Altitude Shifting
“Underrated skill for founders: Altitude shifting. People are often either good at high-level strategy or atomic-level execution, but rarely both."
Erik Torenberg has a concept that he calls altitude shifting:
“Underrated skill for founders: Altitude shifting. People are often either good at high-level strategy or atomic-level execution, but rarely both. It's the ability to zoom out & paint the 5 yr vision, and then drop down into the weeds of day-to-day, & see how the two connect.”
In other words, successful founders are able to see the big picture and the details at the same time. They can shift their perspective from 30,000 feet to ground level and back again. They can see the forest from the trees.
It's challenging because high-level strategy and atomic-level execution require different skill sets. High-level thinking is about being able to hold multiple concepts in your mind at one time. Atomic-level thinking is about focus and execution; blocking out the multiple concepts that could be on your mind and focusing on the most important thing you can do right now.
The ability to shift from high-level strategy or atomic-level execution is a valuable skill for any founder, but also for any startup team member. Being able to see both the big picture and the details is a rare combination.
Will Ahmed, the founder and CEO of WHOOP, is especially good at this. In his episode with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, he speaks about the origins of WHOOP. He says:
“I was someone who used to overtrain, where you get fitter and fitter, and then you sort of fall off a cliff. It's the ultimate betrayal in sports, along with getting injured. And so I got interested in, what could I do personally to prevent over-training? What could I measure about my body? What does it mean to train optimally? How did rest and recovery play a role in performance or in training? And I read something like 500 medical papers while I was an undergrad at Harvard, and what was interesting about that physiology research is that there were indeed metrics that you could measure that could give you a real sense for your body and the status of your body, and there were a couple of observations I made about those metrics. One, those metrics typically required obtrusive, and in my opinion, antiquated equipment to measure them, and two, they weren't all revolved around exercise.”
Ahmed zoomed in on the details by reading those papers. He developed a deep understanding of how to measure strain and recovery in the body. At the same time, he zoomed out on the wearables industry and figured out how his learnings could be morphed into a product that sits on your wrist.
He was holding multiple concepts in his head and trying to synthesise them into one convincing offering. Ahmed and his co-founders began building prototypes with a 3D printer, testing different tools and methods for collecting data. They'd prototype and iterate, focusing on one crucial aspect at a time, and determine whether it met their needs. Zoom in, zoom out. From this, WHOOP - most recently valued at $3.6 billion - was born.
The CEO of my previous company was exceptionally good at altitude shifting. He'd zoom from one meeting to the next and ask relevant and challenging questions throughout. It didn't matter whether the discussion was around the big vision of the company or the way we were thinking of a specific feature in our team, he could tie together multiple perspectives and offer insightful feedback.
I haven't encountered someone that could shift that quickly or accurately. I suspect that plenty of altitude shifting - done over a long time, on a variety of projects, and with different people - develops that muscle.
“Thinking big” as a form of procrastination
To think big is to think without the constraints of reality, to imagine a world that doesn't exist and live in that fictional reality. People that think big often struggle with getting shit done because they're not grounded in reality. And people who are grounded in reality are way too familiar with the difficulty of executing real-world tasks. They know how much focus and hard work goes into getting something done. So they simply know too much to be able to dream and think big.
It’s easy to forget that everything big starts small. Founders and leaders feel the weight of massive expectations to build something huge, to be seen as ambitious. It’s easy to look at things that exist today, like Instagram, and think that you need to build that, not realising that Instagram v1 looked very different. Big and ambitious companies have undergone years of evolution and millions of hours of work. This creates an illusion that "thinking small" is the opposite of being ambitious, but it’s not. It’s too easy for “thinking big” to become a form of procrastination to avoid the hard, messy work of actually moving forward.
Photos of the week
I spent a few days in Slovenia this week. I was blown away by the beauty. Strongly recommend it if you ever get the chance to visit.