Believe one thing deeply
Take a simple idea, and take it seriously. â Charlie Munger
Doing great work starts with believing one thing deeply. Not any one thing in particularâIt matters more that you believe one thing deeply than what that belief is.
A deep belief in a simple idea is the foundation of any enduring project, most of all companies. I once heard Avichal Garg say that successful companies are an artistic expression of their foundersâ beliefs. I now canât help but see this connection everywhere I look. Bill Gates believed that people should, and eventually would, pay for software. Steve Jobs believed that technology deserved craftsmanship. These different beliefs led them to build two very different companies, but both went through the journey of expressing their beliefs through products, technology, and company cultures.
Just one idea, if believed deeply, makes a career. It doesnât need to be grande or shocking. The operative word is âdeeply.â For example, the idea that âmouth breathing is bad for us and we should stop doing itâ is hardly an original insightâMy mother told me as much since I was a kid. Only James Nestor took this idea seriously enough to write a best-selling book, start a breath-work retreat business, and convince us to tape our mouths before going to bed.
Simple is not shallow. An idea becomes deep when you bring it with you to every project, excavating a deeper layer each time you take a swing at doing great work. You see this most clearly in repeat founders. Scott Painter knew what we all know: âAmericans love their cars.â But what businesses can one start from that clichĂŠ? In the past 25 years, he has tried all sorts of ways to improve the car buying and ownership experience: a pricing transparency website (which he took public), an online used car marketplace (raised over $2 billion, then crashed & burned), and an electric vehicle subscription service (failed). Heâs now back at it again, this time selling data and software to automakers. Anything worth exploring is worth exploring to excess.
Surely Iâm forgetting about other aspects to doing great work, like a bias for action (drive) and working smart (strategy)? Less than you might think. A deep belief in one thing is both a proxy for drive and a substitute for strategy. Like a good distributed database, weâre wired to resolve any cognitive dissonance between our actions and our deepest beliefs with eventual consistency. If the belief is strong enough, your actions will conform themselves to it.
You also donât need as much strategy because youâre actually competing with fewer people than you think. Most people dabble in ideas with lukewarm conviction, so the people who believe them the most deeply are ipso facto competing with just themselves. Itâs easy to come first in a race of one. MrBeast surely didnât have the best âcontent strategyâ when he spent 40 hours counting to 100,000. That didnât matter, only he went all-in when other teenagers hedged their YouTube aspirations. Intensity eats strategy for breakfast.
The world is a museum of things people created because they believed one thing deeply. If youâre reading this and agree so far, you probably have an inkling as to what your one thing is. However deeply you already believe it, I challenge you to consider the possibility that thereâs room to take it even further. It will fuel you with a level of clarity, creativity, and determination you never knew you had.
Thanks to Patrick O'Loughlin and John Sherwin for reading drafts of this essay.