In his recent post, “The Days are Long But The Decades Are Short,” Y Combinator cofounder Sam Altman notes some of the things he’s learned in three decades of life. Some of these are pretty common sensical, like putting your close friends, family, and significant other high on your priorities list, doing most things you think you would regret not doing, and taking advantage of youth.
Some of these appear common sensical but are rarely acted upon. Two of my favorites focus on doing things that may appear slightly reckless and on minimizing towards efficiency:
10) However, as valuable as planning is, if a great opportunity comes along you should take it. Don’t be afraid to do something slightly reckless. One of the benefits of working hard is that good opportunities will come along, but it’s still up to you to jump on them when they do.
12) Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it. Get rid of distractions in your life. Develop very strong ways to avoid letting crap you don’t like doing pile up and take your mental cycles, especially in your work life.
These points perfectly encapsulate what it means to live excellently. Excellence is defined by a state of constant progress above stagnation. It’s defined by doing things that are above average and doing them well.
The world is full of distractions that drive us to living averagely. These come in the kinds of decisions we make (i.e.., are we doing what is considered safe and easy or are we willing to try things that are slightly reckless if they promise a high payoff if successful?) and the ways we spend our time between decisions (i.e., are we making the most of our time or simply floating along?).
More than anything else, they are both seated in a liberation mindset.
Before I go any further, I should note that a liberation mindset isn’t a victimhood mindset. Liberation implies being liberated from something. In most contexts, people who are liberated from something are being held there against their will. Slaves are liberated from slave-masters. POWs are liberated from enemy forces. Hostages are liberated from hostage-takers.
Rather, this a liberation mindset in the heroic sense. You are doing the liberating and are the one being liberated. This is liberation from the dull, the average, the not-quite, the I-wish-I-had, the normal, and the unspectacular. It’s liberation from a potential reality that you can push yourself down. It’s liberation from a mindset of mediocrity.
Both of these tips — one emphasizing the willingness to do crazy things and one emphasizing the importance of simplifying for efficiency — liberate us from the mindset that we just have to go about doing the things everybody expects of us. We have to go to college instead of starting that company. We have to come home and watch television and browse facebook. We have to go on a certain number of dates per month with a certain kind of person. Rejecting these expectations and these norms can feel uncomfortable. It can feel unusually reckless, unusually busy, and unusually lonely. It feels that way because it is.
Imagine three paths for your future, denoted by one decision-point and then by another down the second path, splitting it into 3 total paths. At the first decision-point, you can choose to do the expected thing. You can accept that place at that prestigious university. You can decide to go to law school. You can decide to marry that person your family expects you to marry. Or you can pass that up for the potential to be great. You will definitely lose the safe comfort of the former, but gain the existential satisfaction of the latter, should you succeed.
If you choose the reckless, safety-bucking route, you may fail. Your likelihood of failure is inversely correlated with your ability to stick to the grind, minimize distractions, and be single-minded towards you goal. Just like the first decision, choosing this path is hard. You’ll have already moved yourself down a new, different, scary path, but now you have the choice to buck the comforts of everyday life. If you choose to do so, your chances of success increase. If you don’t, they decrease.
This is the core of excellence. Excellence, however we personally imagine it for ourselves, requires us to do things that are reckless (outside the norm) and to focus relentlessly on them. This may mean going out to drink less often, spending less time on facebook, owning less stuff, pulling long hours writing, editing, and writing again, and just generally putting in a lot of work.
Making that reckless decision for an excellent opportunity and putting your nose to the grind increases the chances that you will be physically successful in that endeavor. You may still fail. There is no formula for success. Success is determined by exogenous factors, after all. Even if you fail, you will have moved closer to the ever-moving goal of excellence, which can only be determined by your own mindset and actions.