Visualize the End Result

“If a man knows not which port he sails, no wind is favorable.

”

— Seneca

While studying in Copenhagen during her junior term at Yale, Maya Lin lived near an area where a large cemetery, Assistens Kirkegård, was also used as a public park. Walking to and from class, she observed how death and remembrance were integrated into the daily life of the Danes, not hidden off to the side like the cemeteries she knew from her hometown in Ohio.

When she returned to Yale, she approached her architecture professor with an idea for a senior seminar to study how mortality is expressed in the structures we build for the dead. As the undergraduates immersed themselves in the study of memorial architecture, someone came across a flyer for a competition to enter the design contest for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Lin and her peers decided that was the perfect opportunity for their final project.

The Memorial

In the fall of 1980, Lin started working on her idea. She and her classmates visited Washington, D.C., during Thanksgiving break to look at the site. Standing on the lawn at Constitution Gardens, she started to visualize how the memorial would look within the landscape. She imagined cutting into the earth and polishing the names of the fallen and missing soldiers on its dark surface. And she contemplated the feelings she was trying to evoke in her work: to focus on the fallen and create a beautiful space within the landscape for the living and the dead to meet in as personal and evocative a way as possible. It was all about subtlety, not spectacle.

As she worked through the details, she would use two polished black granite walls that stretched out and descended gradually toward an apex, 10 feet below grade, where they converged at a V, acting as bookends to the war. From above, the walls would look like the earth had opened up. Visitors would descend into the memorial, passing the names of over 57,000 dead or missing veterans before returning to ground level. The names would be listed chronologically in order to capture the timeline of the war, allowing veterans and their families to revisit the time they served and find everyone they knew within a few panels, forging a deeper connection to their experience of the war.

Lin sent through her final submission in the spring of 1981, a soft pastel sketch with an essay explaining her concept in detail and how the experience would feel. There were over 1,400 submissions, including one from her professor and many other from professional architects. On the last day of class, Lin received a call from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, requesting to visit New Haven to ask her a few questions. Three officers arrived to meet Lin in her dorm room and delivered the news—she had won.

Standing her ground

After graduation, Lin moved to D.C. to oversee construction. By this point, word was out, and outrage was spreading over her and her design. How could a 21-year-old Asian-American woman who had just graduated from college without any experience of the war herself possibly design a proper memorial for the Vietnam veterans?

During meetings and press conferences, she faced a backlash for her Asian heritage and designing a memorial for a war fought in Southeast Asia. She received hate mail, personal insults, and racial slurs. People called her design “a black scare of shame,” an “open urinal,” and “something for New York intellectuals.” Critics wanted to make the memorial a white stone, move it above ground, and plant a flagpole or towering statue at its apex, rendering the walls as nothing more than a backdrop.

Lin faced these confrontations with admirable courage. She stood her ground and fought for the design she believed in. She had thought through the design decisions of the memorial in detail and how each contributed to the overall experience she was working to create.

In the end, Lin’s vision for the memorial was preserved, except for a bronze sculpture featuring three soldiers and an American flag added near the entrance. This addition was made without her input, and she didn’t learn about the compromise until she saw it on the news. Frederick Hart, the sculptor of the bronze monument, was paid more than $300,000 for his work, compared to Lin’s $20,000 prize money. At the dedication ceremony, Maya Lin’s name wasn’t mentioned once.

But time would be on her side. She had fought for a design she believed in, visualized what she was working to bring to life, and realized that vision. Within a year, people were clamoring for interviews with her. They finally understood her vision for the memorial because they could experience it themselves.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial became a sacred place. Today it’s one of the most famous monuments in the world, with over five million visitors each year.

So, what are you working toward?

Visualization is the practice of considering how you want to show up in the world. Creating meaningful work isn’t going to happen by accident. It requires thoughtfulness and channeling what you believe to be true about the world into your work. But in order to do that, you must understand what you’re working toward. You have to visualize the future state and hold onto the integrity of your ideas along the way.

The reason you must understand what you’re aiming toward is because directions in life are mutually exclusive. Certain decisions and paths preclude others. Tim Urban, author and writer behind the popular blog Wait But Why, visualizes this concept in a graphic that shows all the life paths closed to you versus those that remain open. You have made decisions in your life and work that have led you to this point. You can’t go back in time and change those.

Source: Tim Urban, @waitbutwhy on X

But there are still dozens of decision points—tributaries—ahead of you that you can use to guide yourself toward realizing the best version of yourself and your work. But you must bring your vision to the forefront and understand what you’re working toward to optimize your decision-making in this moment.

The challenge is that many of us have become decision averse. We don’t want to cross any options off the table. But eliminating options isn’t restrictive: it’s empowering. This frees us to focus and bring our best ideas to life. Decisions are how we come to define our lives and our work. And deliberate, thoughtful decisions are the most powerful currency available to help you realize your vision.

Early in my career, I wanted to be everything and, as a result, was unable to commit to anything. I wanted to be an author, entrepreneur, director, photographer, musician, and that’s just a fraction of the list. I convinced myself that I could balance dozens of unrelated goals. But progress proved impossible because I was unwilling to prioritize and had no idea what I was aiming toward.

In his book, Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman explains, “Since every real-world choice about how to live entails the loss of countless alternative ways of living, there’s no reason to procrastinate, or to resist making commitments, in the anxious hope that you might somehow be able to avoid those losses. Loss is a given. That ship has sailed—and what a relief.”

Visualization forces us to realize that we can’t be everything. We have to understand, at our core, what we can’t live without. Then we must sacrifice and optimize decisions for what matters most.

Realizing your vision

Maya Lin faced many of these decisions in her architecture. What type of experience was she trying to create? What was she trying to say about death? How would the memorial pay its heartfelt respect to the fallen soldiers, veterans, and their families? How would she make it feel like a private, personal experience? What tradeoffs would she make with how visitors moved through the memorial? All of these decision points required a holistic understanding of the vision she was working toward to ensure all elements of the memorial worked together.

Visualization works in both the immediate and long-term. It’s helpful to visualize both your next move and your ultimate goal. What does it look like if you project ten years into the future on your current path? Is that the life you envision for yourself? What feels right? What needs to be different? The same exercise can be applied to your current work on a shorter timeframe. Do you understand and know what you’re working toward? Have you built conviction around that direction? Once you know this, you can track the optimal path and fine-tune your near-term tactics to give you the best chance at making progress against your longer-term vision.

Remember: you are the architect of your own life and work. But you must understand the shape of what you’re building to create anything worthwhile. When you know what you’re working toward, you empower yourself to make tough decisions and navigate challenging tradeoffs in favor of your ultimate goal. But it will always require some sort of sacrifice. It’s your job to determine where you’re willing to make those sacrifices and which elements of your work take precedence, demanding an unyielding approach.

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Sources:

[1] Branch, Mark Alden. "Maya Lin: after the wall." Progressive Architecture, vol. 75, no. 8, Aug. 1994, pp. 60+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A15739154/GPS?u=denver&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=2d91b918.

 [2] Burkeman, Oliver. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

[3] Clinton, Chelsea, and Grace Lin. She Persisted: Maya Lin. Philomel Books, 2022.

[4] Lin, Maya. Boundaries. Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition, 2006.

[5] Menand, Louis. "The Reluctant Memorialist.” The New Yorker, vol. 78, no. 18, 8 July 2002. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A88605695/GPS?u=denver&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=969bd096.

[6] Mock, Freida Lee, director. Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision. Ocean Releasing, 1994.

[7] "Thinking With Her Hands." Whole Earth, winter 2000, p. 72. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A68617397/GPS?u=denver&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=0aa391a1.

[8] Urban, Tim, @waitbutwhy. “We think a lot about those black lines, forgetting that it’s all still in our hands.” 5 March 2021, 10:14 AM, https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy/status/1367871165319049221?lang=en.

Run Your Own Race

“What is my job on the planet? What is it that needs doing, that I know something about, that probably won’t happen unless I take responsibility for it?”

— Buckminster Fuller

In the mid-1990s, whether you were an investor or entrepreneur, everyone in technology was flocking to internet startups. Companies like eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo were gearing up for monstrous initial public offerings. It was a frenzy.

Meanwhile, Tony Fadell went to work for Philips building consumer electronics and handheld computing devices. Everyone told him he was out of his mind. Philips was a dinosaur. The Internet was where all the innovation was happening and fortunes were being made. No one needed another handheld device. But while everyone else chased lucrative internet startups, Fadell continued building hardware. 

Prior to Philips, Fadell spent five years working at General Magic—a failed company that lives on in the lore of Silicon Valley because of its alumni who went on to play pivotal roles at Adobe, Android, Apple, Google, and Nest, among others. 

At General Magic, the team worked to create a mobile computing device for personal communications and entertainment. It was released as the Sony Magic Link and had a phone, touchscreen, email, apps, games, a way to buy plane tickets, and animated emojis. The problem was that the technology wasn’t reliable and it was built for an audience that didn’t yet exist. 

The product was clunky—its processors weren’t fast enough, the touch screens weren’t great, and the battery life was too short. The team at General Magic built almost everything from scratch which was incredibly time consuming and expensive. And in 1995, the Internet was still in its infancy—email had yet to reach widespread adoption. The device became an exercise in innovation to impress other engineers at the company. The team failed to start with a problem that real people experienced and could relate to. They were ten years too early.

As the product floundered, Fadell created a plan to pivot away from making a communications and entertainment device for the general public, instead focusing exclusively on businesspeople. He pitched the idea to Philips since they were already a partner, making semiconductors and processing parts for General Magic.

Explore a different angle

Fadell held to his conviction that there was room for something amazing between desktop computers and cell phones. After pitching the mobile computing device for businesspeople on the go, he joined Philips full-time and got to work. It remained a niche market, but they successfully launched the Philips Velo in 1997 and the Philips Nino in 1998.

In 1999, after a successful run at Philips, Fadell left to start his own company. His vision at Fuse Systems was to build a better digital music player. People were starting to ship MP3 players but they were all clunky and difficult to use. And Fadell was tired of hauling around his collection of CDs everywhere he went. 

Again, he was cautioned by peers that he was continuing to compound his own mistakes by remaining in consumer electronics while the next big wave in tech passed him by. In 1999, internet startups were reaching their pinnacle of hysteria. Fadell continued to stick with personal electronics because that’s what he loved and that’s what he wanted to learn—bridging hardware and software, atoms and electrons.

The dot-com bubble finally burst in 2000—markets crashed and venture capital funding dried up with it. Fadell pitched his company to 80 different VCs and was rejected by every single one. Risk off. No one was interested in investing—even if it wasn’t internet related.

The team at Fuse was barely hanging on when Fadell received a call from Apple in late 2000. Apple had recently purchased iTunes and the application was starting to take off. Steve Jobs wanted iTunes to work with MP3 players and realized Apple needed its own device.

Jobs asked Fadell to join Apple as a consultant on an initiative to create a digital music device, codenamed Project Dulcimer. Fadell agreed, hoping he could use that money to continue paying his team or parlay it into a buyout for Fuse. 

As conversations developed, Fadell joined Apple full-time in January 2001 and brought over his team from Fuse. Jobs signed off on the concept for the device proposed by Fadell and his team in March. And the first iPod was shipped in November.

Fadell led the team that created the first 18 generations of the iPod and the first three generations of the soon-to-be iPhone. 

While people thought he was a fool to stick with hardware and personal electronics for a decade across five companies, by the time Apple called him to make the iPod, he knew exactly how to do it. Every job he held had given him a different vantage point on the same problem. He built a more complete view of the challenge and knew with precision what to work backward from. 

In retrospect, Fadell’s decision to stick with personal electronics seems obvious. But to hang in there for a decade while everyone around you is clamoring after the next big thing—internet startups—and constantly in your ear about missing out while they make nauseating amounts of money is no small feat. That takes serious discipline and trust in yourself. 

Chase problems you care about solving, not trends

Fadell was never optimizing for money. His primary focus was aligning to problems he wanted to learn more about and a space he was passionate about driving forward. That meant building devices and working at the intersection of hardware and software. It’s what he loved doing and that was enough justification for him. 

The most difficult challenge we face in life is to avoid getting pulled into races we aren’t willing to run. It’s why we end up chasing trends or grow insatiable in our quest for more. We’re perpetually consumed with a bigger title, a larger paycheck, the next milestone in life. We don’t want to miss out on anything. But this comes at the cost of sacrificing ourselves along the way. 

Oftentimes we allow ourselves to be carried away by the herd because it gives us a convenient excuse to cling to throughout life. By not committing to our own personal direction, we tell ourselves what could have been. “If I wanted to, I could have written a book, built my own company, led this team.” But you didn’t. The fear of actually dedicating yourself to becoming, grinding it out, and putting your ass on the line left you cowering in fear. So you chased after everyone else. 

To combat this, you must determine what is your own. You must slow down to clarify what you’re after, hone in on the problems you want to spend your time thinking about, and ignore everything else that gets in the way.

If you allow yourself to get caught up in the status quo—what everyone else around you is doing—it’s easy to end up in a dead-end career. You trap yourself into solving problems you don’t find meaning in and in doing so, diminish the impact you could have otherwise had. 

You’re not going to make a dent in this world or create anything meaningful by jumping ship every two years and chasing the next big thing. If you’re deeply interested in a problem and care about solving it, you have to stick with it, regardless of who thinks it matters. Over a long enough time horizon things will work out in your favor.

Staying true to yourself will be the hardest, loneliest thing you will ever do. You’re going to be standing in the wilderness wondering what you’re doing while other people get rich and seem to have it all together. But authenticity is about playing the long game—what can you sustain indefinitely? What were you meant to bring to life? That’s where your best work is born from. 

And while those same people who got rich overnight lose it just as fast and get written off as one-hit wonders, you will have slowly built an empire. Because you ran your own race. 

Ready yourself to face distractions

You’re still going to receive calls that entice you—opportunities to make more money, follow your friends, work on something trendy. But these are distractions that will only pull you away from the work you find real meaning in. That’s why you must determine what you’re after and hold to that with all your might. 

You must be able to navigate these distractions without losing yourself along the way. Do you have the willpower to stand up for yourself? Are you prepared to do the hard thing and turn down opportunities that don’t align with where you want to go? Do you have the endurance to stick with a problem you care about while everyone else jumps ship and tells you it’s a waste of time?

In 1973, Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar Animation Studios, visited Disney to pitch a new computer rendering technology for animation. Disney laughed him off and instead tried to tempt him into a job designing theme parks with the Imagineering team. Holy shit, what a cool job. Since childhood, Catmull had been fascinated with Disney. But he turned it down without hesitation. He knew it was a diversion. He wanted to animate. And he trusted that. 

Life will throw everything it can at you—attempting to distract or tempt you along the way. That’s the test you must face. When things get tough are you going to give up on the work you care about? When the easy money or the comfortable job comes knocking are you going to sell out on your own priorities? Or are you going to stand steadfast in what matters most to you—the work you are meant to do?

If authenticity is what you’re after, you have to find and stick with what you believe in. You have to trust yourself enough to run your own race. And if you do, it’s just a matter of time before you come out ahead. 

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Sources:

1. Build by Tony Fadell

2. General Magic by Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude

3. Masters of Scale with Tony Fadell

4. The Tim Ferriss Show: On Building the iPod, iPhone, Nest, and a Life of Curiosity

5. Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

Call Your Own Shots

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood…”

— Teddy Roosevelt

Jordan Peele, like so many other comedians, saw Saturday Night Live as the pinnacle of sketch comedy. By 2008, Peele had worked his way up the ranks through Boom Chicago, Second City, and Mad TV to hone his sketch and improv skills. Along the way, he earned a reputation for imitations. He could become anyone. 

Around this time, Senator Barack Obama was emerging as a leading candidate for the Presidency and SNL needed someone to play the part. Peele received a call from Seth Myers asking if he had an Obama impression. Peele worked on it for a week then flew out to New York to audition. This was his chance to reach the top after years of hard work.

Peele played it perfectly. SNL offered him the job. There was only one problem—he was still under contract at Mad TV. Peele figured he could negotiate his way out, but the producers at Mad TV wouldn’t budge. Despite his pleas, they refused to concede. He was required to finish out his contract. End of conversation. 

Peele was crushed. SNL was the dream he had worked so hard towards for his entire career. And just like that, with an offer in hand, it was ripped out from underneath him. What right did these network executives have to use his fate as a bargaining chip? Peele was forced to grapple with an uncertain path forward. 

In the weeks, months, and years that followed, Peele discovered a way to channel the anger and frustration from the experience. He realized that if he could become a producer, he would have more leverage and avoid trapping himself in a similar position in the future. 

Peele recognized that producers were the ones making the final decisions about art and comedy. But most of them were shit at it. They mindlessly followed what had worked in the past and were oblivious to what made good art or comedy. Peele was tired of everything having to pass through these gatekeepers to reach audiences. 

Seize creative control

In 2009, after a five-year run at Mad TV and 94 episodes, Peele’s contract finally expired. And he set out with full force to take creative control over his own comedy and content.

As Peele found his footing, he began to explore the idea of his own sketch show with Keegan-Michael Key, a fellow Mad TV alumnus. And the more they discussed the concept, the more they realized it was something they had to do. Key & Peele was born soon after. 

Over the course of thirteen weeks, Key and Peele created more than 250 sketches that showcased the breadth of their comedic skills. They would pare this down to 54 sketches for the first season. As their own executive producers, they could take bigger risks than they otherwise might have been able to. They were constantly assessing how far they could push because that’s what they believed audiences deserved.

The show would run for five seasons on Comedy Central. It is widely considered to be one of the best sketch series ever created. Key & Peele dialed into what they knew people were thinking but might not be saying, and brought it to life through comedy. The polished, bite-sized skits only increased their virality online. Skits like “Obama’s Anger Translator” and “Substitute Teacher” became staples in popular culture. But without Peele pursuing creative control, they would have never been made. 

When Peele was forced to let the SNL offer go, he could have thrown up his hands. He could have accepted that he was powerless against the weight of those who held creative control and made the executive decisions. But instead, he used this as motivation to seize creative control. To define his own work. To answer to himself.

Unveil the hidden risks

Despite what we might tell ourselves, there’s no real justification for taking a hands-off approach in our own lives. But we often do exactly this. We get comfortable operating as passengers in our own stories and console ourselves with empty anecdotes like ‘whatever happens, happens.’ The consequence is that we let mediocre leaders, peers, producers, and executives dictate our future. 

In our indifference, we allow inertia to dull the edges of our work and limit our trajectory.

Living—at least meaningfully—requires a hands-on approach. You are the only one who understands what brings you life, why that matters to you, and where you want to take your work. There are certainly things that exist beyond your control. But you damn well better pry back control of the things that are. 

You must move with conviction, direct your own life, and learn to circumvent the gatekeepers. When you subject yourself to the whims of a committee whose opinions you don’t respect, you end up compromising on too many critical aspects of your work.

There is an important difference between collaborators and gatekeepers. Gatekeepers are rent-seeking suits who justify their position through resource guarding. Collaborators are operators with skin in the game who want to help you wrestle back creative control. Collaborators pass the foxhole test.

The difference is in intention and risk tolerance. Gatekeepers aren’t looking to push things forward. They’re just trying to follow a playbook that prescribes success. Why take a risk on something new when you can make Batman for the 97th time? Never mind that it’s derivative or that in 50 years our grandkids are going to be convinced that we lacked any sort of original thought and we all had a superhero fetish to boot. 

It’s important to surround yourself with collaborators who push you and help bring your work to life. The work that’s true to you. The work that’s helping you to uncover what you believe about the world. Not a watered-down version. Collaborators will be there in the trenches helping you dig.

Create leverage

Similar to creative control, another way to think about this is by seizing the means of production. It gives you flexibility to set the tone. It creates an opportunity for you to go on the offensive, create momentum, and stop resistance in its tracks. 

By 210 B.C., Carthaginian general Hannibal had been wreaking havoc, fighting on the doorstep of Italy for sixteen years. The Roman general, Scipio Africanus grew tired of being baited into exhausting battles that they couldn’t win. Scipio then turned his attention to slowly capturing Hannibal’s means of production so he could better dictate the battles moving forward. 

Scipio’s first step was to take control of New Carthage in Spain—a regional capital where the Carthaginians stored vast amounts of wealth and supplies. Then he realized New Carthage depended on Carthage so he took the battle to modern-day Tunisia. This forced Hannibal and his army to return to their homeland and play defense for the first time in more than a decade. And finally, Scipio saw that Carthage depended on its fertile farmlands for material prosperity, so he struck the Bagradas Valley. This was a turning point in the war. Carthage sued for peace and they were all but eliminated as a threat to Rome. 

By controlling the means of production, Scipio was able to dictate his own terms. You always want to be able to set the tempo, rather than allowing yourself to be thrashed around, reacting to events happening around you. 

Maximize your upside

When you take creative control, you put yourself on the line. You assume the risk. But you also gain exposure to the upside. Both in terms of success and in what you’re learning.

You will learn far more creating your own art, training for your own race, or launching your own startup than you otherwise would optimizing the sign-up funnel at a behemoth tech company, mindlessly consuming sports, or performing sketches that have to be approved by a committee of risk-averse producers.

Far from being the thing that derailed Jordan Peele’s career, not being able to work things out at SNL allowed him to be more ambitious in his work. In five seasons at Key & Peele, he was able to hone his own writing and directing abilities which would prove invaluable later in his career. He was able to pursue more ideas, explore more worlds, and craft more characters than he would have been able to playing by someone else’s rules.

Peele leaned in, taking more creative control and risks when he could have retreated. In doing so, he created a far steeper trajectory in his own career. While it was impossible to know then how things might play out, he trusted himself and his intentions to move towards taking back creative control over his own ideas. And he acted upon that. This gave him more flexibility, room to maneuver, and eliminated dependencies that stood in the way of bringing his ideas to life. 

By taking creative control and calling our own shots, we put our ass on the line. But this demands its own level of respect. The credit belongs to the man in the arena.

When we shut the escape hatch and there’s no turning back, our commitment is what empowers us. It’s what emboldens us to face obstacles and gatekeepers head-on. In doing so, we create more opportunities to show up and take risks for what we believe in. And in those moments when we move unapologetically towards creating something that resonates with us, the universe has a tendency to answer the call.

Bet on yourself. Always.

Subtract To Get To Your Truth

“Knowledge is subtractive, not additive—what we subtract (reduction by what does not work, what not to do), not what we add (what to do).”

— Nassim Taleb

On August 6th, 1986, Bob Dylan walked off the stage at Paso Robles State Fairgrounds alongside Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers and he knew he was done. Dylan had one more stretch of shows lined up with Petty the following year—The Temples in Flames Tour—but after that, it was time to hang it up.

It had been 25 years since an unassuming kid from Hibbing, Minnesota showed up in Greenwich Village to immerse himself alongside his heroes in the folk-music community. And it was a legendary run. But Dylan acknowledged the reality of what his fans, critics, and peers had already voiced, his best days were behind him.

Dylan could no longer fill stadiums on his own and had to rely on big names like Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers or The Grateful Dead to draw crowds. He struggled to write new material—not that he had much desire to do so. And despite the hundreds of songs he had written over the course of his career, there were only a handful he would consider playing. 

During the Summer tour in 1986, Benmont Tench, the keyboardist in Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, often pleaded with Dylan to include different songs in the set, like “Spanish Harlem Incident” or “Chimes of Freedom.” Dylan would muster up some excuse or play it off until he was able to divert the attention away from himself. 

The reality is that he could no longer remember where most of the songs he wrote came from. He couldn’t relate to or understand how he might even attempt to bring those songs back to life. They were a mystery lost to the past. 

Dylan’s plan was to coast through the final tour with the same 20 songs and try to come out unscathed before he went into hiding. That was the deal he made with himself to get through one more run.

The next year before kicking off his final tour with Petty, Dylan was scheduled to play a few shows with The Grateful Dead. He traveled to San Rafael, California to rehearse with The Dead at their studio. After an hour of rehearsal, it was clear that the strategy he used with Petty wasn’t going to work. The Dead were adamant about playing different songs from the depths of Dylan’s catalog. Material he could barely recall. 

He sat panicked and knew he had to get out. The Dead were asking for someone he felt no longer existed. During a lull in the rehearsal, Dylan falsely claimed he left something at the hotel. He stepped out of the studio and onto Front Street to plan his escape.

After wandering for a few blocks, Dylan heard music coming from the door of a small bar and figured that was as good of a place to hide out as any. Only a few patrons stood inside and the walls were baked in cigarette smoke. Towards the back of the bar, a jazz quartet rattled off old ballads like “Time On My Hands.” Dylan ordered a drink and studied the singer—an older man in a suit and tie. As the singer navigated the songs, it was relaxed, not forceful. He eased into them with natural power and instinct. 

As Dylan listened on, there was something familiar in the way the old jazz singer approached the songs. It wasn’t in his voice, it was in the song itself. Suddenly, it brought Dylan back to himself and something he once knew but had lost over the years—a way back to his songs. 

Earlier in his career, Dylan wasn’t worried about the image that others projected upon him, the expectations, or the fame. All he cared about was connecting with the song and doing it the justice it deserved. He was there to bring the words to life—a conduit of sorts. The old jazz singer had reminded him of this simple truth and where to pull from.

Returning to The Grateful Dead’s rehearsal hall, Dylan picked up where he left off like nothing happened. He was rusty and it would take years for him to truly get back to form, but he settled back into a state of relaxed concentration by returning to his principles that were buried underneath all the success, failure, praise, and criticism.

As he continued the final tour with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, over the first four shows Dylan played 80 different songs, never repeating a single one, just to see if he could do it. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t always pretty. But he was starting to tap back into himself and knew how to reach the music again. 

Where am I?

In our own lives, we inevitably reach moments where we feel like we’ve lost ourselves along the way. Where am I? How did I get here? What am I even trying to do? We feel like fragments of our former selves. Exhausted rather than energized by the challenges we face. 

Dylan is not alone in his experience. When we lose the connection to ourselves, our work, careers, and lives grow stagnant. We can’t create anything meaningful if we’re absently going through the motions. Gradually, then suddenly we become strangers to ourselves. 

As the emptiness creeps in, there’s a temptation to go into hiding. We fixate on our faults and let that feeling wash over us. We lose ourselves in the darkness. And when we get stuck here, we compromise our own integrity and the integrity of our work.

Life is deceptive in this way. We overcomplicate things. We inflate the importance of things that don’t really matter. We lose track of what brings us to life—the things we find deeper meaning in. We let our guiding principles fall out of focus. 

In the messiness of life, we make small compromises that add up over time. We say yes to the wrong things and no to the right ones. Things start to pile up. And the more we stack on top of ourselves, the deeper we bury our own priorities. Eventually, the weight of it all drags us down and obscures our vision. 

At this point, we can continue adding more, doing more, always saying yes, never saying no, breaking ourselves to meet the expectations cast upon us. We can continue floundering and creating more distance from ourselves. Or we can step back and ask, is this still serving me? What do I need to shed to come back to myself? What’s at my foundation?

Finding our way back

Sometimes the way back to yourself is through subtraction. 

This starts with peeling back the layers that have built up over the years.

What’s hidden underneath it all? 
What was your original motivation in your work? 
What got you here in the first place? 
What did you know then that you’ve since forgotten? 
What about this once brought you joy?

Finding a way to return to the simple truths we once knew can help us realign ourselves. Our foundation reminds us of what we set out for.

Far too often we attribute our identities to things that are beyond our control. We get caught up chasing what’s external to us because we trick ourselves into believing that’s what makes us who we are. But we are not our jobs, companies, titles, or paychecks. We are not the criticism, praise, accolades, or rejection we face. We exist beyond that. 

When we are just starting out, we instinctively understand this. We focus on internals and creating from what we know to be true about ourselves. We build from what inspires us. And that is enough. Because that’s all we really know. 

As Dylan faced this struggle, inspiration from an unlikely source brought him back to a beginner’s mindset and the principles he understood early in his career before everything got so carried away. Performing was about reaching for the truth within the song and putting that front and center. 

This mindset allowed him to tap back into himself. He was able to once again find meaning in his songs and remember why he was doing what he was doing. He embraced his responsibility to perform each song to the best of his ability. 

From this point on, Dylan focused on playing smaller theaters and more intimate shows—drawing songs from every stage of his career, reinterpretations, new songs, and rarities. Returning to the basic truths he lost along the way led to his resurgence as an artist. Rather than signaling the end of his career, The Temples in Flames Tour helped Dylan uncover the start of something new.

Letting go to remember

Connecting back to yourself starts with cutting away the nonessentials and reminding yourself how you found your way here in the first place. Subtract to get to the truth of things. 

In the process of letting go, you start to remember who you are and what you find meaning in. 

This doesn’t mean you should try to recreate the past. You can’t go back in time. Dylan wasn’t trying to bring a younger version of himself back to life. He was just returning to the principles that set everything in motion and rebuilding from there.

A beginner’s mindset can help you distill the real parts of yourself—the anchors that give you substance and depth. By paring down to what’s real and what’s within your control, you tap back into what sustains you. And as you sift through the rock, dirt, and debris, you free yourself to move with conviction towards bringing your best work to life. 

3 Questions to Help You Rise to the Level of Mastery

“To rise to the level of mastery requires intense dedication. You have to really want it. What would make you have such commitment and dedication?”

— Robert Greene

At the start of my career, I wondered what I was doing wrong. I wanted to dedicate myself to my career, but I didn’t trust myself to know which potential directions were worth going all in on. I was terrified of making the wrong decision. And my early 20s, ego gave me a false sense of confidence and deluded me into believing I could be anything I set my mind to. Rather than eliminating options and accepting that directions in life are mutually exclusive, I sat in indecision. 

But the truth is that you can’t be anything in this life. There are things you are uniquely suited to do based on your skill set, interests, and experiences. And the sooner you accept this reality and cross options off the list, the more time you give yourself to dedicate to the things you’re uniquely good at. But this demands reflection—you have to allow yourself to reflect on the skills you’ve excelled at, the subject areas you’re naturally drawn towards, and where you find meaning. 

What are you naturally good at?

At 24, I was living in Nashville with no idea what I wanted to do in my life. One weekend, I forced myself to go to a coffee shop around the corner, put my headphones on, and write. It was the first time since I was eight years old that I was writing for fun.

Over previous months of reflection, I asked myself what I was naturally drawn towards in childhood and what skills I excelled at without trying as hard as other kids. I remembered that writing was one of those things so I pushed myself to reconnect with this. The connection was immediate and the state of flow I was able to achieve in writing was addicting. That’s how I knew I was on the right track. 

As I used writing to reflect on who I was, I also started to recall how industrious I was as a kid, working to generate extra money. From as early as I can remember, I was working my way through the neighborhood mowing yards, shoveling snow, or starting a mobile snow-cone operation on the back of a wagon that I’d roll door to door during the summer. I loved testing new ideas.

And finally, as I searched for how to fit the pieces together and what to focus on, I began reading for enjoyment again—another thing I loved as a kid and lost through school over the years. This allowed me to hone my sense of focus. I also began to develop stronger strategic thinking skills and stack mental models from different disciplines against each other to improve my decision-making.

All of this led me to a career in product management that I’m deeply invested in. Product demands an elite level of resourcefulness, focus, and communication skills. You have to be driven to create, take risks, and articulate stories in a way that resonates with different audiences. And you have to be able to quickly evaluate directions from multiple perspectives. These were all things I showed aptitude in from an early age. I just had to reconnect with those things and forget all the shit that happened between age 8 and 24 to get back there and align myself to that. 

Perhaps the most important aspect of this is that when you leverage skills that come naturally to you, you can outwork everyone else around you because the work itself is deeply rewarding and where you find your flow state. Your validation comes from the craft itself—internal, not external.

If your goal is mastery, the first step is reconnecting with your childhood interests and skills that come naturally to you. These are the places you must invest in.

To achieve alignment and build from a place of authenticity, you must first remember who you are.

What subject matter are you drawn towards?

During the early part of my career, I bounced between different industries—music, film, healthcare, and insurance. And what I learned through exploration was that those weren’t the things I cared deeply about. After a year or two in each, I was bored and struggled to sustain a connection with the problems we were tackling.

When I started my career in film production working on set for major music videos, I was barely able to sustain two summers in that line of work. It seemed glamorous from the outside looking in. But the inefficiency of working 22 hours for a three-minute music video drove me insane. And most importantly, I wasn’t willing to struggle for the end result because I didn’t connect with many aspects of the work that I was exposed to—whether finance, set design, project management, or cinematography.

I also found I didn’t have a natural interest in the entertainment industry or the value we were providing. And if you don’t care about the subject you’re focused on, it’s going to be tough to stick it out.

But early on, finding something that doesn’t resonate with you can be just as valuable as finding something that does. Because it helps you eliminate a direction and move on. The goal is to learn and refine to better align yourself with each move. 

Through trial and error, the subject areas that I’ve found a deeper interest in are philosophy, education, and finance. After close to a decade of exploration, before I applied to my current job, I knew I was going to stick with edtech and fintech as the sectors I wanted to work in. And it worked. Snapdocs is in the broader fintech category and I find the work endlessly fascinating. So I can stick it out despite the challenges and obstacles in the way of achieving our vision.

There are subjects you’re naturally drawn towards. Consider what you enjoy reading and learning about right now. That’s your starting place. The more you invest in these things, the better. Because it’s very difficult to sustain interest in a field or subject that you aren’t pulling from a deeper sense of curiosity about.

Mastery requires a relentless level of focus and effort.

Where do you find meaning?

And finally, you must also search for meaning. Because no matter how naturally talented you are and how interested you are in a field, you have to find meaning in the work or you’ll forever lack the persistence that mastery requires. 

This can show up in different ways but once unlocked it’s the force multiplier that allows you to endure. Whether it comes from the group of people you’re building alongside or the end result you’re driving towards or the brokenness you’re working to fix. There will be weeks and months that test your limits. If you lack meaning, it will be impossible to continue showing up. Mastery demands endurance. 

“Almost nothing in the world can resist persistent human energy. Things will yield if we strike enough blows with enough force.”

— Robert Greene

I find meaning in accelerating personal growth and pushing the confines of my current limits. I find meaning through the people I’m collaborating with on a daily basis to solve challenging problems. And I also find meaning in solving problems that translate directly to human outcomes. That’s one of the reasons I love my current position, I’m motivated to make the disaster that is the home buying experience less shitty. I want it to be accessible and more transparent for everyone involved. And it’s incredibly challenging. But worth it, because the end result we’re working towards is meaningful to me and I’m able to test myself along the way. 

Another way to think of this is asking yourself, what are you willing to suffer for? You’re going to struggle regardless of the line of work you enter. It’s going to be hard. There will be moments that piss you off or lead you to question what you’re doing. To get through these moments, you have to recognize and reconnect with a deeper reason that keeps you going.

Where do you find meaning? You can endure anything if there’s a deeper connection to your craft and the problem you’re focused on. Keep this front and center and you will be able to persevere when the inevitable obstacles stand in your way. Endurance is foundational in the pursuit of mastery. So what are you willing to show up for every single day?

Rising to the level of mastery

Once you’ve achieved alignment with the answers to these three questions, you’re on your way. But you still have to put in the work. You still have to show up. There is no path towards mastery without having skin in the game. 

As tempting as it might be to distance yourself from the work and make it easier on yourself, this works in opposition to mastering your craft. You can never be above the work. This also helps ensure your incentives are aligned and you have a vested interest in the outcome. Because even when you come up short, you can always take solace in the fact that the credit belongs to the man in the arena. 

When you’ve aligned yourself to skills that differentiate you, subjects you’re naturally drawn towards, and focused on where you find meaning, this all acts as a force multiplier for your work. 

You are uniquely positioned to bring certain things to life. You can’t be everything. And if you want to maximize what you’re giving back to this world, the sooner you focus on mastering what you’re uniquely positioned to contribute, the more fulfillment you will find.

The Art of Drawdown Periods

Inspiration is important. Your influences matter. But you also need time to process, reflect, and create your own connections before jumping into your next project. Whether that’s a book, startup, or scientific theory, the lesson holds true for artists, entrepreneurs, and scientists, alike.

Best-selling author, Ryan Holiday, refers to these as “drawdown periods.” In the months leading up to writing a new book, Holiday guards himself against new information with the potential to clutter this mind. Instead, he seeks a period of stillness where he’s able to distill information and settle his mind before jumping off and creating something new.

““For one of my books I gave myself a January 1 start date for the writing. Two months before, in November, I entered my drawdown period. No more reading or rereading. Just thinking. Long walks. Resting. Preparing.””

— Ryan Holiday

The danger of neglecting a drawdown period is failing to create a buffer where you’re able to discover and piece together your own thoughts on the subject. Instead, you’re just regurgitating the latest idea or concept you’ve heard, as if it’s your own. To be fair, this is human nature — we’re highly impressionable, social beings.

But creating a little more distance is a good thing. It provides additional perspective that you’re able to bring back to your work. Without this, you’re just facing an onslaught of information and distraction which can be difficult to make sense of.

Is your idea worth pursuing?

Above everything else, drawdown periods help inform whether or not an idea’s worth pursuing. The original source of “drawdown periods” — where Holiday borrowed the concept from — was military strategist, John Boyd. After he encountered a breakthrough or exciting new idea, he would spend weeks examining it, assessing its originality, and stress-testing it for problems. If it survived this period, he knew it was worth investing in.

The greater the endeavor, the more vital a drawdown period becomes. It’s important to act when inspiration strikes as it relates to the little things — an article, a small experiment, a new tactic. But the mountains — new books, startups, theories — are worth reflecting on before jumping in.

This helps create a natural filter for the things you’re not completely invested in. If the idea still resonates with you tomorrow, next week, next month, you might be on to something.

Tapering before the race

Far from killing inspiration, drawdown periods promote creativity. They allow you to find your voice and the guiding principle behind your next project. Without this, it’s impossible to sort through what’s your own.

Drawdown periods are the calm before the storm. If you set off scrambling without first setting your feet, you’re putting yourself behind from the start. While everyone loses their way at some point, it’s important to have a sense of your guiding principle — this initial footing — that you can return to along the way. And the best way to establish an early version of your guiding principle is by creating room to reflect before taking the leap.

Creative work is difficult enough, as is. Don’t make it more difficult by cluttering your mind at the start. Allow yourself time to breathe before setting off on your next pursuit.

It’s similar to tapering before a race. If you’re rested, you’ll be in better condition to handle the strenuous demands of the real race and guard yourself against burnout. In endurance sports, two days before a race, your metabolic fitness level is what it will be for the upcoming race. No matter how hard you train during those final 48 hours, you won’t see any benefits to your endurance in time for the race. Rest matters.

The value of tuning out

In 1902, Albert Einstein took a job at the Swiss patent office. The years he spent there could be considered the ultimate drawdown period. It was challenging enough to keep his mind engaged, but not enough to distract him from his more important focus on comprehending and redefining physics.

Three years later, Einstein published his paper, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” which outlines the special theory of relativity. Its contributions to the field of physics were profound. But one of the most astonishing things about the paper was that it had exactly zero footnotes or citations. It was like he reached the conclusions through years of pure thought, without listening to outside opinion.

While Einstein is an extreme example and a profound abstract thinker, the underlying lesson holds true. For originality and creativity, sometimes you need to allow yourself to tune out.

““If you’re constantly exposed to other people’s ideas, it can be tough to think up your own.” ”

— Jake Knapp + John Zeratsky

Deliberate or impulsive?

Drawdown periods aren’t an excuse to avoid getting started. You’re never going to be as prepared as you might like. Drawdown periods are more about giving yourself a moment of calm before the grind of creating something from nothing. New startups, books, and theories can take years, if not decades, to develop.

The difference between great artists, entrepreneurs, and scientists is the difference between drawdown periods and procrastination. Drawdown periods are deliberate. Procrastination is impulsive.

At a certain point, it helps to limit exposure and turn things back to yourself. Allow yourself to mull ideas, forge connections on your own terms, and see what comes out of it. It’s impossible to find your own voice if you’re bombarding yourself with other people’s ideas without giving yourself time to breathe.

Drawdown periods offer a temporary refrain when you’re able to step back and see the terrain. This allows you a chance to appreciate the interconnected whole and create connections or bridge ideas that you might have otherwise missed. The more perspective you can build, the better you’ll be for it. And the same goes for your craft.

As a smart creative, drawdown periods are essential. Give yourself time to prepare, rest, and reflect before your next endeavor. You’ll need every ounce of energy you have if you want to get your thinking clean and bring the best version of an idea to life.

Forget Your Purpose, Start with Meaning

The stories we hear of the successful often make it seem like they were destined for greatness. They identified their purpose from an early age and forged ahead, cutting down distractions in their path. But if you peel back the facade, few encountered sudden revelations. Purpose is hard won.

Child prodigies like Mozart or Tiger Woods are the exception. Robert Greene, best-selling author, worked dozens of jobs as a construction worker, hotel receptionist, translator, and screenwriter, before pitching his first book, The 48 Laws of Power, at age 36. But each step gave him a greater sense of meaning and direction on his way towards writing full time.

It’s human nature to crave a sense of direction. And direction comes from purpose, identity, and authenticity, each of which are intertwined. But they’re not the same thing. If you want to make progress, you have to be able to separate these and lower the stakes. 

Meaning is what purpose is made of

The trouble with taking on purpose from day one is that it appears insurmountable. When you break it down into its individual components, it’s easier to pursue. Purpose is the series of pieces you find meaning in. 

Your life doesn’t need a single purpose out of the gate. Just as it doesn’t need a single meaning. Meaning is an ebb and flow that tracks the motion of your life. If you follow this, it leads towards things you are uniquely suited to bring to life. 

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) discovered botany only after dropping out of medical school. And he wouldn’t publish his theory of evolution until twenty-four years after his visit to the Galapagos Islands. During that time, he speculated on diversity in the natural world through experimentation and careful observation–breeding pigeons, studying barnacles, and soaking seeds in salt water to see how long they survived. What tied together these seemingly unrelated experiments–where he found meaning–was working to understand the nature of life.

Purpose becomes attainable once you stop obsessing over it and turn your attention to the little things you find meaning in on a daily basis. Meaning is within reach.

What’s meaningful to you?

As you seek meaning in your day to day, there are different strategies worth considering. Robert Greene suggests a three-part approach in his book, The Laws of Human Nature.

1. Consider inclinations in your earliest years – moments when you were unusually fascinated by certain subjects, objects, or activities. 

2. Reflect on moments when certain tasks or activities felt natural to you.

3. Determine what particular form of intelligence your brain is wired for (mathematics, logic, physical activity, words, images, music).

Do more of these things. The key is determining what’s meaningful to you and not absorbing what’s important to someone else as your own. Otherwise, you’ll miss the mark. If Darwin listened to his father and remained in medical school, he wouldn’t have joined the crew of the HMS Beagle or discovered the theory of evolution.

And this is perhaps the most difficult skill of all–sorting through the noise and determining what’s your own. It requires years of exploration, introspection, and reflection to determine for yourself. But this exercise gives you a solid start. 

The long game and force multipliers

When you focus on meaning first, you create a system that favors an action-oriented approach. You shift your mental framework from external to internal–what’s within your realm of control. And this is the mindset you need to play the long game. 

“The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game.”

— James Clear

The promise of recognition or reward can carry you for days, maybe months. But not years. Only meaning provides that. Robert Greene’s latest book, The Laws of Human Nature, was the culmination of his life’s work and took six years from start to finish. You can’t fake 72 months of sustained effort without turning things back to what’s within your control and finding a stronger sense of meaning in your daily work. 

Aspiring to win a Royal Medal or become a bestseller can still be productive, if held in perspective. But if that perspective is lost and your self-worth becomes dependent on external validation, you’ll likely give up at the first sign of criticism or apathy–and there will be plenty. 

I find meaning in reading, writing, articulating complex problems, leveraging technology to simplify (rather than overcomplicate), and using storytelling to reveal something to people about their own lives. I can sustain each of these indefinitely because they’re meaningful to me and how I make sense of the world. If recognition comes along the way, I’ll welcome it (always keep the upside). But I also won’t stake my existence on it. 

The catch is that few reach achievement without first pursuing meaning. You can get lucky and reach the top once, but to sustain at that level, like Darwin or Greene, requires something more. Meaning is a force multiplier. The stronger the connection to your work, the more force you’ll be able to exert. 

It’s almost impossible to beat someone who’s engaged, finds meaning in their work, and is committed to the long game. 

You still have to determine what you want out of life, make sacrifices, and focus on a few important things. But it’s not worth agonizing over the search for a single purpose from day one. 

Instead, look for the pieces you find meaning in. Trust yourself. Discover ways to blend your unique abilities, interests, and experiences. With dedication and reflection, you’ll discover a sense of purpose that ties it together along the way. 

Inverting the Distraction of Social Media

There are plenty of articles out there that rail against social media. The trouble is not that they’re inaccurate–most hold valid points. It’s that they’re often a laundry list of complaints without any real takeaways, other than “social media sucks” or “regulate Facebook.” At best, you get a call for moderation. 

A more effective approach is to invert the problem. How does the ever-present distraction that is social media present an advantage for you?

Most people aren’t going to dedicate their time to reading, writing, creating, training, or reflecting. Each of these are difficult things to do. It’s much easier to turn to Snapchat or Instagram as a crutch to waste away the hours. 

If you train yourself to do the difficult work that others avoid and ignore the distractions that others can’t resist, you put yourself years ahead. 

But this requires mental toughness and an ability to suffer. Most people panic at the first sign of discomfort. You’re sacrificing immediate for delayed gratification. If you’re able to master this impulse and embrace discomfort, you provide yourself more opportunities for growth. 

“We distinguished the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter the one who makes no demands on himself…”

— José Ortega y Gasset

In the age of distraction, there’s no greater differentiator than establishing yourself as a stalwart of focus and creativity. 

This comes from allowing yourself to sit with something, even if it means getting stuck. Nail Gaiman, author, uses a similar technique when he sits down to write. He gives himself permission to either write or do nothing. But everything else is off the table. Sooner or later, staring off into the distance gets boring and the only alternative is to write. 

In many ways, distractions are a training ground. Social media is just the latest culprit. If you’re able to resist the easy thing within reach and focus instead on the more challenging task, that translates across every aspect of your life. 

“Most people think they can wait around for the big moments to turn it on. But if you don’t cultivate ‘turning it on’ as a way of life in the little moments – and there are hundreds of times more little moments than big – then there’s no chance in the big moments.”

— Josh Waitzkin

You can either complain about the distraction that is social media or you can use that energy to turn in to your advantage. And it’s a tremendous advantage for those able to ignore the noise and create more. 

Are you going to sit down and do the work? Or are you going to be a sucker for another quick hit of empty recognition that comes from someone mindlessly scrolling through their feed and tapping on your status? 

Let other people wander towards distraction. Social media should be just another test to hone your focus and practice tuning out the noise. 

The more time you spend creating, the more fulfilled you are going to be. History belongs to those able to overcome the incessant distractions of their time. 

The Essential Question for Every Entrepreneur

Sometimes the best question you can ask yourself is, "Am I building something I would want?"

As an entrepreneur, this should precede every other question. If the answer is no, there's a fundamental disconnect. You're going to have a difficult time sustaining the necessary effort over the long run. Momentum comes from engagement.

The real secret to product development is creating something that you would want to use.

I evaluate every new product, opportunity, and startup that I consider pursuing with this filter. Success demands years of hard work. If I'm not engaged or I don't find purpose in the work, it's a nonstarter. Otherwise, I know I'll be at a disadvantage facing off against someone solving for their own point of need.

I use the same filter when considering partnerships or investments. I look for founders and teams who are building things they've demonstrated a deep interest in for years.

Consider those who have sustained success over decades–Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, J.K. Rowling, Oprah Winfrey, Bob Dylan, Walt Disney, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin. Each person created things they wanted in the world around them. They pursued fields of work they found engaging and compelled to contribute to. That's what kept them going.

And that's the difference between people who burn out or get lucky once and people who sustain success–regardless of industry.

But despite this simple truth, many entrepreneurs insist on building things or addressing problems that they have no real interest in themselves. Most often this is due to inexperience or a lack of integrity.

Inexperience reveals itself in early entrepreneurs who believe that their first decent idea is their only shot at making it. Instead of practicing patience, they force the issue.

But the real currency of successful startups is in execution. You can have the best idea in the world, but if it doesn't resonate with you as an individual, it's going to be difficult to get through the necessary struggles. Creating something from nothing is hard work.

The notion that ideas are a multiplier of execution is empowering. It frees you to be more selective about the startups and projects you get involved with. Instead of looking for a single brilliant idea, look for a strong idea that resonates with you and that you are uniquely suited to bring to life.

There’s no shortage of ideas out there. You might as well take on something you're aligned with and invested in so you feel like you're working towards something worthwhile.

Entrepreneurs with integrity don't involve themselves in projects that aren't aligned with their values and interests. They don't allow themselves to be distracted–even by the allure of easy money. And they don't allow envy to dictate their direction in life.

If you're building something you wouldn't actually want and that you're not proud of, you're sacrificing integrity. And integrity is far harder to come by than money, recognition, or an inflated sense of self-importance. Never mind the ensuing search for lost time.

“Your goal in life is to find out the people who need you the most, to find out the business that needs you the most, to find the project and the art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you. What you don’t want to do is be building checklists and decision frameworks built on what other people are doing. You’re never going to be that. You’ll never be good at being somebody else.”

— Naval Ravikant

The world needs more people creating real value–building things that resonate with them and pursuing work that reflects their deepest interests and principles. That's what it takes to build something great and sustain the effort that it takes to overcome inevitable obstacles.

For most hard-working, talented people it’s just a matter of time. Years of consistently showing up, learning, and dedicating time to your craft pays dividends. The power of small, calculated decisions, habits, and behaviors grows exponentially over time.

But first, you must find alignment.

Are you building something because you think someone else might want it?

Or are you creating something that you would actually want to use? This reflects a deeper interest and resilience. It's an immediate advantage that puts you in a far better position to succeed. This is where you want to be.

The Myth of Losing Your Edge

One of the biggest fears that many hardworking, talented people have is that if they ease up in any facet of their lives, they’ll lose their edge. It’s a myth that’s fueled by a failure to differentiate between internal and external expectations. If you want to be at your best, it’s important to make this distinction and assign each their proper weight.

If you’ve convinced yourself that your edge comes from orchestrating external factors–things that are by nature beyond your control–that’s your ego taking over. This mindset is what pushes people to high strung, compulsive, and rigid behavior. Attempting to inflict your will with brute force and control every variable will drive you to exhaustion.

What keeps you ahead is not a state of constant dissatisfaction and the excessive demands you place upon the world. And while you might be quick to dismiss this as the ‘slackers credo’ of aiming low, take a closer look. Renegotiating expectations has nothing to do with the trajectory of your aim. It’s about prioritization.

You do not control the actions of others, how your work is interpreted, the recognition you receive, the specific obstacles you face, or whether the perfect sequence of events unfolds immediately before you.

It’s not that these things don’t matter. But they should matter less. Because they aren’t what define your edge and they aren’t reliable metrics against which to measure yourself.

The greater importance you assign to these types of external expectations, the more dependencies you introduce, and the higher the likelihood that you’ll end up pissed off, burned out, and distracted from the work that matters most. While you might be able to influence these to an extent, any significant control you believe you possess over them is illusory.

Your real edge is in your persistence and your own abilities. Your inner drive is independent of external expectations–the two are not inextricably linked. You have to be able to separate these from one another, as the resourceful and antifragile know well.

Rather than compromising your edge, redefining internal and external expectations puts you at a significant advantage. You free yourself to focus back on the things you can actually affect–mainly, your actions, dedicating time to your craft, discovering meaning in your work, living in accordance with your principles, developing your own resourcefulness, navigating inevitable obstacles. This is the most accurate way to measure your own progress.

When you become reliant on someone or something else to determine a successful outcome or your personal sense of self-worth, you’re putting yourself in an impossible position. Dependencies introduce anxiety and envy.

The mentality of “if only X, Y, Z happened for me, that would solve everything” is more of a liability than it is an asset. And it doesn’t say much for your ability to prioritize. Why place a premium on things you can’t directly affect? You’re wasting your limited time and energy, which could be better allocated elsewhere.

What you should prioritize is a state of relaxed concentration. It’s here where your best work gets done.

When you turn your attention back to your own abilities and immerse yourself in the task at hand, the anxiety subsides. There’s something calming about putting in the work when it’s down to just you and your craft. It brings things back to self-discipline, self-expression, and the pursuit of meaning in your work, all of which are within your immediate grasp.

Most top performers, who once believed their insatiable, demanding tendencies to be their edge, will concede this with age. What you achieve in life is not conditional on your external expectations. They don’t make you better and they don’t guarantee success. There will always be other factors in play beyond your control, and that’s okay. What actually matters is your internal focus, the work you’re putting in, and the expectations you hold for yourself.

Renegotiating expectations doesn’t mean sacrificing personal aspirations or expecting less from yourself. And it doesn’t mean aiming low. It means aiming higher and demanding more–of yourself–and prioritizing that. Define yourself by substance. Not by luck or futile attempts to bend the world to your will.

When you differentiate between internal and external expectations–assigning each their proper weight–it’s not your edge that you’ll lose, it’s your angst. In its place, you’ll build gratitude and a greater capacity to focus on the work that resonates strongest with you. It’s here where you can make a real difference and develop the quiet confidence that it takes to create something meaningful.