Don’t get fooled by the insane outliers. It’s a long, slow road. But if you can stomach the wait, the embarrassment, and the frustration, you just might make it.
People dramatically under estimate how many decisions one has to make before shipping the v1 of even the simplest product. They all seem obvious in retrospect, but so, so much thinking had to happen to ship something like "press a button, get a ride."
Wendell Berry wrote: there are two muses — the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought."
Founders are taught to possess enough faith to will whatever they’re working on into existence but are rarely reminded to worship anything but themself. This creates a pressure cooker of responsibility that distorts reality to the point that they often find it hard not to confuse themselves for God — and we all know how that ends.
After years of floundering, I think I'm finally getting it: You get energy by spending it. The fuel tank metaphor is completely misleading. The body supplies energy to meet demand. The tank *expands* if you use a lot of fuel. In other words, biology is fundamentally antifragile
Those who really win (an industry, or in a career) did so by delaying gratification. One of the greatest competitive advantages in a startup team — or any bold new project or turnaround — is simply sticking together long enough to figure it out. This is hard because our natural human tendency is to crave short-term rewards and seek short-cuts to... See more