Rick Rubin & Intuition-Driven Building

`1:40:08`

some people might hear this, that's why I'm saying this, some people might hear this and go, "Well, that's an excuse to just do whatever the hell you want. There's no ramifications to any of these things." There are ramifications to these things, but they are written in history, and that is that. I've always just tried to do the best I can. This is why... I'm going to tie this back to numbers. We don't have revenue targets, except for, like, I want to be profitable. I don't have sales targets, revenue targets, user targets. I don't have any of these things. We just do the best work we can. A target shouldn't make me do better work. I should do better work because of the pride I take in the work that I do, and the seriousness in which I take the work that I do, and the enjoyment in the work that I do. I'm going to do the best I can. That's what I do. That's all I can do. That's all I should be doing,

`1:40:53`

and I don't need something to try to tell me that I could do better had I aimed for some target. The target is the work I'm doing now. That's the best I can do. So, fully on board. He said it more eloquently than I did, but that's how I've always felt about this stuff, which is why I don't like measurement. I just like the product. The product is the measurement, not the number of things that people have done it, used it, and whatever. It is what it is. The number, the money, is ultimately like the byproduct of making something good. It's not the reason to do it. People are in search of certainty all the time, and I think it's nowhere to be found. But it makes people very uncomfortable not to know why this happened, or... And by the way, I shouldn't say it's not to be found. If you're making widgets on a line,

`1:41:41`

and the widget's supposed to have a circle in the middle, and all of a sudden the circle's off, you can trace that back to where the machine went offline. Like, you can figure out some of these things. Of course, if they're mechanical and you can track it all down, but most businesses are not mechanical in that way. They are a series of decisions, ideas, timing, market conditions, competitor conditions, perhaps, your mood on a given day, the way it rolled out, what other news was happening in the day the thing... Like, to try to pinpoint the answer and then to go, "Okay, now next time we know not to do or to do," and to feel like you now know something that you actually don't know, but to be so certain that you do because you've "figured it out," I think it's really dangerous. — Is that why I've heard you say a few times that you don't think