Hard work

`3:09:13`

And so there is a degree to which you wanna make the mistake. So I think I would still give the advice of you want to have a stretch of your life where you work too hard, including a thing that fails. I don't think you can learn the lessons why that's a bad idea in any other way except by doing it. There is a degree like, but of course you don't. — I think you should stretch. Should you have to stretch for a decade? I'm not so sure. — Yeah, the decade thing is 20s is a special time. — It's a lot to trade. You don't get your 20s back. Yeah, you don't get your 30s back. You don't get your 40s back. You really, I would've regretted personally if I hadn't done the other things I did in my 20s, if I hadn't had the fun I had, if I hadn't had the friends I had, if I hadn't built up the hobbies that I did, if I hadn't started driving race cars at an early enough age to actually get really good at it, if I had just gone all in on business because I would've got the same out in the end. This is something Derek Sivers really taught me is he has this great essay

`3:10:15`

about how when he went for a bike ride, he could go really hard all out and he could do the ride I think in whatever 19 minutes. Or he could enjoy the ride, go 5% slower, do the ride in 21 minutes and realize there's only two minutes apart. Either I go all in all the time, there's nothing else, I'm completely exhausted at the alt. Or I travel the same distance and I arrive maybe two minutes later, but I got to enjoy the scenery, listen to the birds, smell the flowers. That journey is also valuable. Now I say that while accepting and celebrating that if you wanna be the best at one thing in the world, no, you have to sacrifice everything. You have to be obsessed with just that thing. There is no instant of someone who's the best in the world at something who's not completely obsessed at. I didn't need to be the best at anything. This was a rare blessing of humility I had early on is like, do you know what?

`3:11:16`

I am not that smart. I'm not that good. I'm not that talented. I can do interesting things by combining different aspects and elements that I know, but I'm not gonna be the best at anything. And that released me from this singular obsession with just going, I'm gonna be the best programmer in the world. Eh, I know I'm not. I failed at it twice before I even got how conditional it's worked. I'm not smart enough to be the best at anything. I'm not dedicated enough to do that. That's a bit of a blessing. And I think as a society, we have to straddle both celebrating peak excellence, which we do all the time and celebrating the peak intensity of mission it takes to become that. And then also going like, do you know what? We don't all need to be Michael Jordan. There's only gonna be one of those. — Well, we should say that there's certain pursuits where a singular obsession is required. Basketball is one of them. By the way, probably racing. If you wanna be the best at F1 in the world...

`3:12:17`

— If you wanna be Senna, you gotta be a maniac. — But I would argue that there's most disciplines like programming allows if you want to be, quote, unquote, "the best," whatever that means, I think that's judged at the end of your life. And usually if you look at that path, it's gonna be an nonlinear one. It you're not gonna look like the life of an Olympic athlete who's singular focus. There's gonna be some acid there in the 20s or there's going to be a several detours, which the true greats. There's gonna be detours. And sometimes they're not gonna be Steve Jobs asset type of situation. There'll be just different companies you've worked for different careers or different sort of efforts you allocated your life to. But it's gonna be non-linear. It's not gonna be a singular focus. — The way I think about this sometimes is I want a good bargain on learning. I can become in the top 5%

`3:13:18`

of whatever I defined as good at something much, much easier. Perhaps it's 20 times easier, 100 times easier to get into the top 5% than it is to get into the top 0.1%. That's almost impossibly hard to get into that. But if I'm content just being in the top 5%, I can be in the top 5% on like five things at once. I can get really good at writing. I can get decent at driving a race car. I can become pretty good at programming. I can run a company. I can have a family. I can do a lot of things at the same time. That gives me sort of that variety that almost was idealized Karl Marx has this idea, "Oh, I'm gonna fish in the morning and hammer in the evening and paint on the weekends, right?" That there's a sense for me at least where his diagnosis of alienation was true. That just that tunnel vision. There's just this one thing I'm just gonna focus on that gives me a sense of alienation I can't stomach. When I'm really deep on programming and sometimes I go deep for weeks,