Life is lived in the arena
Blame yourself for everything, and preserve your agency.
You have to take responsibility for everything bad that happens to you—and this is a mindset. Maybe it’s a little fake, but it’s very self-serving. And in fact, if you can go the extra mile and just attribute everything good that happens to you to luck, that might be helpful too.
And I like to harass all of my friends—including Nivi—that one of the problems I notice with these guys is you’re just operating way below potential. Your potential is so much higher than where you are. You have to apply some of that into kinetic.
Real feedback comes from free markets and nature. Physics is harsh: either your product worked, or it didn’t. Free markets are harsh: either people buy it, or they don’t. But feedback from other people is fake. You can’t get good feedback from groups because groups are just trying to get along. Individuals search for truth, groups search for consensus. A group that doesn’t get along decoheres. It falls apart. And the larger the group, the less good feedback you’re going to get from it.
There’s a famous saying, I think from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, where he says the airplane wing is perfect “not because there’s nothing left to add, but because there’s nothing left to take away.”
Before you optimize a system, that’s among the last things that you do. Before you start trying to figure out how to make something more efficient, the first thing you do is you question the requirements.
You’re like, “Why does the requirement even exist?”
One of the Elon methods in Jorgenson’s new book is you first go and you track down the requirement. And not which department came up with the requirement; the requirement has to come from an individual.
Who’s the individual who said, “This is what I want.”
You go back and say, “Do you really need this?”
You eliminate the requirement. And then once you’ve eliminated the requirements that are unnecessary, then you have a smaller number of requirements. Now you have parts, and you try to get rid of as many parts as you can to fulfill the requirements that are absolutely necessary.
It’s funny—everybody says “I’m a generalist,” which is their way of copping out on being a specialist. But really what you want to be is a polymath, which is a generalist who can pick up every specialty, at least to the 80/20 level, so they can make smart trade-offs.