Despite Coach Sommer’s (page 9) regular reminders about connective-tissue adaptations taking 200 to 210 days, after a few weeks of flailing with “straddle L extensions,” I was at my wits’ end. Even after the third workout, I had renamed them “frog spaz” in my workout journal because that’s what I resembled while doing them: a frog being electrocuted.
Each week, I sent Coach Sommer videos of my workouts via Dropbox. In my accompanying notes at one point, I expressed how discouraging it was to make zero tangible progress with this exercise. Below is his email response, which I immediately saved to Evernote to review often.
It’s all great, but I’ve bolded my favorite part.
Hi Tim,
Patience. Far too soon to expect strength improvements. Strength improvements [for a movement like this] take a minimum of 6 weeks. Any perceived improvements prior to that are simply the result of improved synaptic facilitation. In plain English, the central nervous system simply became more efficient at that particular movement with practice. This is, however, not to be confused with actual strength gains.
Dealing with the temporary frustration of not making progress is an integral part of the path towards excellence. In fact, it is essential and something that every single elite athlete has had to learn to deal with. If the pursuit of excellence was easy, everyone would do it. In fact, this impatience in dealing with frustration is the primary reason that most people fail to achieve their goals. Unreasonable expectations timewise, resulting in unnecessary frustration, due to a perceived feeling of failure. Achieving the extraordinary is not a linear process.
The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home.
A blue collar work ethic married to indomitable will. It is literally that simple. Nothing interferes. Nothing can sway you from your purpose. Once the decision is made, simply refuse to budge. Refuse to compromise.
And accept that quality long-term results require quality long-term focus. No emotion. No drama. No beating yourself up over small bumps in the road. Learn to enjoy and appreciate the process. This is especially important because you are going to spend far more time on the actual journey than with those all too brief moments of triumph at the end.
Certainly celebrate the moments of triumph when they occur. More importantly, learn from defeats when they happen. In fact, if you are not encountering defeat on a fairly regular basis, you are not trying hard enough. And absolutely refuse to accept less than your best.
Throw out a timeline. It will take what it takes.
If the commitment is to a long-term goal and not to a series of smaller intermediate goals, then only one decision needs to be made and adhered to. Clear, simple, straightforward. Much easier to maintain than having to make small decision after small decision to stay the course when dealing with each step along the way. This provides far too many opportunities to inadvertently drift from your chosen goal. The single decision is one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.
2
Wealthy
“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.”
—James Cameron
“If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn’t plan your mission properly.”
—Colonel David Hackworth
“Not my circus. Not my monkeys.”
—Polish proverb
“It may be lucky, but it’s not an accident.”
Spirit animal: Animal crackers
* * *
Chris Sacca
Chris Sacca (TW/FB/IG/SC: @sacca, lowercasecapital.com) is an early-stage investor in dozens of companies, including Twitter, Uber, Instagram, Kickstarter, and Twilio. He was the cover story of Forbes’s Midas issue in 2015 thanks to what will likely be the most successful venture capital fund in history, Lowercase I of Lowercase Capital. (Get the name? It took me embarrassingly long.) Previously, Chris was Head of Special Initiatives at Google Inc., and he is currently a recurring guest Shark on ABC’s Shark Tank.
Random Bits
I first met Chris in 2008 at a barbecue organized by Kevin Rose (page 340). For my entire life, I’d had a phobia of swimming and an acute fear of drowning. This came up over wine, and Chris said, “I have the answer to your prayers.” He introduced me to Total Immersion swimming by Terry Laughlin, and in less than 10 days of solo training, I went from a 2-length maximum (of a 25-yard pool) to swimming more than 40 lengths per workout in sets of 2 and 4. It blew my mind, and now I swim for fun.
Chris is one of the people who generously mentored me in the startup investing game. The other majors include Naval Ravikant (page 546), Kevin Rose (page 340), and Mike Maples, who got me started (see the Real-World MBA on page 250).
Chris mentioned several books when he appeared on my podcast, including I Seem to Be a Verb by Buckminster Fuller. 48 hours later, used copies were selling for $999 on Amazon.
Are You Playing Offense or Defense?
Despite the fact that people refer to Chris as a “Silicon Valley investor,” he hasn’t lived in San Francisco since 2007. Instead, he bought a cabin in rural Truckee, Tahoe’s less-expensive neighbor, and moved to prime skiing and hiking country. It is no tech hotbed. Back then, Chris hadn’t yet made real money in the investing game, but he had a rationale for buying the getaway:
“I wanted to go on offense. I wanted to have the time to focus, to learn the things I wanted to learn, to build what I wanted to build, and to really invest in relationships that I wanted to grow, rather than just doing a day of coffee after coffee after coffee.”
TF: He no longer felt compelled to take meetings he didn’t want. There were no more early-morning coffee dates and late-night social dinners he didn’t want to attend. Rather, Chris invited specific founders to spend weekends at “the jam pad” and “the jam tub” (the hot tub outside). He considers the cabin the best investment he’s ever made:
“Everyone loves coming to the mountains. Over the years, that’s helped me build lasting friendships. Some of those have been the catalysts for my investments in Uber, Twitter, and others. I’ve even had a body-hacking, grill-manning, best-selling author stay there a few times. [TF: I also embarrassed myself with Euro-style Speedos.] I borrow the cash for a 3-bedroom house and get a lifetime’s worth of pals and a hugely successful business in return? Best trade ever.”
Chris elaborates: “Generally, what all of this comes down to is whether you are on offense or defense. I think that as you survey the challenges in your lives, it’s just: Which of those did you assign yourself, and which of those are you doing to please someone else? Your inbox is a to-do list to which anyone in the world can add an action item. I needed to get out of my inbox and back to my own to-do list.”
Go to as Many Higher-Level Meetings as Possible
TIM: “If working in a startup environment, what should one do or focus on to learn and improve as much as possible?”
CHRIS: “Go to all the meetings you can, even if you’re not invited to them, and figure out how to be helpful. If people wonder why you’re there, just start taking notes. Read all the other notes you can find on the company, and gain a general knowledge that your very limited job function may not offer you. Just make yourself useful and helpful by doing so. That’s worked for me in a few different environments, and I encourage you to try it.”
TF: Chris was well known at Google for showing up to meetings with anyone, including the co-founders. Even if attendees looked at each other puzzled, Chris would sit down and let them know he’d be taking notes for them. It worked. He got a front-row seat to the highest levels of Google and soon became a fixture in those meetings.
Cowboy Shirts
Chris is known for wearing somewhat ridiculous cowboy shirts. They’ve become his signature style. Here’s a bit more context, from a Forbes profile of Chris by Alex Konrad: “Steve Jobs had his black turtleneck. Chris Sacca has his embroidered cowb
oy shirt. He bought his first one, impulsively, at the Reno airport en route to a speech, and the reaction prompted him to buy out half the store on his return.” He likes the brands Scully and Rockmount. A good place to look at a wide selection is VintageWesternWear.com.
A shirt might seem like a small thing, but Chris realized early on that being a successful investor isn’t simply knowing which companies to invest in. Part of the process is ensuring founders know who you are. If a single shirt can create seemingly unending media mentions and doesn’t hurt your reputation, it’s low-hanging fruit. On top of that: “It also saved me a lot of time thinking about what to wear and a lot of money that would’ve been wasted on suits.”
When the Going Gets Tough—“Tonight, I Will Be in My Bed.”
In 2009, Chris did a charity bicycle ride with the Trek Travel team from Santa Barbara, California, to Charleston, North Carolina:
“I had a phrase I kept repeating in my head over and over again, which was, ‘Tonight, I will be in my bed. Tonight, I will be in my bed. Tonight, I will be in my bed.’ . . . It was something I repeated to remind me that the pain of what I was going through was temporary and that, no matter what, at the end of that day, I would be in my bed that night.”
On the Advantage of Cultivating Beginner’s Mind
“Experience often deeply embeds the assumptions that need to be questioned in the first place. When you have a lot of experience with something, you don’t notice the things that are new about it. You don’t notice the idiosyncrasies that need to be tweaked. You don’t notice where the gaps are, what’s missing, or what’s not really working.”
TF: Just like Malcolm Gladwell’s dad (see page 573) and Alex Blumberg (page 303), Chris is incredibly smart about asking the “dumb” questions hiding in plain sight.
Empathy Isn’t Just Good for Life, It’s Good for Business
“As a builder, as an entrepreneur, how can you create something for someone else if you don’t have even enough glancing familiarity with them to imagine the world through their eyes?”
Sweet and Sour Summers
“There is something my parents did, and it was pretty unique. My brother and I refer to it as ‘The Sweet and Sour Summer.’ My parents would send us, for the first half of the summer, to an internship with a relative or a friend of the family who had an interesting job. So, at 12, I went and interned with my godbrother, who is a lobbyist in D.C. I would go along with him to pitch congressmen. I had one tie, and I was a pretty good writer. I’d write up one-page summaries of these bills we were pitching, and I’d literally sit there with these congressmen with these filthy mouths—you know, the old Alabaman senator and stuff like that—and watch the pitch happen. It was awesome. I learned so much and developed so much confidence, and really honed my storytelling skills.
“But then, from there, I would come home and work in a construction outfit, in a nasty, nasty job. I mean, hosing off the equipment that had been used to fix septic systems, gassing shit up, dragging shit around in the yard, filling up propane tanks. Just being the junior guy on the totem pole, and quite literally getting my ass kicked by whichever parolee was angry at me that day. I think it was part of their master plan, which was: There’s a world of cool opportunities out there for you, but let’s build within you a sense of not just work ethic, but also, a little kick in the ass about why you don’t wanna end up in one of those real jobs. . . .”
TIM: “You had the introduction to the godbrother, for the lobbying. Did your parents also help organize the sour part of each summer?”
CHRIS: “The guy who ran that construction company is my dad’s best friend, and he was under strict orders to make sure we had the roughest day there.”
“Good Stories Always Beat Good Spreadsheets”
“Whether you are raising money, pitching your product to customers, selling the company, or recruiting employees, never forget that underneath all the math and the MBA bullshit talk, we are all still emotionally driven human beings. We want to attach ourselves to narratives. We don’t act because of equations. We follow our beliefs. We get behind leaders who stir our feelings. In the early days of your venture, if you find someone diving too deep into the numbers, that means they are struggling to find a reason to deeply care about you.”
“Be Your Unapologetically Weird Self”
“I gave a commencement speech in Minnesota few years ago [at the Carlson School of Management]. The core of it was to be your unapologetically weird self. I think authenticity is one of the most lacking things out there these days.”
An excerpt from that speech: “Weirdness is why we adore our friends. . . . Weirdness is what bonds us to our colleagues. Weirdness is what sets us apart, gets us hired. Be your unapologetically weird self. In fact, being weird may even find you the ultimate happiness.”
TF: As an example—mullet wigs.
CHRIS: “If you could bring one thing to make for an amazing party night, it’s wigs, seriously. Go to Amazon right now and order 50 mullet wigs. Mullet wigs change everything.”
* * *
Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen (TW: @pmarca, a16z.com) is a legendary figure in Silicon Valley, and his creations have changed the world. Even in the epicenter of tech, it’s hard to find a more fascinating icon. Marc co-created the highly influential Mosaic browser, the first widely used graphical web browser. He also co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He then co-founded Loudcloud, which sold as Opsware to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He’s considered one of the founding fathers of the modern Internet, alongside pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee, who launched the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and early HTML standards.
This all makes him one of the few humans ever to create software categories used by more than a billion people and establish multiple billion-dollar companies. Marc is now co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, where he has become one of the most influential and dominant tech investors on the planet.
“Raise Prices”
This was Marc’s response to “If you could have a billboard anywhere, what would it say?” He’d put it right in the heart of San Francisco, and here’s the reason:
“The number-one theme that companies have when they really struggle is they are not charging enough for their product. It has become conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that the way to succeed is to price your product as low as possible, under the theory that if it’s low-priced, everybody can buy it, and that’s how you get to volume,” he said. “And we just see over and over and over again people failing with that, because they get into a problem called ‘too hungry to eat.’ They don’t charge enough for their product to be able to afford the sales and marketing required to actually get anybody to buy it. Is your product any good if people won’t pay more for it?”
Don’t Fetishize Failure
“I’m old-fashioned. Where I come from, people like to succeed. . . . When I was a founder, when I first started out, we didn’t have the word ‘pivot.’ We didn’t have a fancy word for it. We just called it a fuck-up.
“We do see companies that, literally, every time we meet them, they’ve pivoted. Every time, they’re off to something new, and it’s like watching a rabbit go through a maze or something. They’re never going to converge on anything because they’re never going to put the time into actually figuring it out and getting it right.”
(See Peter Thiel’s thoughts on failure on page 233.)
The “Nerds at Night” Test
How does Marc look for new opportunities? He has dozens of tools, but one of his heuristics is simple:
“We call our test ‘What do the nerds do on nights and weekends?’ Their day job is Oracle, Salesforce.com, Adobe or Apple or Intel or one of these companies, or an insurance company, bank [or they’re a student]. Whatever. That’s fine. They go do whatever they need to do to m
ake a living. The question is: What’s the hobby? What’s the thing at night or on the weekend? Then things get really interesting.”
Stress-Testing Ideas with a “Red Team”
“Each of our GPs [general partners] has the ability to pull the trigger on a deal without a vote or without consensus. If the person closest to the deal has a very strong degree of positive commitment and enthusiasm about it, then we should do that investment, even if everybody else in the room thinks it’s the stupidest thing they’ve ever heard . . . however, you don’t get to do that completely on your own without stress-testing. If necessary, we create a ‘red team.’ We’ll formally create the countervailing force to argue the other side.”
TF: To avoid the potential problem of newer hires getting battered more than senior folks, Marc and his founding partner, Ben Horowitz, make a point of smashing each other. “Whenever [Ben] brings in a deal, I just beat the shit out of it. I might think it’s the best idea I’ve ever heard of, but I’ll just trash the crap out of it and try to get everybody else to pile on. And then, at the end of it, if he’s still pounding the table saying, ‘No, no, this is the thing . . .’ then we say we’re all in. We’re all behind you. . . . It’s a ‘disagree and commit’ kind of culture. By the way, he does the same thing to me. It’s the torture test.”
TF: Where can you create a “red team” in your life to stress-test your most treasured beliefs? (See Samy Kamkar, page 427; Stan McChrystal, page 435; and Jocko Willink, page 412.)
Always Forward
I’ll let the below exchange speak for itself. This philosophy pairs well with the 21-Day No Complaint experiment that I’ve written about before on my blog (fourhourblog.com):
Tools of Titans Page 18
