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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Guy Raz
Read between
November 29, 2020 - January 7, 2023
If you’ve ever read any Greek mythology or the Bible or watched Star Wars, you have experience with the “hero’s journey,” the concept—identified by the author and philosopher Joseph Campbell—that most great epic stories follow a similar narrative arc: a hero has a crazy idea; people doubt her; she leaves the village to pursue her vision, faces untold obstacles, falls into an abyss, barely escapes death, but manages to come out the other side with whatever she was looking for and continues on her journey to an eventual triumphant return.
the intersection of personal passion and problem solving is where good ideas are born and lasting businesses are built.
tripped up when thinking about startup ideas. They forget about igniting this kind of passion in their customers and instead use only their own passion as the North Star for their search. Passion is important—you will never hear me say otherwise—but the trouble with passion by itself is that it can lead you down rabbit holes that only you care about, or to problems that only you have.
Y Combinator and a kind of entrepreneurial Confucius, wrote a long essay titled “How to Get Startup Ideas” for his blog.
“The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas,” Graham wrote. “It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself . . . It sounds obvious to say you should only work on problems that exist. And yet by far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has.”
There is a name for a person who creates something purely out of passion: hobbyist. There is a name for a person who creates something out of passion that solves a problem only they have: tinkerer. There is a name for a person who creates something out of passion that also solves a problem they share with lots of other people: entrepreneur.
The French novelist Victor Hugo famously wrote in 1862, “One withstands the invasion of armies; one does not withstand the invasion of ideas.” Lisa
on this very subject of the difference between danger and fear. The reason for this is fairly simple: we’re more relaxed around things we’re more acquainted with.
“It is the difference in life between things that are scary and things that are dangerous. There are plenty of things that are scary but aren’t dangerous. And there are things that are dangerous but not scary. And those are the things that get you,” Jim said by way of explanation. I understood in theory what he was saying, but he offered a climbing analogy from his Outward Bound days to really drive it home.
and the key issue that I suspect has thwarted many young, aspiring entrepreneurs, is misapprehending the difference between something being dangerous and something being scary. It is mistaking fear for folly, risk for recklessness. It is the presumption that if something has never been done before, that is because it can’t or it shouldn’t be done. If you have a good idea that excites you, that compels you to take a detour from the comfort of a normal existence along the beaten path, you will first need to navigate this minefield of misunderstanding, whether it lives within you or sits between
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The danger for Michael was in relenting to his parents’ demands that he become a doctor, in hating every waking second of it while he watched the personal computing revolution unfold in front of him, and then in resenting his family for the rest of his life because they pushed him down a path that he knew in his heart was wrong for him.
But then those concerns melt away as they reflect on the even greater dangers of regret and squandered opportunity, and, as Jim put it, waking up at sixty-five years old only to realize that they’d wasted their lives.
But just as often, it is a consequence of curiosity and coincidence.
something that they are sure already exists—a product, a service, a TV show, even a video game, it doesn’t really matter—only to discover that it is nowhere to be found. So they start talking about it in casual conversation to whoever will listen—friends, family, Uber drivers, baristas, professional acquaintances—and they learn that they are not the only one who has been looking for this thing and has come up empty-handed. Then, in realizing that they are not alone, something else happens: the absence of this thing evolves from a minor inconvenience in their life to a real-world problem that,
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“We would talk to them about travel and ask them all these open-ended questions,”
That is exactly what research is supposed to accomplish. It is not meant to be leaned on like a crutch, or deferred to unequivocally, as though it is more relevant than experience or instinct or talent.
Apparel. Ice cream. Footwear. Luggage. They’re all different, but they’re all the same. There is nothing special about any of these industries that makes them uniquely suited for new entrants or for disruption. Similarly, there isn’t anything innate in Jen and Steph, or Daymond or Tim, or Ben and Jerry, that made them uniquely suited as creators to be the new kids on their respective blocks. But they are fantastic examples of founders who did their homework to fill in the gaps in their understanding, so that the things they set out to build did not topple for lack of a sturdy foundation.
The famous American writer and polymath Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote in 1872, “Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.”* On their drive to their ski vacation, Eric planted the seed in Adam’s mind.
an uncommon effort to achieve uncommon results. Which is what a successful startup is: uncommon. Don’t mistake this for negativity, by the way. I am forever a cautious optimist. I know success is possible. I know that you can do this. But I also know that there is one type of business for which bootstrapping never works: the type run by someone who isn’t passionate enough about their idea to put in the long days and the endless weeks required; who doesn’t care enough to get on that plane to New York or to max out all their credit cards to keep the servers running. To bootstrap your business
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Jeff Bezos’s grandfather was a prominent figure in the early years of the US Atomic Energy Commission and the agency that would eventually become DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). He had helped to cultivate Bezos’s interest in technology from a young age during Jeff’s summer visits to the family ranch about ninety minutes south of San Antonio, Texas.
there is only one reliable way to engineer word of mouth: you have to make a really good product. Actually, that’s not precisely true. It can’t just be really good. It has to be so good that someone has to recommend it. And because nobody is going to recommend something ordinary, it has to be new and special and leave people with something they can easily share with their friends by way of their recommendation.
Walt Disney is often quoted as saying, “Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.”
Sometimes the floor isn’t nearly as crowded as it felt at ground level. Other times it gets crowded, but only in a particular set of circumstances. Inevitably, patterns emerge, and before long behavior that at first felt chaotic now seems predictable.
When that day comes for you, when you think seriously about quitting for the first time, getting some true perspective is going to be the thing that gives you the courage to push forward.
