But even Steve had limits to his abilities; he couldn’t make his original vision for NeXT’s black cubes work, and the business needed to pivot into selling enterprise software to survive. He denied that Lisa Brennan-Jobs was his daughter for many years. And, he couldn’t distort his way out of cancer.

I had once planned on writing a book about reality distortion, and how today’s business leaders seem to have continued the tradition. As the years go by, I’ve grown to see its undisciplined use as a risky, unhealthy, and unreliable practice. 

Engaging a healthy, expansive, and optimistic attitude is different from engaging an extreme delusional perspective. 

Reality catches up. There are much more constructive ways to deal with painful reality checks. As Will Smith wrote, “The bigger the fantasy you live, the more painful the inevitable collision with reality. Reality is going to pay you back in equal proportion to your delusion.”

When you want to connect with reality, loosen up your grip on what you believe and your vision for the future, and see what happens. As Philip K. Dick wrote, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Or as Oliver Burkeman paraphrases Michael Singer, “Reality doesn’t need you to help operate it.”

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A few moments, or perhaps days, later, I realize that I’m not going to have the time and energy to write it at this moment; maybe I never will. My hands are full, and life is too short. That fever turns into grief.

This process takes place in a similar spirit to how Visakan Veerasamy describes his unfinished drafts as having “grandiose shapes.” He explains, “They’re conceptualized from the beginning in ways that require a lot of time and energy to finish, and would also require quite a lot from my readers.”

Several years ago, I realized that focusing on agility as a writer can be useful. A couple of years after that, I started writing every day at this blog. 

This practice is training my brain to take big ideas and, instead of putting them into a grandiose shape that I don’t have bandwidth to work on, find a more modest one for them that I’m actually capable of. It’s much scruffier. It’s imperfect because it meets the real world. The game doesn’t end when an idea is in the form of a book; the whole point of the game is to keep writing.

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By 1998, Steve Jobs and the company’s other new leaders decided to try to save it. Steve identified two things that were working for Apple: its neglected brand, and its operating system. They cancelled a lot of product development. That year, the company released only five new products. 

There’s a fine line between being prolific and being distracted. That line is being choiceful: making thoughtful, intentional, and deliberate decisions. 

Steve’s successor Tim Cook said it well when he took up the reins at Apple: 

“We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us.”

It reminds me of something a former leader at Apple, Jony Ive, said: 

“What focus is, saying no to something that with every bone in your body you think is a phenomenal idea. And you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it. Because you are focusing on something else.”

Apple spent billions of dollars on developing a car. A couple of years ago, Apple shut it down to focus on AI and continue to improve its current product portfolio.

It feels painful to practice choicefulness. The trade comes in the form of the energy you free up by choosing to focus, and a much better chance at succeeding.

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His first home was in a room on the fourth floor of a brownstone in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, just a block west of Central Park. In the evenings, he often worked at a diner nearby, sipping on coffee while completing his harmony exercises as well as composing his own music in his notebooks.

One night, Philip noticed an older man in his 60s doing the same thing—composing music. He writes in his memoir, Words Without Music, “It was a piano quintet (piano plus string quartet) and, from my few quick glances, it looked very well thought out and ‘professional.’” 

If you were in Philip’s position, you might think that this older man hadn’t seemed to gain much success with his music. You might even worry that would be your fate; after decades of dedication, there you were, still toiling away in obscurity in a diner with someone decades your junior. 

That thought didn’t cross Philip’s mind. Instead, he writes:

Now, here is perhaps the most remarkable part of the story, and something I didn’t understand until many years later: I wasn’t at all upset by this nonencounter. It never occurred to me that, perhaps, it was a harbinger of my own future. No, I didn’t think that way at all. My thought was that his presence confirmed that what I was doing was correct. Here was an example of an obviously mature composer pursuing his career in these unexpected surroundings. I never knew who he was. Perhaps he was there, escaping from some noisy domestic scene—wife, kids running around, too many guests at home. Or, like me, perhaps he was simply living alone in a single room. The main thing was that I didn’t find it worrisome. If anything I admired his resolve, his composure. It was inspiring.

Creative commitment expresses itself in all different types of ways. Success can be one signal of it, but it’s no more than that. And there are plenty of serious people who don’t need to broadcast success to be a sign of their commitment, just as there are plenty of spouses who don’t need a big diamond ring to let the world know that they are happily married. (Many artists, including Philip, worked day jobs before they could focus on their art full-time. If you’re participating in this tradition, you’ve joined a long lineage.)

As long as you keep practicing and working on the craft, you’re taking it seriously.

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You don’t need to pursue one strategy at a time. You can draft up three to five strategies, test them out, and see which ones work. In fact, it’s probably useful to think of more than one path to win. 

The most effective entrepreneurs and companies generally practice this. The art is in executing these strategies and tests, and conducting effective research.

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For context, no team losing by that much has ever come back to win in the finals. They were leading the series by 2-1. 

I wondered if the coach would just sit their star players and let their opponents, the San Antonio Spurs, have it. Rest and focus on the next win.

Nope. The Knicks played another two consistent quarters, and ended up winning by a point. It was the greatest comeback in NBA finals history.

Play the whole game. Give yourself a chance to snap out of the funk, and for your opponents to make mistakes. Don’t quit at the half.

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Chasing the ecstasy of the first win leads you to future losses. It gives you a false sense of confidence, leading you to think you’re in control, and to do something you’ll regret.

Gambling isn’t just an act, it’s an attitude and mindset. Winning any type of gamble should be a warning sign to get out.

The pain of losing a gamble is useful because it discourages you from losing more. The first step to getting out of a hole is to stop digging.

Investing is not the same as gambling. If you can’t tell the difference, you’re gambling.

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“Instead of focusing on being sure, they try to figure out how unsure they are, making their best guess at the chances that different outcomes will occur,” she writes. “The accuracy of those guesses will depend on how much information they have and how experienced they are at making such guesses. This is part of the basis of all bets.”

From this perspective, Annie suggests taking a more considered approach to when outcomes don’t unfold as we predicted or would have preferred. You’re not 100% wrong.

One key is to learn from the experience, and to examine the outcome to see if there are any insights or factors you can learn that might improve your reasoning the next time you need to make a decision.

The other is to accept that no matter how good your decision is—or how bad—sometimes factors that are out of your control have a greater effect on the outcome. “Luck” is just a word we use to describe these factors. 

Perhaps it’s assuring to remember that life is probabilistic; if you get to make enough decisions, and you learn from each outcome and improve your decision quality, your outcomes should also improve. At the same time, any given decision could turn out in a way you don’t expect.

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In The Biggest Bluff, author Maria Konnikova writes about her journey to becoming a professional poker player. She meets champion Erik Seidel, who takes her on as his student.

After narrowly losing a tournament, Maria finds Erik to vent about a bad beat. The odds had been in her favor. Erik, who is usually a good listener, uncharacteristically interrupts her. He tells her, “Bad beats are a really bad mental habit. You don’t want to ever dwell on them. It doesn’t help you become a better player.”

Instead, Erik tells Maria, “Focus on the process, not the luck. Did I play correctly? Everything else is just BS in our heads. Thinking that way won’t get you anywhere. You know about the randomness of it but it doesn’t help to think about it.”

Focusing on luck—randomness, uncertainty, chaos—encourages you to abdicate control over the situation. You feel like a victim. Instead, as Maria reflects, if you made the best decision possible, you want to say something more like this to yourself: “I made the correct decision. Sure, the outcome didn’t go my way, but I thought correctly under pressure. And that’s the skill I can control.” Things don’t just happen to you, you can take responsibility for your actions. If you’re learning, then you focus on the process, and the lesson you learned, and make sure to apply it to the next decision.

This attitude amplifies luck, in a sense; it leads you to focus on factors that you can control, to learn from the outcomes, which in turn energizes other people and encourages them to keep you at the top of their minds. 

I’m not a poker player, and I’ve gotten complimented on my ability to take feedback, but I’ve still often fallen into the vicious habit of framing outcomes as bad beats. As I reflect, I think about the times I’ve blamed circumstances or other people when I should have been deconstructing the outcome (by myself or with a peer/teacher), learning from it, and making a better decision and effort next time. 

Moving forward, I’ll take the advice from Maria and Erik: “No bad beats. Forget they ever happened.”

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Work works itself to work

Work is happy each and every day

There’s nothing work can’t do

Work does anything and everything

Even work work doesn’t want to do

Work only knows to move forward

Work surprises everyone with its unstoppable energy

There is nothing work doesn’t know

It answers all if you ask

If you ask to do it work will do it

What work likes the most

Is to struggle with hard work

All the hard work work would do

Let us now work work work

It reminds me that work is a condition of life; it’s not meant to be escaped. 

A proper respect for your own work also makes sure you’re not exploited.

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