Never Enough

“only the paranoid survive”—was

It’s a strategy I went on to use throughout my career: there’s no harm in asking.

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

What caused this, I later realized upon reading Luke Burgis’s book Wanting, is something called mimetic desire. The idea that whatever those around you model as being valuable and important, you unconsciously find yourself caring about and wanting, too. Whether it’s as simple as a fashion choice, like a wristwatch, or as complex as a meaningless pr

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.

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

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

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

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.