“Entrepreneurship Changed the Way I Think”, 2024-09-04 (; similar):
A quick note with some self reflection on the eve of my 37th year and after nearly 3 years of running a hardware start up.
…Self awareness: As alluded to in this post, there is nothing like the responsibility and authority of running a company for finally hammering home why things might not have gone so well in the past. It’s like the Point of View Gun from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
It’s not optional either. The hard part is once you recognize a mistaken behavior pattern you formerly used, you see it everywhere and see the harm it does.
To give one example, I’ve had the privilege of working with many many smart and talented people over my career. It is vanishingly rare to see failure occur because of a skill issue. Any degreed engineer or mathematician can, with enough persistence, solve any technical problem. And yet people fail all the time. Why? It’s a will issue. Will is a kind of skill. People somehow decide that they won’t do whatever relatively trivial thing (usually a minor adjustment of attitude) is required to succeed. This blows my mind. It takes years to master some engineering discipline and about 2 minutes to sip a coffee and strengthen your resolve to prevail over some issue no matter what. And yet… the resolve is apparently the hard part. I now understand why some recruiters strongly weight performance in elite sports, which is impossible to fake.
…Internalizing agency and responsibility, practicing curiosity, getting to the core issue, seeing the scope of true excellence and scaling that as quickly as possible.
[Gumption is not that hard; what’s hard is caring.]
…There’s no limit to what you can achieve if you surrender credit for ideas. Ideas are cheap. Execution is what matters.
…There is plenty of media talking about leadership, most of it doesn’t transfer until after the fact. Then it makes sense.
…There’s no limit to what you can achieve if you surrender credit for ideas. Ideas are cheap. Execution is what matters.
…Hiring, leading, fundraising are always a slog. You can always hire better, raise more, etc etc. It has gotten easier as we’ve accumulated a track record of success, and I’ve gotten more experience. That said, it’s still a thankless and soul destroying exercise.
Internet visibility helps a lot. I don’t think it would have been possible to raise without having so many relatively wealthy fans of my blog. Blogs are underrated! Write one!
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