When you start doing many things at once, running deals, chasing opportunities, building more than one thing, your brain starts telling you a lie. It tells you the games are connected. That this deal and that deal are somehow one situation. And once you believe that, you start playing soft: you give up upside on one because you’re winning on another, you negotiate slower here because you’re already ahead there, you let one table set the mood for the next.
I did exactly that. And what I learned is simple: you can win both. That’s what you should actually be aiming for, not trading one against the other. Every shot is its own independent system. You separate it, and you play it to win on its own terms, as if the others didn’t exist.
Think of it like Monte Carlo, a thousand independent trials, each one run clean, none of them contaminating the next. That’s how the games should sit in your head. Uncorrelated. Siloed.
And this isn’t only about negotiation. It’s about life. When you’re juggling many things, the real danger is letting the systems bleed into each other, a friendship from one world leaks into an interest in another, and suddenly you, this person, and a third entity are all tangled into one messy formula. In business, your whole job is to minimize the big implosions. The moment everything is wired together, one collapse anywhere takes down everything, because it all shares the same fault line.
So if you want to do multiple things, silo them hard. Different forms. Different teams. Different calls. Different upside, different investment size. Keep each one clean and complete on its own.
You are the center, and that’s fine. You can be the node that connects to many worlds. But don’t create too many nodes, and don’t let the worlds touch each other through anyone but you. The second there are back-channels you don’t control, the formula goes weird and something breaks.
There’s a cost to this, and I’ll be honest about it. Siloing means you carry everything alone, you become the only wire between the systems, which is its own kind of weight. And yes, sometimes you’ll miss a synergy by keeping things apart. But in my experience, mixing yielded worse, not better. The clean separation protects the upside far more often than the blending creates it.
Play every game like it’s the only one on the board. Then go win the next one the same way.
“PMF with a 1000 iterations.”
“The game never ends. That’s the way I live my life. That’s the way I think about everything I do. I don’t think about winning or losing ever, on anything I do. I just keep playing the game.”Micky Malka
“Don’t fight in the North or the South. Fight every battle, everywhere, always, in your mind. Everyone is your enemy, everyone is your friend. Every possible series of events is happening all at once. Live that way and nothing will surprise you. Everything that happens will be something that you’ve seen before.”Petyr Baelish
“If you don’t know what to do, build capacity.”
“To win at everything, you have to start by winning something.”Hayden Adams
“Action produces information. If you’re unsure of what to do, just do anything, even if it’s the wrong thing. This will give you information about what you should actually be doing.
Sounds simple on the surface, the hard part is making it part of your every day working process.”Brian Armstrong
“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn’t, pays it.”Albert Einstein