The Reward for Good Work Is More Work

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— Is it important? — I feel fortunate. — Is the time important to you? If I could tell you, "Okay, you can make the same exact amount of money that you made in 27 years, but you made it in 15, and you're done," you'd take the 27? — Right. I would take the 27. — Because... — The money is a side effect of all of this. — I know. — So, all the money does, like Patrick, who you interviewed, O'Shaughnessy, right? — Yeah. — I love what he said about work. I think it's something like, "I work so I could work more," or something like that, right? — "The reward for good work is more work." — There you go. — It's to keep going. — Great way to phrase it. And so, that's why 27 years is more interesting than 15. I like this stuff. The beauty about this, for me, is that somehow we've managed to build this system this thing, this company, these products

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that sustain over a long period of time, that allow us to enjoy our craft and our work over a long period of time, and we are in control of that as much as we can be. The market can change. Anything can happen at any time. But I can control my costs, I can control my quality, I can control my messaging as best I can, and we can make the best thing we can over time and keep making that thing. That's what I want to do. This is my whole point. I don't want to trade my position with anybody for anything. I can love what other people do, too. I do. There's great products all over the place, and I'm like, "Wow, that's an amazing thing that someone made." For example, one of my favorite products is the Concept2 Rower. Are you familiar with this? — Yes. — I don't know anything about the company,

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but I can reverse engineer that I bet it's a badass, killer company, too, because that's how I look at things, by the way. I look at the products, not the companies. I look at the products and go, "Oh, that's a great product. I bet that's a great company." Or, "This product is, nah, I don't like this product. I bet the company's kind of..." — I do this for people. If you can make a great product, you're probably an interesting person to talk to. — Yeah, I could see that reverse thing as well. I mean, again, look to the inside to figure out what forms on the outside. So, Concept2 is probably one of my favorite products of all time, the Concept2 Rower. Their bikes are good, too, and they make a ski machine, too. But the rower is my favorite machine. And I love it because it is so well-built. First of all, it's under a thousand bucks, and it's been under a thousand bucks, I think, forever, and it's been around forever.

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There's been different variations of it, but they're always improving on a theme. It's roughly the same thing every iteration, but slightly better. It comes in a big box, very easy to assemble. It's a big machine, but it's very easy to assemble. The display is black and white LCD, not even LED, LCD, with five rubberized buttons, and then I think there's two other ones. It runs on C or D batteries. No electricity, no plugging in, no recharge. Oh, shit, it's done, get some new batteries. It just works. The buttons you press, there's no touch screens. The thing is reliable. It always works. It's incredibly durable. It does exactly what it's supposed to do with nothing else. And I look at that, and I go, "That is a perfect product." One of the few perfect products I've ever seen.

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A paper clip and a Concept2 Rower, hard to improve on both of those things. I have deep admiration for that kind of thing. I still wouldn't want to trade my company for theirs, because I don't know anything about what they do. I know what I do. But I can still respect and admire all sorts of things and all sorts of companies but I still wouldn't want to be them. I like what we do, and I like that I can do it for a long period of time. And hopefully, I'll do it for as long as I feel like I want to do it, and then, at some point, we'll decide that we're not going to do it anymore, and I don't know when that'll be. I'm always a year-to-year guy. I'm a day-to-day guy when it comes to planning. Like I talked about a little bit earlier, I don't believe in long-term planning. I believe in being around for the long term, but I think the best way to do that is day by day, not quarter by quarter or year by year.

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Just figure out today, and figure out tomorrow, and figure out tomorrow. I've always been mystified by people who think they can figure out the next three years today, but they're afraid of figuring out tomorrow, tomorrow. I need to plan the next three years, so I can do that. I can plan, what, 900 or 1000 days in advance, but tomorrow, I can't figure things out if I don't have a plan. You can figure things out tomorrow if you can figure things out for the next 1000 days. — Explain how you plan day by day. — There is no plan. I mean, like, we have a direction. — Yeah. — So, the way I think about this, and this is, again, another weird metaphor perhaps, but I think of our business, and maybe, me even, like I'm a squirrel. — Okay. — Probably weren't expecting this. So, you watch a squirrel run across a field.

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What does it do? It knows where it wants to go, roughly, and it runs, and it scurries, and it stops and it looks around, and then it scurries some more, and it stops, and it looks around, and it scurries some more. It doesn't need to get exactly where it wants to go. It knows roughly where it wants to go, and it clearly doesn't know how exactly it's going to get there, but it knows where it's headed, and then it course-corrects. That's how I do it. So, at our company, we typically think about six weeks in advance, and that's about it. There's some occasional projects, maybe a few over the 27 years that we've done, that we needed to think further ahead. Like we just recently left the cloud, left AWS, and we're running our own stuff now in data centers. That was a much bigger project, okay? But most projects, 99% of them at our company, take six weeks or less,