Excerpts from “Desperation Induced Focus”

“Most big companies aren’t focused on creating things out of nothing. Someone else made the magic money-making machine, and they assume that it will just keep working.”

“This lack of focus is a luxury and a disease.”

This is called peace time thinking. Thoughts generated out of seemingly derived notions or non-axioms. Sometimes too much trust in the system.

My advice to people when they are thinking about instituting a new process is to go to a whiteboard and write down the answer to this question: “If you could only get one thing done this year, what would it be?”.

Desperation inspires creativity and intense focus. It is an essential ingredient to building great products and services.

So, the next time you feel desperate, lean in. Embrace it. Use it as the fuel to create the next founding moment4 for your company.

And the next time someone tries to tell you to do something because a big company does it, be suspicious.

One must arrive at something from first principles and not because someone told them (a.k.a. by proxy). Keep the advice in mind and use it as a reminder but never an axiom.

To the builders of the future, you need to relive the pain that it has genuinely relieved.

~ updated at: 2024-10-23T17:30:03.050Z