Jonathan Swanson

Just not my focus in life.

We did some fun research at Athena.

We actually used AI to do this.

We got a list of thousands of the kind of greats of history and downloaded 10 biographies in all of them and then looked for how they delegated.

And across all sorts of people, Cicero, Newton, Caesar, Einstein, Voltaire, Gates, Churchill, Picasso, Buddha, all of them had personal assistants.

And

It's not a coincidence, because these people did not 10x, but like 1,000x more than other people have done in history.

And there's this kind of great man view of history that one person does these great things, and there's some truth to that.

But the reality is there's actually a team, and there's an organization, and there's typically an assistant who is helping this person accomplish great things.

The history books just don't put those people on the cover.

But that's how it's actually happened.

And yeah, it's fun reading these stories.

I'm reading a biography of Cicero right now, and he has an assistant who is helping him manage the Roman Empire and trying to protect the Republic.

And this guy is not, you know, the person we learn about when we learn about Cicero.

uh, history, but it was important.

And so, you know, our view of this is if you want to accomplish small things or great things, uh, it's helpful to have an assistant.

Uh, there's, there's also funny stories.

So Catherine the Great, I think, was one of the, uh, the greats at delegation.

She delegated not just managing her empire and, uh,

rewriting the laws, but she also had someone, she delegated her dating life.