Defining Success: Pride in the Work

`1:51:04`

The way I think about it is, would I want to do this again? — The next day? — Just this, whatever this was. Like, would I want to do it again? If the answer is yes, then it was successful. If I hurt myself, I wouldn't want to do that again. If I wasn't proud of what I said, I wouldn't want... It's the same thing, like, knowing what I know now, would I hire this person again? It's the same question. Would I want to do this, whatever I just did, again? If so, it's successful. And I think that that's enough of a definition for me. It's not about money, it's not about any of those things. It's like, "Would I want to do it again? Would I want to spend my time doing that again, playing replay?" And I know it wouldn't be the same outcome, but the experience of it would be different, but it would still be the same trajectory. I'd like to do that thing again.

`1:51:50`

You were speaking earlier about humans' propensity to take something simple and make it complex. Even though we crave simplicity, we abhor complexity, we kind of trend in- — Yeah. —... the trajectory of making things just more complex. I don't know why, when you were speaking, this came to my mind, but one of my favorite podcast episodes ever was back in 2023, Rick Rubin interviewed Jimmy Iovine. — Mm-hmm. — And they talked about one of the first... Rick Rubin tells the story of the first time he met Jimmy Iovine. Jimmy is already a legend. He's 10 years older than Rick, so he was well-known, and Rick is there with some other music executive, and Rick plays him this song he just produced. And Jimmy said something that changed his life, or the way he thought about things. — Mm. He goes, "Oh, I wish I could still make something that simple." — Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. — And Rick's like, "What do you mean?

`1:52:35`

I'm sure you can. You're better at this than I am. — You have a lot more experience than I do. You've been doing this a lot longer. — Yeah. — Of course, you can make something simple." And the point was that you don't know what you don't know. — Mm-hmm. — And so, he made this beautiful, simple thing, and then you tend to think you need to add more things to it, and make it more complex. — Yeah. — Where Jimmy just, again, like, that's just the way he is when you're with him. He'll say one sentence, he just gets right to the heart of the issue. — Yeah, it sounds like an incredible thing to have, like a skill to have, basically. Yeah, I think that is the trend, it is just to add more things, I mean, naturally. And part of it is because you feel like, "Well, people get bored of things, and so they have to kind of expand the things," or there's expectations to do more, and people put a lot of pressure on themselves as business owners, or they take money from the outside world, and they have to grow a certain amount because they have to return the investment.

`1:53:20`

And all of a sudden, they've unmoored themselves. They've lost connection with why they started this in the first place. They're no longer running their own business. They're running someone else's business. They just created a job for themselves, working for someone else. That's what can happen when you've just taken the simple thing that you had, and added a layer to it, that just blows it up in a different direction. In some cases... — It makes it worse. — I mean, for some people, it makes it better, right? But I think for a lot of people, it makes it worse, because now you're on a track which you can't get off. There's only one outcome that works. This is optionality. Let me get into this. Like, my feeling, in general, is that businesses... Okay, the most important thing to me, in business, is independence,