hypothesis:
1. work feels bad (unmotivating, boring, hard) when we lack of focus
2. focus is upstream of energy, flow, fulfillment, progress, feedback loops
what's upstream of focus?
attention (presence) paired w/ agency (when our... See more
One way to identify your invisible asymptotes is to simply ask your customers. As I noted at the start of this piece, at Amazon we honed in on how shipping fees were a brake on our business by simply asking customers and non-customers.
Here's where the oft-cited quote from Henry Ford is brought up as an... See more
re: many genAI apps can do 'anything and everything'
i used to tell this funny story to a lot of consumer founders:
when one-shot TTS first started to work, someone made a website where you could deepfake anyone's voice (long before ElevenLabs quality). it had a complicated UX and got little... See more
That, as a startup, you should only do half of what you want to do (only half the options, half the tabs, half the offerings, and half the target audience) to compound your chances of true PMF.
One thing I do look back on fondly was how incredibly focused we were. Resources and time were so tight that you could feel the weight of all the things you weren’t working on. You had real conviction that the thing you were doing was the most important thing.
To pick a somewhat trivial example, at fireside chats with Mark (the predecessor to the... See more
A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are.
People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever... See more