Eventually You Will Get What You Deserve

We're still talking about working for the long term. The next tweet on that topic is: apply specific knowledge with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve. I would also add to that: apply judgment, apply accountability, and apply the skill of reading. This one is just a glib way of saying that it takes time.

Even once you have all of these pieces in place, there is an indeterminate amount of time that you're gonna have to put in. If you're counting, you will run out of patience before it actually arrives. So, you just have to make sure that you give these things a proper time. Life is long. Charlie Munger had some line on this. Somebody asked him about making money, and he reinterpreted that. He said, "What the questioner is actually asking is: how do I get rich like you but faster?"

Before I end up as an really old guy, everybody wants it immediately, but the world is an efficient place. Immediate doesn't work. You do have to put in the time; you do have to put in the hours. So, I think you just have to put yourself in the position with the specific knowledge, with the accountability, with the leverage, with the authentic skill set that you have to be the best in the world at what you do. Then, you have to enjoy it and just keep doing it and keep doing it and keep doing it.

And don't keep track and don't keep count, because if you do, you will run out of time. I can look back at my career and the people, two decades ago, that I had identified as brilliant and hard-working. But I hadn't thought much more about it; they're all successful now, almost without exception. On a long enough time scale, you do get paid, but it can easily be 10 or 20 years—sometimes it's five.

And if it's five or three, and a friend of yours got there, it can drive you insane. But those are exceptions, and for every winner, there's multiple failures. One thing that's important in entrepreneurship is: you just have to be right. Once you get many, many shots on goal, you can take a shot on goal every three to five years, maybe every ten at the slowest, or once every year at the fastest, depending on how you're iterating with startups.

But you really only have to be right once. My little equation is that your eventual outcome will be equal to something like the distinctiveness of your specific knowledge times how much leverage you can apply to that knowledge, times how often your judgment is correct, times how singularly accountable you are for the outcome, times how much society values what you're doing.

Then, you compound all of that with how long you can keep doing it and how long you can keep improving it through reading and learning. That's actually a really good way to summarize it. It's probably worth even trying to sketch that equation out. That said, people try to then apply mathematics to what is really philosophy.

I've seen this happen in the past where I say one thing, and then I say another thing that seemed contradictory if you treat it as a math equation. But it's obviously in a different context. Then, people will say, "Well, you say that desire is suffering—that's the Buddhist saying. And then you say that all greatness comes from suffering. So, does that mean all greatness comes from desire?"

This is, in math, people—you can't just start carrying variables around and forming absolute logical outputs. You have to know when to apply things, so I think that is very useful to understand. But at the same time, one can't get too analytical about it. It's what a physicist would call "false precision" when you take two made-up estimates and you multiply them together and you get four degrees of precision. Those decimal points don't actually count; you don't have that data, you don't have that knowledge in a model.

The more estimated variables you have, the greater the error in the model. So, just adding more and more complexity to your decision-making process actually gets you a worse answer. You're better off just picking the single biggest thing or, for example, what am I really good at according to observation and according to people that I trust that the market values.

Like that alone—those two variables alone are probably good enough. Because if you're good at it, you'll keep it up. And if you're good at it, you develop the judgment. And if you're good at it and you like to do it, eventually people will give you the resources, and you won't be afraid to take on accountability. So, all the other pieces will fall in place. Product market fit is inevitable if you're doing something you love to do and the market wants it.