part alone is worth the listen)
• Patrick’s unique approach to books and how he chooses what he’s going to spend his time reading

...life in Silicon Valley, Baumol’s cost disease, and so, so much more.

Patrick truly is one of the warmest, humblest and down-to-earth people I’ve had the pleasure to speak with and I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation together. I hope you will too!

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Just when I start to think I’m using my time well and getting a lot done in my life, I meet someone like Barbara Oakley.

Barbara is a true polymath. She was a captain in the U.S. Army, a Russian translator on Soviet trawlers, a radio operator in the South Pole, an engineer, university professor, researcher and the author of 8 books.

Oh, and she is also the creator and instructor of Learning to Learn, the most popular Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) ever(!), with over one million enrolled students.

In this fascinating interview, we cover many aspects of learning, including how to make it stick so we remember more and forget less, how to be more efficient so we learn more quickly, and how to remove that barriers that get in the way of effective learning.

Specifically, Barbara covers:

• How she changed her brain from hating math and science to loving it so much she now teaches engineering to college students
• What neuroscience can tell us about how to learn more effectively
• The two modes of your brain and how that impacts what and how you learn
• Why backing off can sometimes be the best thing you can do when learning something new
• How to “chunk” your learning so new knowledge is woven into prior knowledge making it easily accessible
• The best ways to develop new patterns of learning in our brains
• How to practice a skill so you can blast through plateaus and improve more quickly
• Her favorite tactic for dealing with procrastination so you can spend more time learning
• The activities she recommends that rapidly increase neural connections like fertilizer on the brain
• Whether memorization has a place in learning anymore, or simply a barrier to true understanding
• The truth about “learning types” and how identifying as a visual or auditory learner might be setting yourself up for failure.

...and a whole lot more.

If you want to be the most efficient learner you can be, and have more fun doing it, you won’t want to miss this discussion.

Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/

Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/

Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish