Never Enough

that people don’t like doing things that aren’t their own idea. They’re less motivated to execute, especially when it comes to building something special.

This had led me to the epiphany that there is always somebody else who loves the job you hate.

I was embracing what I came to call Lazy Leadership: the idea that a CEO’s job is not to do all the work, but more importantly to design the machine and systems. Not a player on the field. Not the coach. But the owner, sitting up in a little box at the top of the arena, passively observing until the next critical fifty-thousand-foot decision had to

“only the paranoid survive”—was

“I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake.”

“All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.”

My key insight at this time was one that would become the core of how I run my businesses today: It’s not enough to do what you love. You also have to stop doing what you hate. The goal isn’t—as many people think—to not work at all; it’s to only work on things that you enjoy doing. The stuff that you’d do even if you didn’t get paid for it.

There’s a famous Upton Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

What people fail to realize is that businesses are like tapeworms—they have to grow in order to stay alive. Without growth, there’s no additional revenue to increase salaries over time. If a star employee came to me asking for a promotion and I told them, “Oh, we decided to stop growing this year, so I can’t,” would they stay? Unlikely.