We Can Achieve Anything If We Stop Trying To Do Everything

“I wanted my kids to know me,” Mr Isaacson recalled Mr Jobs saying, in a posthumous tribute the biographer wrote for Time magazine. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”

“He was very human. He was so much more of a real person than most people know. That’s what made him so great,” he added. “Steve made choices. I asked him if he was glad that he had kids, and he said, ‘It’s 10,000 times better than anything I’ve ever done’.”

That's a bitter pill to swallow.

Not true. Trust me. There is no guarantee. You've not met people who are singularly pursuing a goal, and it's clear they'll never improve past what they've already achieved (which can be no better than average)?

I agree with your whole post, but I urge caution at your parenthetical because it could easily play into the VC mentality of needing 9-10 figures to consider a company successful. Of course it's easy for them to take the risk with other people's money, but as a founder you need to ask yourself what your goal is.

It's dangerous for two reasons: first, you may build something amazing that would easily have been sustainable but fails because unchecked greed demands that it be the biggest even if that is not it's fundamental value (ie. see Twitter). The other is that billion dollar companies are not built by dreaming of the perfect vision, but rather smart execution leveraging available resources and opportunities—the vision sounds good in Wired article, but there are millions of dreamers with visions that never accomplished anything; you need execution and relentless learning, and that is very hard if you are not focused on where you are now and where you want to be in a few weeks or months.

I'm not really critiquing what you wrote, because I'm not sure how it applies to what I'm thinking, but to me it seems like there's a danger in assuming that degree of success in life or lack thereof arises from lack of ambition per se. I think as ambition increases, so does risk, in general, so lack of success could be due to lack of ambition, but many very ambitious people who just have been on the bad side of circumstances, in the wrong place or at the wrong time.

I worry a bit about an implicit assumption that we often make that someone could always have "tried harder," which seems to be the argument of the essay now that I think about it. If a failure situation arises, we tend to pick it apart and look for what the person did wrong, and then if we find anything, ascribe blame to the person. In some situations--maybe always, that sort of introspection is helpful, but often I worry it misses the broader picture, in terms of the value of what was given up, or why that person was put in the position to begin with. We also don't scrutinize success as often to look at stupid decisions that could have panned out very poorly, and blame the individual--often there's an implicit pass, like "oh this person is so lucky," as if that luck is an attribute of the person, and marvel at that luck instead as if it's something to reward.

This essay kind of hit hard, because at middle age I've realized that the field / career area I'm in is in crisis, a sort of house of cards, and at some level driven by fundamentally unethical or unsound phenomena. My choice is basically to suck it up and just go along with it, or ditch the whole thing and start over as if I was in my 20s. If I ditch things, I feel like I'm by definition a failure by many, and ignoring this compounding benefits idea, but if I stay with it, I'm just supporting a system that I feel resentful about and that I think is going to fall apart eventually one way or another, even if some are inevitably going to be remaining at the top of that rubble pile.

I guess one way to think about it is this: in life, for most things, that compounding benefits curve is accompanied by a compounding costs curve, and sometimes the difference doesn't look compounding at all.

> That guy will still be a very good golfer if he focuses on that.

From what I read somewhere, he retired from golf because of back injury. So if my memory serves right, it renders your "[he] will still be a very good golfer" ridiculous, because no, he will never be a golfer anymore.

Of course it's a meme that doesn't spread itself, kind of hypocritcal to be posting on a social platform

Though I agree with your sentiment as it applies in broad strokes I'd like to sell some software, make ~$10M, and be a recluse.

I don't even need the $10M, though, I'd be happy to not have to wake up at 7 o'clock, rush to the train, then sit at a desk all day.

However once that moment slips, your mind begins to wander. So a degree of constancy of purpose is needed. And you need a kind of GTD system to prioritize and eliminate what is unnecessary.

In startups, the results tend to be so polarized that shooting for the moon again and again can burn you out.