Let's talk about hard work. There's this battle that happened on
Twitter a lot between should you work hard and should you not like David Hauser's on they're saying it's like your slave driving people and keep the boys always on there saying like know all the great Founders work their fingers to the Bone and they're talking past each other. First of all, they're talking about two different things. David is talking about employees and a lifestyle business, which is fine. You're number one thing in life. If you're doing that is not getting wealthy. You have a job. You also have your family you also have your life but Keith is talking about the Olympics of startups. He's talking about the person going for the gold medal and trying to build a multi-billion dollar public company
that person has to get everything right. They have to have great judgment. They have to pick the right thing to work on they have to recruit the right team and they have to work crazy hard because they're basically engaged in a competitive Sprint.
So if getting wealthy is your goal you are going to have to work
as hard as you can but hard work is absolutely no substitute for who you work with and what you work on. What you work on is probably the most important thing finding product.
Market founder fit to expand on Marc Andreessen definition. He came with product Market fit, but I would add product Market founder
fit which is how well you are
personally suited to that business
the combination. That's three. That should be your overwhelming goal and you can save yourself a lot of time if you pick the right area to work in picking the right people to work with
is the next most important piece and then third comes how hard you work, but they're like three legs of a stool few
short Change in any one of them the whole stools going to fall down.
So it's not like you can pick one over the other
that easily so the order of operations when you're building a business is or even building your career is first figure out what should I be doing? What is
something where there is a market that is emerging. There's a
product that I can build that I'm excited to work on and something where I have specific knowledge and I'm really into it and then second surround yourself with the best people possible
and no matter how high your bar is raised your bar because you can never be working with other people who are great enough if there's someone greater out there to work with you should go work
with them. I
A lot of people who are looking at which started to join in Silicon Valley. I say basically pick the one that's going to have the best Alumni network for you in the future. Look at the PayPal mafia. They work with a bunch of geniuses. So they all got rich. So just try and pick based on the highest intelligence energy and integrity people that you can find and then finally once you've picked the right thing to work on and the right people to work with then you work as hard as you can this is where the mythology gets a little crazy people work 1820 our weeks a lot of that's just status signaling. It's
showing off. Nobody really works 8,200 20 hours a week
sustained at high
output with mental Clarity your brain breaks down. You just
won't have good ideas. So really the way people tend
to work most effectively especially in knowledge work
is they
Sprint as hard as they can while they're working on something in their inspired and they're passionate and then they rest to take long breaks. It's more like a lion hunting and much less like a marathon runner running. So you sprint then you rest you
reassess and then
Try again. And what you end up doing is you end up building a marathon of Sprints. Maybe just made the point to me the side that
inspiration is perishable, which is a very good point when you have your
inspiration do it right then and there this happens to me a lot with my tweets dorms. I've actually come up with a whole bunch of additional tweets during besides the
ones that are already out there, but
sometimes it just hesitate or I just pause and they just dies and what I've learned is if I'm
inspired to write a blog post or to publish a tweet storm. I should probably do it right away. Otherwise, it's not going to get out there. I won't come back to it. So inspiration is a beautiful and powerful thing and when you have it just sees it
so people talk about impatience. When do you know to be impatient when you know to be patient my glib tweet on this was impatience with actions and patients with results and I think that's actually a good philosophy for Life anything you have to do. Just get it done. Why wait, you're not getting any younger your life is slipping away. You don't want to spend it waiting in line. You don't want to spend it
traveling back and forth. You don't want to spend it doing things that you know, ultimately aren't part of your
And when you do them you want to do them as quickly as you can while you do them well with your full attention, but then you just have to give up on the results. You have to be patient with the results because you do a complex systems you're dealing with lots of people. It takes
a long time for markets to adopt products. It takes time for people to get comfortable working with each other. It takes time for great products to emerge as you polish away
polish away polish away. So in patients with actions patients with results and as maybe said inspiration is perishable. So when you
have inspiration act on it, right then and there
if I have a problem that I discovered one of my businesses and needs to be solved. I basically won't sleep until at least the resolution is in motion. And this is just a personal failing. But if I'm on the board of a company, I'll call the CEO if I'm running the company. I'll
call my reports if I'm
responsible. I'll get on there right then and there and solve it if I don't solve a problem the moment it
happens or I will start moving towards solving the moon happens. I have no peace. I have no rest. I have no happiness until that problem is
Alt so solve it as quickly as possible. I literally won't sleep until it's solved. Maybe that's a personal characteristic, but it's
worked out well in business.
