Of course, if we were able to watch a great athlete training, or a great writer writing, or a great coder coding, we would see that honing a strength is hard work—it is by no means easy to find that incremental margin of performance when you are already operating at a high level—and that a strength is not where we are most “finished” but in fact where we are most productively challenged. Yet we are told to resist the temptation to “just” play to our strengths, and instead to work constantly on our weaknesses. In common parlance, we are told to avoid “running around our backhand.” This betrays, perhaps, a misunderstanding of what a strength actually is. It is not, for each of us, where performance is easiest—it is where performance is most impactful and increasing.

If I was going to upend my life and my family, take a huge risk, dedicate five to ten years to creating a device unlike anything I’d ever made in a space I knew nothing about, then I

needed to give myself time to learn. I needed to sketch out designs. I needed to plan out features and think about the sales and business model.

I’ve seen way too many people come out of the corporate world, decide to start a company, and be completely unprepared for what it takes. If they’ve never been on a small team starting from scratch, they’re often a fish out of water. They spend too much money too fast. Hire too many people. Don’t put in the time, don’t have the startup mentality, can’t make hard decisions, are buried by consensus thinking. They end up making mediocre products or

nothing at all.

Don’t let that be your story. If you want to start a company, if you want to start anything, to create something new, then you need to be ready to push for greatness. And greatness doesn’t come from nothing. You have to prepare. You have to know where you’re headed and remember where you came from. You have to make hard decisions and be the mission-driven “asshole.” [See also: Chapter 2.3: Assholes: Mission-driven “assholes.”]

So do the work. Know what you’re getting into. Trust your gut.

And when the time comes, you’ll be ready.

So if your primary goal is to have a fully worked out, set-in-stone plan, you are only upping your chances of being unoriginal. Moreover, you cannot plan your way out of problems. While planning is very important, and we do a lot of it, there is only so much you can control in a creative environment. In general, I have found that people who pour their energy into thinking about an approach and insisting that it is too early to act are wrong just as often as people who dive in and work quickly.

These days, I’m wary of seemingly simple incentive rules that promise amazing results. They are rarely simple, and often leave collateral damage. Usually, a better option is to have a frank discussion about what we should value and why. Why should we care about exploring more designs early on? Why should we aim to speed up engineering velocity? Once people understand and buy into those values, they can make the best decisions on how to apply them.