The Reward for Good Work Is More Work

`0:37:59`

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.

`0:38:46`

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.

`0:39:34`

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,