added by sari and · updated 3mo ago
Choose Good Quests
Since it is difficult to find a quest that is easy and good , most people optimizing for an easy goal will end up on a quest that is both easy and bad. Now, the degree of “bad” varies depending on who you are, and what you can do.
from Choose Good Quests by Markie Wagner
Reza Saeedi added 1y ago
A player's ability to complete their quest is a function of the quest and their own skills, resources, and powers. Quests that are easy for certain players are nearly impossible for others: Olympic runners will regularly run sub-5 minute miles during training, even though this would be an incredibly ambitious goal for most people.
from Choose Good Quests by Markie Wagner
Reza Saeedi added 1y ago
Beyond investing, many former founders leverage their success to become public pseudo-intellectuals, speaking on podcasts and broadcasting their thoughts on popular tech Twitter accounts. But unless you are a truly generational thinker, proselytizing is far less impactful than building a specific, better version of the future. To the publ
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sari added 1y ago
But today there are more people "helping the builders" than actually building, fighting one another in a zero-sum game for allocation in competitive deals. Incredibly, being an investor has become one of the highest status jobs in Silicon Valley — higher even than playing an important operating role at a great company. This has led to an over
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sari added 1y ago
A hard quest is high-risk and operationally complex, with a low chance of success. Reversing aging, going to Mars, curing cancer, building a supersonic plane, creating AGI, or founding a new country — these are all hard quests, and most players attempting these quests will fail.
An easy quest is typically more straightf
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sari added 1y ago
The world is filled with good quests that require massively leveled heroes to complete: semiconductor manufacturing, complex industrial automation, natural resource discovery, next-generation energy production, low-cost and low-labor construction, new modes of transportation, general artificial intelligence, mapping and interfacing with the br
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sari added 1y ago
- To the public intellectual, one must ask: if your ideas are so good, why aren't you executing on them? It is much easier (and less impactful) to write about the importance of “green tech” than to build Tesla. Moreover, many self-titled public intellectuals are not even particularly intellectual. They are just... public.
from Choose Good Quests by Markie Wagner
sari added 5mo ago
- As a culture, we have a tendency to celebrate status that emerges from net worth and network signaling rather than the work ethic of a second-act founder using his net worth and network, while he grinds on a project, to drive the world forward. This is totally backwards.
from Choose Good Quests by Markie Wagner
Oliver Valero added 3mo ago
Quests tend to manifest as an objective we center our lives around. Your quest might be to reach a specific milestone: to become a senator, to publish a book, to make a million dollars. But not all quests have an end state. You might be on a quest to maximize your net worth, or to bench-press more weight than anyone else at the gym. Maybe you’re j
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Reza Saeedi added 1y ago