Are you in the right boat?

Are you in the right boat?

There’s this saying in the entrepreneurship world where a bad founder in a good market is better than a good founder in a mediocre market.

Put in other words, what you choose to do has a huge impact on your life. I truly think that in today’s society we put so much pressure on ourselves to overwork, grind for 16 hours a day. We keep telling ourselves that this is the only way, but then look at all of these other innovators who did so much great work in the world, and you’ll realize that none of them actually overworked themselves way too much, because they understood this simple concept called leverage.

This might sound cliché, but it’s also the reason why it’s being overlooked this much. People don’t think enough about how they can get leverage in whatever field they operate in. And usually you might know about the obvious levers, such as the market, the team, the yapa yapa… But did you ever think of your brain as a lever in itself? Or more correctly, the ways in which you think.

Think of Darwin, Einstein, or even Marc Randolph. They didn’t overwork themselves, they didn’t spend 16+ hours per day doing what most people call “work.” Sometimes, the work isn’t as obvious, and it happens in the background. You need the time to let yourself think if you want to come up with great things. By always being in the middle of the action, you lose one of your biggest levers — your own brain.

In content creation, for example, one of the best levers you can have is the quality of the content itself. You can think of the number of hours you put into each of your videos and then you’ll realize that if you take the time to edit and polish a video for twice the usual time it takes you to edit it, you’ll get at least 4x returns on the video rather than if you posted it by editing the usual way. This means that in content creation, volume isn’t necessarily the way to go anymore; at this point in time the way to do it is to be obsessed over the little details. When everyone pushes for perfection, you should push for volume, and when everyone pushes for volume, you should push for perfection.

In other words, use your brain as a lever. Don’t do what everyone else is doing. And trust the Universe! Somehow, things work out if your desire is strong enough and you stay persistent.