#111 Illia Polosukhin of NEAR: My Favorite Books, Tools, Habits, and More | 20 Minute Playbook

In Episode #111, we deconstruct Illia Polosukhin's peak performance playbook—from his favorite book to the tiny habit that's had the biggest impact on his life. Illia is the co-founder of NEAR Protocol and Unchain Fund. We cover why context switching is a necessary skill for founders, Illia’s recommended books, and the nuance of the Russian language in writing.

“Find a mentor who's a few years ahead of you, like not too far, but like two, three years ahead of you, because those are people who still remember what they were doing in your position. And so they will be able to give you the most useful advice.” – Illia Polosukhin

EPISODE GUIDE (LINKS, QUOTES, NOTES, AND BOOKS MENTIONED)

https://www.danielscrivner.com/notes/illia-polosukhin-playbook 

FULL TEXT TRANSCRIPT

https://www.danielscrivner.com/notes/illia-polosukhin-playbook-transcript 

CHAPTERS

In this episode, we deconstruct Illia Polosukhin’s peak performance playbook—from his favorite book to the tiny habit that's had the biggest impact on his life. In it we cover:

• (00:00:00) – Introduction
• (00:01:59) – Designing social graph in Web3
• (00:04:01) – Why context switching is a necessary skill for founders
• (00:05:51) – Finding mentors who are just a few years ahead of you in business
• (00:10:56) – Building a great decentralized ecosystem requires high-level, small, agile teams
• (00:13:29) – Books Illia recommends
• (00:16:59) – The nuance of the Russian language in writing

ABOUT ILLIA POLOSUKHIN

Illia Polosukhin is co-founder of NEAR Protocol. NEAR is a layer one blockchain that's incredibly fast, has very low transaction fees and is climate neutral, in part because of its proof of stake model.

It's traded on crypto exchanges under the ticker symbol NEAR, and has a market cap of just under $5 billion today. From 2020 through 2021, the developers working in NEARs ecosystem, that's everyone building applications on top of their blockchain quadrupled, making NEAR the second fastest growing chain behind only Solana. 

In this episode, Illia shares why he loves running daily and how it helps him remember to just put one foot in front of the other to accomplish anything; why he loves the book Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and how he applies that principle in his life and work; why he's fascinated with the concept of a social graph and how to build it into the NEAR protocol and why it's so important for building a better world in Web3; why he thinks everyone should find mentors that are two to three years ahead of them in terms of where they'd like to be and why he'd tell his younger self to focus on speed and velocity shipping quickly in everything that he does.

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ABOUT OUTLIER ACADEMY

Learn timeless lessons on work and life from iconic founders, world-renown investors, and bestselling authors. Outlier Academy is the forever school for those chasing greatness. Past guests include Gokul Rajaram of DoorDash, Scott Belsky of Benchmark and Adobe, Joey Krug of Pantera Capital, Mark Sisson of Primal Kitchen, Luke Gromen of The Forest for the Trees, and Brian Scudamore of 1-800-GOT-JUNK.

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ABOUT DANIEL SCRIVNER

Outlier Academy is hosted by Daniel Scrivner. Over the last 15 years, Daniel has led design teams at Square and Apple, turned around a $3M+ ARR SaaS business, and invested in more than 100 companies. He launched Outlier Academy in 2020 to learn from the world’s best founders, investors, authors, and peak performance experts.

Website: https://www.danielscrivner.com

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/danielscrivner

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