Each time we barely pushed the needle when it came to growth. We dreamt of silver bullets, but we were only pushing out what amounted to paper bullets.
To be successful over the course of a career requires the application and accumulation of expertise. This assumes that for any given undertaking you either provide expertise or you are just a bystander. It’s the experts that are the drivers — an expertise that is gained from a curiosity, and a mindset of treating one’s craft very seriously.
A startup is by nature a crash course in developing expertise. What makes startups unique is the sheer dearth of resources. This dearth of resources forces founders to rapidly adapt their skills to meet the demands of the project.
‘I didn’t know how to do x, so I just had to figure it out.’ This is what I regularly hear from successful founders, whereas ‘I couldn’t find someone to do X, so I had to reconsider whether to pursue it at all’ is a common refrain from unsuccessful founders.
He’s a thoughtful person overall. He is an excellent interviewer. There’s also something to be said that creating a brand as large as he has takes some insight into marketing and understanding his audience.
A pre-requisite to automating and finding optimizations in the way Ferris describes, is to first be really good at what you do. Tim Ferris himself is good at what he does.