Transcription
[Music] Let's talk about hard work. If getting wealthy is your goal, you are going to have to work as hard as you can. But hard work is absolutely no substitute for who you work with and what you work on. What you work on is probably the most important thing. And you can save yourself a lot of time if you pick the right area to work in. Picking the right people to work with is the next most important piece. And then third comes how hard you work. But they're like three legs of a stool. If you short change on any one of them, the whole stool is going to fall down. So it's not like you can pick one over the other that easily.
[Music] First, figure out what should I be doing? What is something where there is a market that is emerging? There's a product that I can build that I'm excited to work on and something where I have specific knowledge and I'm really into it.
Second, surround yourself with the best people possible. And no matter how high your bar is, raise your bar because you can never be working with other people who are great enough. There's someone greater out there to work with. You should go work with them. I advise a lot of people who are looking at which startup to join in Silicon Valley as they basically pick the one that's going to have the best alumni network for you in the future. Look at the PayPal mafia. They work with a bunch of geniuses. So, they all got rich. Try and pick based on the highest intelligence, energy, and integrity people that you can find.
And then finally, once you've picked the right thing to work on and the right people to work with, then you work as hard as you can. This is where the mythology gets a little crazy. People will work 80, 120 hour weeks. A lot of that's just status signaling. It's showing off. Nobody really works 80 to 120 hours a week sustained at high output with mental clarity. Your brain breaks down. You just won't have good ideas. Really, the way people tend to work most effectively, especially in knowledge work, is they sprint as hard as they can while they're working on something and they're inspired and they're passionate, and then they rest. They take long breaks. It's more like a lion hunting and much less like a marathon runner running. So you sprint, then you rest, you reassess, and then you try again. And what you end up doing is you end up building a marathon of sprints.
Inspiration is perishable. When you have your inspiration, do it right then and there. People talk about impatience. When do you know to be impatient? When do you know to be patient? Impatience with actions and patience with results. Anything you have to do, just get it done. Why wait? You're not getting any younger. Your life is slipping away. You don't want to spend it waiting in line. You don't want to spend it traveling back and forth. You don't want to spend it doing things that you know ultimately aren't part of your mission. And when you do them, you want to do them as quickly as you can while you do them well with your full attention. But then you just have to give up on the results. You have to be patient with the results because you're dealing with complex systems. You're dealing with lots of people. It takes a long time for markets to adopt products. It takes time for people to get comfortable working with each other. It takes time for great products to emerge as you polish away, polish away, polish away.