A ball carrier lifts no trophies.
I’ve noticed something: a lot of people get hyped on things that, if you actually scope them down, turn out to be nothing. The thing isn’t big. It just got picked up so they could feel like they belong somewhere, like they achieved something.
Think about the kid who dreams of being a footballer and ends up as the one who carries the ball onto the pitch, and feels like he made it. Compare that to Messi lifting real trophies while he’s still young. Or the guy who becomes a legend inside his own small town and thinks that’s greatness. It’s not. Because he’s sidelined. The real game, the real innovation, is happening somewhere else entirely, in San Francisco, in the real world, and he’s not in it.
That got me thinking about how the big companies actually got built. None of them played on the sideline. Stripe spent its early years grinding with almost no customers, just refusing to quit. Elon poured nearly all his own money into Tesla and SpaceX, then raised more, and bet the whole thing. If you mirror that, you see the pattern: winning comes from betting big and refusing to be sidelined.
It’s like a strong hand in poker. If your hand is strong, you don’t hedge and you don’t play it small, you go full force. But if you play in between, or you go chasing attention and validation in the wrong places, you just fill yourself up on empty air. You feel busy. You feel seen. And you still don’t win.
So what actually puts you on the sideline?
First: not knowing the ultimate goal. If you don’t know where you’re supposed to arrive, you’ll drift toward whatever gives you a little attention along the way. So define the bull case. What does the absolute best version of this look like? Who’s the superstar you’re measuring against? Point all your energy there, because nothing else matters if you’re aiming at a small league.
Second: playing in a small league at all. If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. Being number one in a fifth-tier league is worth nothing, because you’re not even correlated to the big game. I’d rather be the loser among the big guys than the winner among the losers. That’s the trade that actually moves you.
And that’s expensive. It means moving cities, moving ideas, moving sectors. Not settling for random stuff. Not settling for bad deals. Good deal or no deal, that’s the only setting. Because if you commit to the wrong thing just for validation, life passes you by, and the real outcome never shows up.
Play in the A league. The NBA, not the rookies. Whatever you achieve anywhere else, one day you’ll realize it was never the league you were meant to win in.
Because winning in the wrong place is worse than losing.
“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