Belief Before Ability
"A lesson that repeats across all of these stories is that almost every great founder had a ridiculous amount of persistence."
Quick announcement: I’m moving to Budapest today 🇭🇺 If you or anyone you know is nearby and wants to grab a coffee, let me know!
Kanye 🤝 Dyson 🤝 Jobs
It's useful to look at the history of the field you want to master. I read a lot about people that have built great companies and products. Reading about Jobs at Apple shows you what's possible when you focus and execute for a really long time. Reading about the hours1 that Carmack poured into creating Doom shows you what it means to work hard. Reading about the 5,127 prototypes that Dyson built before arriving at his design of the bagless vacuum casts persistence in a new light.
I read these stories not just because they're entertaining and inspiring, but because I want to be a great founder myself. There are plenty of lessons in the lives of the greats and it'd be foolish not to learn from them.
A lesson that repeats across all of these stories is that almost every great founder had a ridiculous amount of persistence. No matter how many times they were told ‘no’ their belief in their abilities never wavered. Belief came before ability.
Kanye West is one of the best examples of this. Back in the early 2000s, he moved to New York. It was the centre of the hip-hop universe and it's where he needed to be. Jeen-Yuhs, a documentary about Kanye, shows his journey of trying to secure a record deal. He was rejected time and time again, yet his belief in his ability never wavered. At one point, he explains how he used to practice his Grammy speech while walking around the city. He was practising his Grammy speech before he made his first album. His levels of belief and persistence were off the charts.
The same persistence is visible in James Dyson. One day Dyson was pushing around his Hoover vacuum and the bag kept blocking the suction. He thought he could do something better. Dyson had spotted a local sawmill using cyclone technology to separate sawdust particles from the air and thought it could work on a vacuum cleaner. He replaced the Hoover’s bag with a crude cardboard prototype of his cyclone design and it worked. In the 5 years that followed, Dyson built 5,127 prototypes. He mortgaged his house. But he eventually created the world's first bagless vacuum cleaner.
Steve Jobs is called a genius and a visionary but we speak little of how persistent he was. It's easy to celebrate his success at Apple but that's too simplistic a view. It skips over the persistence and stubbornness and refusal to quit that allowed Jobs to achieve what he did.
The dozen years between his first tenure at Apple and his return, from 1985 to 1997, are important to study. During that period he experienced countless failures and made a lot of mistakes. It’s an important period because it equipped him with the product understanding and wisdom that made his second reign at Apple so legendary. He had to go through it but he was only able to endure it because he was persistent and unrelenting in his desire to revolutionise the world through personal computing.
His perseverance was remarkable. Whatever happened, he remained driven, curious, and determined to create beautiful products that would revolutionise computing. Without that, his second act at Apple, the most valuable work he ever did, wouldn’t have happened. The failures, tantrums, poor judgement calls, and immaturity led to the clarity, insight, and steadiness he displayed later in life.
“People say you have a lot of passion for what you’re doing, and it’s totally true and the reason is because it’s so hard that if you don’t, any rational person would give up. It’s really hard and you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don’t love it, if you’re not having fun doing it, if you don’t really love it, you’re going to give up. And that’s what happens to most people, actually. If you really look at the ones that ended up being successful in the eyes of society, and the ones who didn’t, often times it’s the ones that are successful that love what they did so they could persevere, you know, when it got really tough. And the ones that didn’t love it, quit. Because they’re sane, right? Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don’t love it? So it’s a lot of hard work and it’s a lot of worrying constantly, and if you don’t love it, you’re gonna fail. So, you gotta love it, you gotta have passion.” - Steve Jobs
Choose Ignorance
Jack Raines recently wrote a piece titled ‘Good Ignorance’ that captured the value of ignorance. When it comes to perseverance, ignorance is your closest ally. If you fully understand the risks and unlikelihood of success for a new endeavour when you start, you'd probably never do it. But if your ignorance prevents you from quitting, and you keep hacking away day after day, you just might pull it off. Ignorance + discipline can buy you time to succeed.
18-hour days, 7 days a week, was standard.