Collection: In the Arena

When it comes to execution, you’ve got to do it yourself.<br>Life is lived in the arena; you only learn by doing.<br>If you’re not doing, then all the learning you’re picking up is too general and too abstract, then it truly is Hallmark aphorisms because you don’t know what applies where and when.

Acquiring knowledge is easy; the hard part is knowing which part to apply and when.<br>That’s why all true learning is “on the job”. Life is in the Arena.

When you truly work for yourself, you won’t have hobbies, weekends, vacations, but you won’t have work either.

This is the paradox of working for yourself, which every entrepreneur or every self-employed person is familiar with, which is that when you start working for yourself, you basically sacrifice this work-life balance thing. You sacrifice this work-life distinction. There’s no more 9-to-5, office, no one telling you what to do, no playbook to follow. At the same time, there’s nothing to turn off; you can’t turn it off, you are the business, product, work, the entity. Also, because you care if you’re doing something that’s truly yours, you care very deeply, so you can’t turn it off, and that’s the curse of an entrepreneur. But the benefit of the entrepreneur is that if you’re doing it right, for the right reasons, people in the right way, and if you can set aside the stress of not hitting your goals, which is real and hard to set aside, that’s when you’re most productive. You’re basically only measured on your output, and you’re only held up to the bar that you raised for yourself.

Pause, Reflect, See How Well It Did

“Become the best in the world at what you do, keep redefining what you do until this is true.” You want to be the best in the world at what you do, but keep redefining what you do until that’s true, and the only way that redefining is going to work is through the process of iteration, through doing. Iteration does not mean repetition, not mechanical, not 10,000 hours, it’s 10,000 iterations.<br>It’s the time spent, it’s learning loops. What iteration means is you do something and then you stop and you pause and you reflect, you see how well that it worked or did not work, and you change it then you try something else, then pause, reflect, then see how well it did, then you change and try something else, that’s the process of iteration, and that’s the process of learning.

Blame yourself for everything and preserve your agency.

When conveying a thought

If it’s not said in an interesting way, then it’s a cliche, or if they’ve heard it too much, it’s a cliche.<br>But if it’s said in an interesting way, then it may remind them of something that was important, or it might convert their specific knowledge, or might be a hook for converting their specific knowledge into more general knowledge in their own minds. The world is not entirely luck.<br>In fact, you know that because in your own life there are things that you have done that have led to good outcomes, and you know if you had not done that thing, it would not have led to that good outcome.<br>So you can absolutely move the needle, and it’s not all luck, especially the longer the timeframe you’re talking about, the more intense the activity, the more iterations you take, and the more thinking and choice you apply to it, the less luck matters.<br>It recedes into the distance. You have to preserve your agency, you have to preserve your belief that you can change things.<br>You have to take responsibility for everything bad that happens to you, and this is a mindset. The truth of the matter is: People who work very hard and apply themselves and don’t give up and take responsibility for the outcomes on a long enough time scale, end up succeeding in whatever they’re focusing on, and every successful case knows this.

It is impossible to fool Mother Nature

If you’re good at something, don’t be shy about it. Accept that you’re good at something. If you’re going to do anything exceptional, you do have to bet on yourself in some way.<br>And if you’re exceptional at something, that does require you acknowledging that you are exceptional at it or at least trying to be, and not worrying about what other people think.<br>However, you don’t want to be delusional either. You don’t get to say you’re exceptional by yourself; other people get to say you’re exceptional at something, and your mother doesn’t count. Real feedback comes from free markets and nature.<br>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 faked; you can’t get good feedback from groups, because groups are just trying to get along. Individuals search for truth, groups search for consensus. Thus, the larger the group, the less good feedback you’re going to get from it.