#111: Social Signals 2025, Curt Cignetti's Principles, Physics of Great Wealth and Happiness

Hi All!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

This week, we will take a look at how a 64-year old college football coach brought a historically irrelevant program to the top of the sport, how to synthesize your ideas across multiple domains, the biggest lessons learned about social platforms in 2025, and more.

Let's dive in:

How to Articulate Yourself Intelligently

Being a clear communicator is one of the most important skills in life.

Dan Koe recently wrote an article about the three frameworks that will allow you to 'articulate yourself more intelligently':

Beginner - The Micro Story : Humans can’t help but pay attention to a story, especially if it’s short and impactful. Once you learn how to do it well, you can effectively short-circuit someone’s brain into being interested in the topic you are talking about.

The foundation of a story is transformation. This does not have to be a transformation about a specific person. A transformation can be as simple as introducing a problem and giving a solution.

If we want to make that a bit more impactful, here’s how you structure what you want to say:

Problem – state a relatable problem that you’ve observed or experienced before.
Amplify – illustrate how that problem leads to a negative outcome if it is not solved.
Solution – state the solution to the problem. In a short post, this can be one sentence or a short list. In a long newsletter or script, this can be all of the key points with their explanations. The problem and amplification would account for the hook.

Intermediate - The Pyramid Principle: The Pyramid Principle is a communication framework that structures ideas in a hierarchical, logical way to make information more palatable and persuasive.

It’s pretty simple.

1. Start with the main idea (the key conclusion or recommendation)
2. Support it with key arguments (usually 3-5 key points)
3. Provide detailed evidence (data, examples, analysis)

Advanced - Cross Domain Synthesis: This one is my favorite because I have multiple interests. Here's how to structure:

- Problem and amplify – your introduction should state a relatable problem and illustrate what happens if that problem is not solved.

- Cross-domain synthesis – note patterns or concepts from your other interests that help support your argument. If I’m talking about deep work, I can use the concept of entropy from physics to illustrate how distraction works. This teaches my audience something new, and I can sleep well knowing that all other deep work content out there does not do this.
- Unique process or solution – give a list of ideas or steps that best solve the problem you introduced at the beginning, solidifying the transformation. These should come from your own contemplation rather than someone else’s prescription.

Dan goes further into some predictable 'legos' that can guide you cross domain synthesis:

Pain point – if I don’t know how to start a section, I start with a relevant pain point, and ideas start to flow from there.
Example – once I’ve started a section, you can throw an example in anywhere. This grounds what you are saying.
Personal story – think to a time in your life that relates to what you are writing about. This can go anywhere.
Statistic – research a truthful statistic that adds more authority to your point.
Metaphor – explain a complex idea as if you are talking to a child. Alan Watts is incredible at this.
Quote – include a quote that justifies what you are saying. Quotes are easy because they are almost always great ideas.
Reframe – give people a different perspective on the point you just discussed.
What, how, or why – when all else fails, simply ask what, how, or why? Thinking is questioning.

The Curt Cignetti Phenomenon

Curt Cignetti is what the U.S. college football world is describing as a 'unicorn' for the results he has produced during his two-year tenure at Indiana University.

For context, Indiana’s last football conference championship was in 1967, when the Hoosiers were Big Ten co-champions. Before that, the last outright championship was in 1945. Last Saturday night, Cignetti claimed their third title in history, beating the Ohio State Buckeyes who have 39 Big Ten conference championships.

The Athletic recently published an article covering Cignetti, titled "Indiana Football was irrelevant. Then a cocky nerd arrived". I expected to read the college football rendition of 'Moneyball', but what followed in the article was documentation of a maniacal and obsession-driven mission focused solely on repeated excellence.

A former player described the main lessons learned from Cignetti: "We want to be fast, we want to be surgical, and we never play with too many emotions. That’s what I remember. It’s the same message he’s giving to Indiana." Cignetti shows his dedication to routine by apparently orders the same meal from Chipotle every day, and is blunt and transparent with his thoughts. It's a style that reminds me of Ray Dalio's radical transparency.

My favorite anecdote, however, is when former tight end Willie Wright described how Cignetti handled an incident with one of Wright's teammates:

When one N.C. State practice devolved into a scuffle, Wright took a blindside shot from a teammate, who then pinned him to the turf to continue the onslaught. In the film session that followed, Cignetti paused a clip of the sequence and zoomed in.

Is that you, Willie?

He zoomed in again. And again. And again.

“I know one thing,” Wright says now. “I didn’t get snuck anymore.”

Indiana is ranked #1 overall going into the College Football Playoff this year, and I'll be rooting for them and their Hesiman-favorite quarterback Fernando Mendoza, who I've been a fan of since this post-game interview during his time at Cal.

Great Products Are Opinionated

The following excerpt comes from the latest Naval Ravikant titled, "Great products are opinionated":

“Every great founder I’ve seen up close, or even from afar, is highly opinionated and they’re almost dictatorial in how they run things.

Also, early-stage teams are opinionated. And the products they build are opinionated. Opinionated means they have a strong vision for what it should and should not do.

If you don’t have a strong vision of what it should and should not do, then you end up with a giant mess of competing features.

Jack Dorsey has a great phrase: “Limit the number of details and make every detail perfect.” And that’s especially important in consumer products. You have to be extremely opinionated. All the best products in consumer-land get there through simplicity.
...
In the age of TikTok and ChatGPT, that’s more obvious than ever. People don’t want to make choices. They don’t want the cognitive load. They want you to figure out what the right defaults are and what they should be doing and looking at, and they want you to present it to them.”

Physics of Great Wealth and Happiness

I thought the following was a beautiful insight into the physics of great wealth and happiness by @nickcammarata:

the physics of great wealth is that you have to get access to an equity that goes up tremendously, you can’t do it on income. the physics of great happy is you have to let the contractions between you and being itself melt, you can’t do it by getting the things you want

Social Signals 2025

Few pieces leave me near speechless and compelled to designate as 'required reading' but the Social Signals 2025 report from Matthew Stasoff is one of them. It's a 441-page slide deck of the most important lessons derived from social media in the last year, filled with images, graphs, and charts that show patterns and the evolution of online social from decades ago to now.

When I got to the middle of the deck around slide 215, I thought I was going to throw up. I was so overwhelmed by the accuracy, truth, and depth of insights that it left my brain scrambling to come back to reality. This was after a roller coaster of feelings going from the "Hell Everywhere" on slide 63 to the "It's not all bad" snapshot on Slide 107. In the midst of great despair, there are glimpses of hope when it comes to a more positive online social experience in the future.

What I have learned going through it, is that the only way to win/succeed moving forward is to be so insanely focused on your vision and what you are doing that you essentially tune out the world.

You NEED to schedule time to turn off your brain, disconnect from the onslaught of digital fishhooks everywhere vying for your mindshare, and think about WHO YOU ARE and WHAT YOU TRULY WANT IN LIFE.

It's an intense view, but we are heading towards a potentially apocalyptic direction if we do not recover our inner humanity. We are obligated to share more of what we love and want to see in this world.

When we find the time to release ourselves from our screen prisons, maybe we will notice something in the world that reminds us what life is truly meant for.

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Undiscovered #111: Social Signals 2025, Curt Cignetti's Principles, Physics of Great Wealth and Happiness

#111: Social Signals 2025, Curt Cignetti's Principles, Physics of Great Wealth and Happiness

How to Articulate Yourself Intelligently

The Curt Cignetti Phenomenon

Great Products Are Opinionated

Physics of Great Wealth and Happiness

Social Signals 2025

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