Don’t forget to be retarded

I was reading about the early days of PayPal and had one thought:

My God, these people were so delusional.

Elon thought X.com would replace banks, insurance, basically everything. To him, money was just entries in a database. All the layers on top were random things humans made up.

Max Levchin and Peter Thiel weren’t much more reasonable.

Today, we call them visionaries. At the time, they were obviously delusional.

The difference between vision and delusion is mostly whether it worked.

Here’s the thing: if you seriously consider everything that can go wrong, you’ll never build anything big.

• What if OpenAI does it?
• What if Anthropic does it?
• What if the company collapses?

All intelligent questions. Also completely useless.

You cannot do a backflip while questioning halfway through whether you’ll land. You need to be delusional enough to jump and committed enough to rotate.

(to be fair, you can also break your neck haha)

But if your goal is a triple backflip 720 on skis, one backflip suddenly doesn’t feel that crazy.

You should update the route constantly. Just don’t negotiate down where you’re trying to go.

Anyways, smart people spend way too much time making sure they don’t look stupid.

Don’t forget to be retarded.