You have to be bad to get good
Hey y'all! Happy Labor Day weekend. I hope you had good plans and got to celebrate it in whatever way made you happy! I celebrated by grabbing a 17 pound brisket on Sunday so I could smoke it for Monday. I started the smoker on Monday night after dinner, and got it in there before 11PM. When I went to bed I set my watch alarm for 1:15 AM so I could add to the fire, planning on doing that every 90 minutes or so. I woke up, feeling exhausted. I rolled out of bed, got on my flip flops, and then realized it was 5:30 AM. Not 1:15. Whoops. Today I learned that my watch doesn't wake me up from a deep sleep. While the brisket was cooking today I converted my website into Wordpress. My goal was to have it ready before I go to the conference next week. I managed to get a functional version up today. Go check it out! As always, I'm interested in hearing from you! Let me know what you got up to for the holiday. Kevin A Quote Three Things1 - 🌱 2013’s How to Start a Startup - I’ve been going through the history of Tim Ferriss podcasts. While some of it is timeless, in some cases I’m being introduced to decade-old content. I started watching the 20-lecture series of How to Start a Startup, a Stanford class run by a series of Y Combinator alums and partners. Lecture 1 starts with Sam Altman, now CEO of Open AI. 2 - 📫 Paul Graham on How to Do Great Work - Incidentally, Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, recently published his first essay of substance since November of 2022. It’s a long read at about 45 minutes, but it has lots of good advice about how to discover where you can do great work in the world. “The discoveries are out there, waiting to be made. Why not by you?” 3 - 🛩️ Lt. David Carey on his Experience as a POW in Vietnam - Ryan Holiday on his Daily Stoic podcast recently interviewed Lt. David Carey about getting shot down in Vietnam and spending 2,022 days in captivity. I found his experience fascinating. There’s a lot to learn from someone about how they navigated a very difficult experience. Deeper DiveThink of something you're amazing at. How did you get there? Did you appear, fully formed on your first day, as a maestro in your discipline, hobby, or creative endeavor? Unlikely. Instead, you probably got there gradually over time, through effort and consistency. Masters of their craft still have bad first drafts. Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, has written and spoken extensively about this. Even today, with all the success Pixar has had, they still create bad movies at first. In his appearance on the Tim Ferriss Show, episode 22, he said: This is like the big misconception that people have, is that a new film is the baby version of the final film, when in fact the final film bears no relationship to what you started off with. What we’ve found is that first version always sucks. And I don’t mean this because I'm self effacing or that we’re modest about it. I mean it in the sense that they really do suck. John McPhee, pulitzer prize winning author, talks about this in his article (and later book), Draft No. 4. In it he talks about how writer's block stymies many writers. Draft one is bad, but if you can get to the second draft, you just might make it. [at the] end of the second draft, if I’m lucky,...the feeling comes over me that I have something I want to show to other people, something that seems to be working and is not going to go away. The feeling is more than welcome, yes, but it is hardly euphoria. It’s just a new lease on life, a sense that I’m going to survive until the middle of next month. Being bad is the precursor to getting good! Attempt number one always sucks. Draft number one always sucks. But there must always be a first draft in order to get something good to come out the other end. So our goal therefore is to hurry up and get that first draft, that first try at something, out there, on paper, and in the world. Don't let fear keep you on the sidelines, planning and thinking. Do. This newsletter is my example! I'm out here getting the reps. My quality may be poor or inconsistent, but I'm building the habit. If I want to get good, this is the path. Let's explore how this concept can be applied in various aspects of life, such as leadership and parenting. Applying this to leadership, you have to balance the tension between a practice culture and a performance culture. If you're doing anything novel or complex, your team will need some space to fail (practice). However, any business must succeed, or they won't stay in business for long (performance). Holding both of these things true at once is necessary and difficult! It's one of the many dichotomies of leadership. In parenting, it's likely better to praise effort and consistency over achievement. If you praise achievement you start to reinforce a fixed mindset. Your kids, like all of us, will not be good the first time they try something. If they see you admiring their achievement, they may not develop the habits. They may not be willing to suck for as long as it takes to eventually get the achievement that only comes after the effort and consistency. Zooming out from specific applications to the bigger picture, you also eventually realize that "as the island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of ignorance." (book link) It means that "good" isn't a fixed destination you achieve, it's a moving target, ever out of reach. Being bad to get good becomes the perpetual process. You're always pushing your boundaries. You come to appreciate and enjoy being bad because you realize it's the path to greatness. So what are you going to suck at this week? Get after it! Celebrate it! Then do it again the week after. Please let me know what it is so I can celebrate with you!
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