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Consequently, it’s really common to see focus issues amongst early founder types. Whereas folk like me, who mostly suck at the early stage but are good executors, tend to lean towards focus and not lying to ourselves.

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The biggest interesting tension at the early stage seems to me to be - not lying to yourself (always a deadly thing in business) - having conviction that there’s something in your current idea (which is terrible and thus requires lying to yourself)

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(I’m over-generalising here; I know it’s possible to be good at both. Jobs is an existence proof of that.) But it helps to know where our biases lie. My bias is certainly towards focus/seeing reality clearly, which doesn’t lend itself as well to being kind to fragile new ideas.

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One other thing that I couldn’t express as clearly in the essay — talking about focus is hard because it essentially boils down to judgment. Sometimes it’s right to focus. And sometimes it’s right to distribute attention across a few initiatives. Which is right? Hard to say.

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And it’s not just a simple matter of “yes fills time, no makes time.” In a business context focus requires judgment about a set of initiatives and a set of goals. Focus implies ruthlessly ignoring everything that doesn’t contribute to a goal.

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Ok I’m going to stop this thread here because so many of these thoughts are not fleshed out properly. I’m struggling to express something I feel keenly, that I’m starting to put into practice consistently and that I can recognise in others, but I find difficult to talk about.

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The reason I told the story about the F&B market in my essay is because that was the precipitating event for me to take focus seriously. Two years of constant blowups, while we lied to ourselves about our goals … let’s just say I never wanted to experience that again.

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"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." - Feynman.

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and

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. “ – Mark Twain

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Oh, so, so true. The problem with such sayings is that they become cliches — they’re repeated ad nauseum so we roll our eyes at them. But they capture deep truth!

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Garry is on point. It's the paradox of founders that they must be both brutal realists and visionary optimists.

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Garry Tan 陈嘉兴

By default most founders are

short term optimists (ignore bad execution) and

long term pessimists (pick small problems) Successful founders are the opposite—

short term pessimists and (always improving)

long term optimists (pick big problems) youtube.com/watch?v=9NYrsE

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🔥 This is so good.

3:27 AM · Oct 20, 2022TweetDeck