Four False Walls | Eric Jorgenson
Eric: So, my quick talk, you're just gonna do a fantastic imagining of, how good my AI art slides were. The theme that I like to talk about is breaking perception. I think you'll hear that a little bit in all 3 of us. And the metaphor that I like to use is, like, 4 false walls. So I'm gonna walk you through kind of the the prepared stuff I got.
And if I got a few extra minutes, I'm happy to kinda take questions. Here are my 4 false walls. You've been lied to, often. Not maliciously, not even intentionally. But throughout your life, people have been telling you how the world works and what the rules are.
They can only teach you the rules as they know them. You probably do not wanna live life by the rules incidentally installed in you by your uncle Chuck or your 3rd grade teacher. I have an uncle Chuck. Life did not go great. People have been forcing rules, perspectives, and ideas on you your whole life and you haven't gotten very many chances to choose who you listen to or about what.
It can be very uncomfortable to have an idea uninstalled from your head and to find out something you believe is wrong, incomplete, or holding you back. Most people don't have the skill of uninstalling ideas at all and that's why so many people are so spectacularly wrong about so many things. Once an idea is in their head, they can't change it. I hope you're still open to being offered a few new ideas, new perceptions you might not have had before. And the 4 that I've selected, I believe are universally applicable, critically important, and simple.
And even if you know them, hopefully, you welcome a reminder. For those of you who intend on living in the world your own way, here's the 4 false walls. The first one, the perception, is that you have to choose a role, an identity, a stereotype. And the reality is that you have to be yourself. Don't choose a role.
Become your own character. I think you'll hear Jack and John have embraced this wholeheartedly. Reality rewards the broad, flexible, and multidisciplinary. This turns a very cliche advice of being yourself into a clear and relaxing mandate. Explore anything and everything that feels interesting to you, And the more different and broad disciplines you dabble in, the better it will be.
Over and over again, you'll see successful people who are not super experts in one discipline, but bizarre mashups of study, hobby, and curiosity that seem random but create this unique and powerful world view. Through the combination of different fields, these advanced generalists, as I call them, become even more special than specialists. Often, they're more likely to find new ideas than specialists in their field. Specialists hate that. A few quotes to support and build on this idea.
The first two from the books I've written, the first is from Naval Ravikoff. The less you want something, the less you're thinking about it, the less you're obsessing over it, the more you're gonna do it in a natural way, the more you're gonna do it for yourself. You're gonna do it in a way you're good at and you're gonna stick with it. The people around you will see that the quality of your work is higher. You're more likely to end up with skills that society does not yet know how to train other people to do.
And if they can train other people how to do something, then they can replace you. If they can replace you, they don't have to pay you very much. The second, from Balaji is while I've had success as a founder and investor, there are people who are better founders and investors. Similarly, there are better engineers, scientists, CEOs and bestselling authors. I sit at the intersection of all of these without considering myself defined by any of them.
And then, of course, our guy Charlie Munger would bring it home. If you skillfully follow the multidisciplinary path, you will never wish to come back. It would be like cutting off your hands. That's the first wall. The second perception is do the task in front of you.
The reality is that the problem you see is not the real problem. Reality rewards those who see the real problems, the real opportunities, and the real solutions. The real work is to figure out what work truly needs to be done. Reality rewards those doing the real work. Those people are often pretty weird.
Elon Musk explains why. It's very common, possibly the most common error of smart engineers to optimize a thing that should never have existed. Why do we do this? We've been trained in high school and college to answer the question in front of us. It's convergent logic.
You can't tell the professor your question is dumb, you will get a bad grade. You have to answer the question without knowing it. Everyone has this mental straitjacket on. They'll work on optimizing a thing that simply should not exist. To me, this explains lawns, candy corn, and the Bravo TV channel.
Our whole lives, we've been trained to solve the problem in front of us. No one has trained us to find problems, triage problems, breakdown problems, reframe problems, evade problems, or ignore them entirely. The skill of seeing the right problem is perhaps the most valuable skill there is. This is what our greatest entrepreneurs, scientists, and artists do. They find new ways of thinking about things, more efficient ways to think, which move us all forward.
One of my very favorite books is The Systems Bible by John Gall, And he's got a a fantastic quote that I think sums this up. Many years ago, Abraham Lincoln observed that the best way to get rid of one's enemies is to make them a friend. This has been wrongly regarded as another example of Lincoln's charitable nature and has failed to achieve recognition for the major intellectual contribution that it is. This concept is reframing. When reframing is complete, the problem is not solved.
It simply doesn't exist anymore. There's no longer any problem to discuss, let alone a solution. These reframes often feel counterintuitive to the point of seeming completely stupid. And this is why the people who are really excellent at it are perceived as just being weird. Jeff Bezos is a great example of this.
A manager pointed out to him that we needed more communication. There's coordination problems between the teams. It's something I think everybody's business experiences. And the manager said, we need better communication. We need more communication.
And Bezos replied, communication is terrible. It's a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren't working together in a close organic way. We should be trying to figure out ways for teams to communicate less, not more. This led to the development of more API style relationships within Amazon.
We're automated reporting more modularity among the teams, and it's a huge reframe to think about something that everyone in business considers critically important as to being not the solution, but the problem. In this way, I think having vision is more about seeing different than seeing better, and that is easier. The differences can be smaller than you think. Even intensely successful careers are often just 3 steps. Take a simple idea, take it seriously, and do it for a long time.
An example I like from the entertainment industry is Michael Ovitz. He changed the culture of his talent agency to a meritocracy and changed the straddle strategy to bundling. That's it. Those 2 ideas executed over 40 years. He's now a billionaire and one of the most powerful people in Hollywood.
The culture was from a pay your dues kind of good old boys club, and he made it a young, hardworking meritocracy. And the bundling strategy is because the studios were purchasing individual pieces slowly. Some of them from him, some of them from competitors, and tried to fit them together themselves. CAA packaged their clients and would sell entire projects to studios already derisked. It's a win win arrangement that gave CAA the pricing power for themselves and their clients.
And Michael Oviks explained how this worked with a famous movie they were all aware of, Jurassic Park. The package was developed at CAA. Michael Crichton had pitched the story. He gave the book to Steven Spielberg, said he was in. They pulled in Kathleen Kennedy, the producer, and controlled all the elements within CIA.
We had the ability to go to the studio and say, we have good news and bad news. The good news is we have a movie based on a book by Michael Crichton that will be a bestseller. It will be directed by the great Steven Spielberg and produced by the incredible Kathleen Kennedy. You don't even need stars. The bad news is that we control it.
We asked for a partnership deal in which clients and studios were paid the same as the studio, dollar for dollar, and they had one day to come back to us. They said it nicely, there's a strong-arm as you could get. That's the second second perception, second wall. We're way behind. I'm gonna talk a little faster.
3rd perception is do what you can with what you have. The reality is that you need to go get more firepower. While frugality is good and efficiency divine, most of the gains in life come from getting more firepower. There's no trick or shortcut to this. The best way to get more firepower is to earn it.
There's 2 points within this point. Leverage accrues to the competent, giving them more influence. And the progress in society mostly comes from technology. The first one, we reward highly competent people with more resources and more opportunities, like leveling up in a video game. You kick ass, you get some treasure, you get some weapons, and you can use that treasure and weapons to go kick more ass.
That's how companies grow. Every purchase a customer makes is a vote for that company's competence. The company made a little profit, reinvest that into improving their product or service with more firepower and more leverage. And that happens across a few categories, tools, products, people, and capital. And I'm not gonna define them because I don't have time.
So we're on to the next one. Number 2, progress in society comes mostly from technology. There's the micro sense of use technology to get more firepower in your own life, in your own business, But there's also the macro sense. Progress for civilization comes mostly for from technology. This latter idea is a core part of the second book that just, came out for me, the anthology of biology.
It taught me a much sharper sense of which work has the largest positive impact on society over the long term. As an example, you could spend a 100 lifetimes working for the Peace Corps and you might feel really great about yourself. But the scientist who creates a room temperature superconductor, the engineer who builds self driving cars, or the entrepreneur who builds a robotic iron foundry will do more good for humanity in their one lifetime. If you care about the reality of the impact rather than the perception, embrace the impact of technology. We're surrounded by the miracles of the technology of the past.
Do not shirk your responsibility to future generations. We owe them improvements on the gifts we were given. The 4th one, the perception is that you are preparing to live and you must wait your turn. The reality is that you should start now. You are on the clock.
This is not a warm up game. This is the Super Bowl. Reality rewards the bold and the impatient. You may not feel like it at the moment, but take action and you will see momentum build both in yourself and in the world's responses to your actions. Once you start, reality will reform around your charging will.
The mythical name for this is manifesting, but this cause and effect is very simple. Most people do not have strong desires or strong visions. They're looking for a cause, an idea, a person to give meaning to their efforts. If you can give them meaning, you can be a channel for them to act on their own beliefs. They'll support your purpose.
So start now. The only thing that cannot be bought is time, even a minute of it. And that leads to 2 tactics. Move as fast as you can. No one gives you a turn.
You take turns. And you need to take as many as you can. Moreover, there are no turns. Life is a real time strategy game like StarCraft, not a turn based game like Monopoly. If you work 80 hours a week while someone else works 40, you'll lap them in a year.
Don't waste your time on unimportant things. This is not to say love, travel, fun, raising gerbils, or any other side quests are not important. That's the stuff of life. But I definitely did not need to rewatch The Office for a third time. It's true.
It's a fucking good show, though. Number 2, to stay in the game. It's difficult to appreciate just how long careers will be. It will be long. Learning takes time.
Building trust takes time. The longer you can play, the better you'll be. The later you start, the shorter your game will be. So, again, start now. Even if you start the wrong thing, you will have practiced starting.
Warren Buffett may not be the greatest investor to ever live, but no one has been working for longer. If he retired after 40 years with a $1,000,000,000, his career would have been completely unremarkable. The fact is he's had nearly 2 entire careers, 80 years of investing experience, and 99% of his wealth came from the second 40 year career. So balance your insane urgency with a slow deep patience of impatience for action, patience for results. In 20 years, maybe the only thing that matters about this particular day, week, month, or year is that you did not quit.
And that may turn out to be true of every day or every week. Speed matters a lot. Time in the game matters a lot more, so start quickly and never stop. That's it.
This transcript was generated with Transistor AI
