Burning Dumpster Fire of Stupidity
Agility, Humility, and Humor to Become Less Wrong & Convert "Impossible" into "Late"
“You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.”
“If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough”
“We had no idea what we were doing”
“Just a flat-out burning dumpster fire of stupidity I would say was the beginning of the company, and we had to recover from there and it was very difficult”
Technoking of Tesla, Elon Musk
Once upon a time in a magical land far, far away called Silicon Valley, USA, a small team of ambitious, young, brave, brilliant, geeky, starry-eyed, but hopelessly naïve dreamers embarked on a bold quest to create a technology startup.
They hoped to disrupt a hundred-year-old industry that had been tragically trapped atop a local maximum with a fundamentally suboptimal design that was long overdue for a radical rethink. Luckily, the physically optimal architecture had recently become commercially viable due to a convergence of enabling technologies all having reached a critical threshold of maturity.
That kind of perfect timing right as a convergence of tech reaches a tipping point is how all the big winners start out, like Apple taking the first iPhone to market in 2007 to shake up mobile computing and communication, and like Microsoft writing a BASIC interpreter for the revolutionary Altair 8800 personal computer in 1975 in order to disrupt mainframe computing. Visionary, audacious outsiders capitalize on the opportunity immediately while the industry incumbents focus on what they know and what shareholders are looking at: their existing core competency. The powers that be see a pathetic little plant that isn’t worth their time and attention and might not even have long-term growth potential; entrepreneurs, by paying attention, study the sprout closely and correctly recognize a California redwood.
Unfortunately, in the case of this particular technology startup, the founding engineers had a product design and business execution plan filled with staggeringly dumb decisions based on fundamentally flawed premises, which resulted in an insane nightmare of trials, tribulations, and brutal confusion that could be characterized as a flat-out burning dumpster fire of stupidity. Almost everything about their product design and business plan was wrong and wouldn’t work. The team screwed the pooch six ways to Sunday and made so many mistakes it was just embarrassing.
Believe it or not, these huge idiots—after gradually gaining a dawning awareness of the true extent of their cluelessness and the actual degree of difficulty involved in the endeavor, at a point when rational people would have cut their losses and quit—instead audaciously chose to double down. Faced with an existential crisis for their fledgling company and an apparently low probability of success, the team started working even harder and longer than before, and if that wasn’t crazy enough, they also started winging it in general, with a heavily modified, quickly improvised version of the original plan. They recruited several new people to join the project, attempted to extinguish the blazing heap of garbage with a firehose spewing out millions of additional dollars onto the flames, and changed the plan over and over again until it bore merely a faint resemblance to the initial idea. It was like buying a house to renovate it, but then spending years knocking out almost all the walls and rebuilding 94% of it from scratch, all while spending more time and money than it would’ve taken to just design and build a fresh new house in the first place.
They exacerbated the challenges by deciding to outsource many critical parts and manufacturing operations to suppliers in faraway locations like England, Taiwan, Germany, Thailand and France, and these were suppliers who in many cases couldn’t even meet the engineering specifications. Astonishingly, the startup gave the most critical supply contract to a barbecue manufacturer in Thailand. I’m not joking; production of the core, never-been-built-before technology was outsourced to a barbecue manufacturer in Thailand with a six-month total lead time from order placement to inbound receiving at the final assembly facility in California. Like I said, a series of numerous staggeringly dumb decisions contributed to this disaster.
In the ensuing five years, one of these clowns (pictured above), who had disregarded the sensible advice of everyone he knew, who had been bankrolling this tragic yet entertaining circus due to having more dollars than sense, and who possessed a pathological inability to give up on important goals even when faced with 90% probability of failure, actually shoveled so many pallets of cash from his own 9-figure wealth pile into the Inferno of Incompetence that he almost went bankrupt.
True story.
Don’t believe me? Before you bring out your pitchforks and torches and assemble outside my door, hear the tale told by a couple of the aforementioned engineers themselves, whom I greatly respect and admire and am not actually insulting. I must admit that I directly plagiarized half of my retelling of this story from their own exact words, with the rest being paraphrased with only slight embellishment for entertainment purposes.
I also want to discuss why it’s actually very important that Elon and other Tesla leaders describe themselves and their own work in this manner, on the one hand painting it in grand terms and selling the amazing capabilities of the company while also using hilarious language and anecdotes to describe their many failures.
Spoiler Alert!
(In case you haven’t caught anything after Season 5)
This soap opera actually has a “happily ever after”.
After the drama and the litany of silly mistakes culminated in the near-bankruptcy of the startup and its lead clown in 2008, a phoenix arose from the ashes of the burning dumpster fire of stupidity and it evolved into the most successful company ever. The middle-class-to-riches-to-rags clown has since become the world’s wealthiest clown and he currently knows more about vehicle design and manufacturing than anyone else in the Solar System. How did that happen so fast? What gives?
First, it’s not about how you start; it’s about having an insightful general idea for doing something really useful and then making fast progress on fixing inevitable mistakes, all while avoiding bankruptcy. In other words, what matters most are qualities like:
Determination
Discipline
Speed
Agility
Resourcefulness
Grit
“Clown” was the word selected partially just to make this article funnier, but mainly because it’s an apt description of Elon Musk. Clowns, by definition, attempt to make people laugh and elevate the mood of the room by acting in a foolish and caricatured manner, telling boorish, self-deprecating jokes, and generally making a mockery of themselves for everyone else’s entertainment. I think this clownery and apparent lack of ego or concern for being perceived as traditionally “professional” was then, and remains today, a crucial element in why Tesla has been able to achieve what they’ve achieved.
Like a good stoic, clowns always find a way to wear a big goofy grin, even while eating glass and staring into the abyss (i.e. starting a company)
Positive attitude and humor helps keep people’s spirits up in the darkest of times
Clowns can change their minds more easily because they’re not concerned with being taken seriously and any mistakes just become new ways to hilariously ridicule their own past errors
Experiment More, Plan Less
Behold the original plan that sparked the dumpster fire in 2003:
So many bad ideas:
Commercialize custom-built hobbyist technology from AC Propulsion
Retrofit a battery-electric powertrain into a gas car design
Emphasize the prototype and neglect the manufacturing and supply chain
Outsource as much design and manufacturing as possible in order to be “a car company without a factory”
That’s weird. This sounds like exactly the opposite of the Tesla we know and love today that vertically integrates everything from design to mine to factory to service to recycling, does anything possible to increase the number of meaningful iterative design improvements per unit time, warns legacy car companies about the pitfalls of retrofit conversions of ICEV platforms to battery propulsion, and tries to minimize the distance travelled by all atoms throughout the value chain. We have gone “fab-less car company” ambitions to “prototypes are easy; manufacturing is hard” and “the factory is the product” and “manufacturing will be Tesla’s long-term competitive advantage”.
This reversal of plans is a sign of determination, learning, and not clinging onto a sinking ship out of pride, fear of change, or complacency, but instead quickly jumping over to a better boat that actually floats. While this sounds obviously logical and self-evident, it turns out that making a change like this can be quite difficult for most people. Elon and Tesla are great at avoiding the Sunk Cost Fallacy, which is the fancy psychology and behavioral economics term describing the irrational tendency for people to continue an endeavor after previously making an investment in money, effort, or time, even when it would be better to stop or change course.
“When you’re in a hole, stop digging” — Old adage
In retrospect, the only good parts of the initial Tesla Motors business model were:
Realizing that lithium-ion cylindrical battery cells and electric motors could make a great sports car with good energy efficiency and no tailpipe emissions
Realizing that electric vehicles had long-term potential to render all gas and diesel propulsion obsolete
Not pursuing dealerships as a distribution strategy
Aiming initial marketing at rich, Californian, tech-loving environmentalists who drove Priuses on weekdays and Porsches on weekends
Involving an apparently delusional venture capitalist (for lack of a better descriptor) who was trying to start a private orbital rocket company in order to convince NASA to start a Mars colonization mission and who had been talking about electric cars and finite oil supply at parties since the 1980s
Simply getting a few fundamental ideas right in the beginning was apparently sufficient, as Elon beautifully said in the 2016 Tesla shareholder’s meeting, a goldmine of candid discussion of early Tesla history.
“I think the lesson for people here thinking about creating companies is that even if your company starts off based on things that are completely untrue that you don’t know about, what really matters is recognizing the mistakes and adapting quickly and fixing the false premises upon which the company was founded…and the sooner you do that the better.”
Elon Musk
Highlights:
JB Straubel’s first conversation with Elon in 2003 in which JB pitched an electric airplane startup idea (bad idea) followed by the conversation fortuitously going on a tangent about electric cars (good idea)
Suppliers not returning calls from Tesla trying to place orders
The AC Propulsion tzero ending up being so ridiculously hard to clone that JB considered it “genius engineering to actually make it run at all”
Drew Baglino’s early work on reverse engineering the analog power electronics in the tzero and designing replacement digital electronics for the Roadster
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin being given a prototype test ride with a software bug embarrassingly limiting the speed to 10 miles per hour
Spoiler: They invested in Tesla anyway
The Tesla Roadster public unveiling event in 2006 with prototypes that were barely holding together and which periodically needed to be hidden behind a curtain so ice water could be pumped through the powertrain to cool it off
Juicy details on the Thai barbecue outsourcing debacle
Discussed at 4:26:30 in video:
Elon: I remember having a conversation with Jason that’s like “Jason, dude, we are doomed if we do not insource the battery pack, because we have a supplier in Thailand that is great at making barbecues but not at making battery packs” and the supply chain was so long that it would take six months from when the cells were built to when the battery pack was done and in a car…
The capital cost of that supply chain was gigantic because we would have to pay for all of that inventory and process and inevitably there would be mistakes made in the design or the fabrication of the battery pack and we’d have six months worth of battery packs that didn’t work. So this was sort of like doom on a stick. And it’s like, man, even though the idea of manufacturing in San Carlos was mad, it was less mad than outsourcing to a situation that definitely didn’t work. So it was like, “Jason, we have basically months to insource this operation so that we can iterate rapidly on the battery pack design, iron out our issues, and tighten the supply chain.”
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Jason: Extremely well-intentioned, but just absolutely no experience. The building was open to the air and so you would literally have animal droppings on the product and that’s when we were like “Alright, we gotta have a building, man, c’mon.”
Elon: Roofs are important, you know.
…
Jason: So after two years of spending—I spent personally 50% of two years there [in Thailand]; a bunch of people in this room spent as much if not more time there getting the thing running, and like you [Elon] said also, the lag: We would show up in Thailand—I don’t know if you guys know what a pelican case is, but it’s this awesome plastic suitcase and we’d show up with seven of them at the airport and these [security] guys would just look at us like “What are you guys doing?”…Anyway, we brought [manufacturing] back in January of 2008. We packed up seven shipping containers, and we reassembled that factory in San Carlos…in about five and a half months.
…
Jason: It was [a] really early telltale: vertical integration is the way to go. Some would argue we might’ve over-centered [on vertical integration] in some areas…but really we had control now. We had all the engineers right there. We didn’t have batteries on the water, not only from Thailand to England but then cars on the water from England to here.
Elon: Yeah. That’s what I meant by the six-month supply chains. So it would be like, we would only find out if there was an issue with either the design or the manufacturing of the battery pack six months after it was built. So you can imagine the insanity of having some built-in design or manufacturing flaw and have six months worth of inventory that all has that flaw.
Jason: Yeah, some of the same people we were working with building the factory in Thailand. We would do missions…to the UK to the Lotus factory again with these pelican cases full of glue and popsicle sticks and mixers, and we would do these retrofits of—I think the record was like 15 batteries in two and a half weeks, where we disassembled the whole thing, did the retrofit, assembled it. The Lotus guys thought we were insane.
Elon: Yeah they did.
Jason: They had a point.
…
JB: I think that taught us a really key lesson that is still incredibly relevant today [in 2016], which is a lot of the technology and intellectual property was actually in how we make the products and I think that’s underappreciated by a lot of people…
Relentless Resourcefulness
Paul Graham, one of the founders of Y Combinator, has watched hundreds and hundreds of technology startups fail and a few succeed, all in a remarkably well controlled entrepreneurial experimental setup complete with careful observation, data collection, and long follow-up periods. That sounds pretty scientific. Let’s see what he has to say about this topic.
Like all investors, we spend a lot of time trying to learn how to predict which startups will succeed … We learned quickly that the most important predictor of success is determination. At first we thought it might be intelligence. Everyone likes to believe that's what makes startups succeed … In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent.
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The simplest form of determination is sheer willfulness. When you want something, you must have it, no matter what … Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline. That word balance is a significant one. The more willful you are, the more disciplined you have to be. The stronger your will, the less anyone will be able to argue with you except yourself. And someone has to argue with you, because everyone has base impulses, and if you have more will than discipline you'll just give into them and end up on a local maximum like drug addiction.
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One reason the young sometimes succeed where the old fail is that they don't realize how incompetent they are…When they first start working on something, they overrate their achievements. But that gives them confidence to keep working, and their performance improves. Whereas someone clearer-eyed would see their initial incompetence for what it was, and perhaps be discouraged from continuing.
A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful … It's not hard to express the quality we're looking for in metaphors. The best is probably a running back. A good running back is not merely determined, but flexible as well. They want to get downfield, but they adapt their plans on the fly.
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If I were running a startup, this would be the phrase I'd tape to the mirror. "Make something people want" is the destination, but "Be relentlessly resourceful" is how you get there.
The General Assembly tent in Fremont is perfect example of Tesla exhibiting these characteristics of success. Most people viewed this move as a sign of desperation and incompetence. They laughed and deeply misunderstood the significance. The tent did indicate a kind of incompetence—in the short term. Tesla pursued a level of automation far beyond their capabilities in 2018 and also had a bunch of design mistakes to fix. What the doubters and haters missed is what that tent strategy indicated about the character of the people at Tesla and the culture they shared, and that proved to be more important in the long run.
If you want to see the way most people reacted to the tent, read this:
https://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-tent-20180625-story.html
If you don’t know the story, in early 2018 Tesla was experiencing extreme difficulty with ramping up production of the Model 3. They had made all kinds of mistakes in designing their first ever mass production line for making hundreds of thousands of electric cars per year. “Production Hell” is a pretty catchy name, but I’d argue for an alternative name: “Burning Dumpster Fire of Stupidity Part 2”. Tesla ended up needing to bring in employees from all over the company to help, and even Tesla’s executive leadership team was working on the production line with everybody else, furiously working to solve problems before the company collapsed. At some point, when the factory was too crowded for what Tesla needed, somebody proposed setting up an assembly line in the parking lot with cover from a popup sprung tent structure.
That tent option met all the design requirements and could be implemented in 3 weeks with almost no money outlay. It was, therefore, brilliant first-principles thinking for solving the problem, and without it the company likely would have perished. Something truly genius always will be unorthodox, because by definition orthodox things are already being done by most others.
In Tesla, regardless of whether your official title is Chief Financial Officer, Engineer, or Janitor, your only real job is to take the set of actions that most contribute to maximizing the speed of the world’s transition to sustainable energy. That’s it. Job #1. Normally that entails fulfilling your nominal job role, but in the depths of 2018 Production Hell, that meant salvaging the botched Model 3 ramp and reaching positive cash flow by any means necessary. The entire company put in 100-hour work weeks to get the job done, according to Elon, both directly by helping with Model 3 issues and indirectly elsewhere in the company by covering for the many absent employees loaned away to Fremont and Sparks. If for you that specifically meant spending 14 hours a day helping assemble cars in a tent with no air conditioning in the middle of a Californian summer and helping close the loop between the customer, the design engineers and the manufacturing line, then so be it; that was your personal mission.
How can any competitor hope to outperform an organization willing to work that hard and sacrifice that much for their mission with such excellent cooperation and teamwork? This level of commitment and extreme ownership is not normal. It’s like Navy SEAL-level discipline.
Advantages of Immature Comedy and Other Types of “Unprofessional” Behavior
If we skip ahead several years in the timeline, we see that Elon has developed an obsession with puerile jokes regarding the magic numbers 69 and 420. He actually got the Tesla Board of Directors to approve a change of his primary job title to “Technoking” and CFO Zach Kirkhorn’s primary title to “Master of Coin”. Tesla’s official government paperwork now formally refers to him as the Technoking.
Limited-Edition Merchandise
Muskian companies generate interest and engagement with silly gag products that go viral online and sell out with no paid advertising, making a mockery of conventional business wisdom while making a brand statement like:
“We have fun and we want you to have fun too, and we’re so confident in what we’re doing that we’ll sell overpriced jokes completely unrelated to our core business and have our CEO promote them on Twitter and in Youtube interviews while we get free advertising from mainstream media because running a news story about this is an easy way generate clicks.”
Jokes on the Technoking’s Twitter Account
In Q2 2018, as Tesla was grinding through the depths of Model 3 Production Hell while burning so much cash that most outsider observers thought Tesla would go belly-up, with production with US tax credits set to start phasing out for Tesla in 2019, Elon announced on April Fool’s Day:
This is one instance of many. Regardless of how one feels about Elon’s general behavior on Twitter or specific mistakes he’s made there, it’s undeniable that his tweets attract attention and engagement from tens of millions of people every day. This is an enormous marketing and recruiting advantage possessed by no other company on the planet.
Product Features and Nomenclature
To select model names, other car companies do deep market research, focus groups and psychology studies. Tesla simply chose S, X, 3, and Y, in order to spell out S3XY.
Ford Motor Company has been unwilling to relinquish their trademark rights to “Model E”
“Emissions Testing Mode” makes fart noises whenever the wheel is turned
“Romance Mode” displays a crackling fire on the console, complete with sound and heat
The powertrain nomenclature for “Ludicrous” and “Plaid” pays homage to Spaceballs, the goofy 1987 parody of Star Wars.
(Swearing may be NSFW)
The Muskian brand and marketing strategy is both ridiculous and ridiculously effective. A few tweets Elon sends while sitting on the toilet can generate more attention and engagement than a million-dollar ad campaign. A livestream reveal on YouTube of a major product like the Plaid powertrain or the Cybertruck can generate tens of millions of engaged views and discussions all around the world. The social media engagement surrounding this company is off-the-charts, and I’m convinced the humor and personality is a big reason why.
Also, that attitude doesn’t just affect the customers, but the employees as well, allowing people to relax, joke around more often, and try out wacky ideas without fear of being judged or punished for failure or for upsetting the status quo. Tesla is not an uptight company where people worry about appearances as much as in a typical corporation.
Breaking the Rules of Presentations and Demos
During the Cybertruck livestream that millions of people were watching, when that steel ball cracked the Cybertruck window, Elon audibly blurted out “Oh my f***ing god!”
You’re not allowed to do that! In high school I might have gotten after-school detention as punishment for saying something like that during a presentation. In this case, however, it became an integral part of one of the most viral and engaging internet marketing events of all time.
(As mentioned above, video has swearing; may be NSFW)
In my 9th-grade Oral Communications class, we were graded in our presentations on the content, but also on aspects such as body language and enunciation. Points were deducted for filler verbal tics like “um”, “ah”, “like”, and “sort of”. If you didn’t stand still and project confident, open body language, smile and make appropriate eye contact with the audience, that also led to deductions.
Let’s compare that conventional wisdom for presentation with Tesla events. Tesla employees, especially Elon, would probably have failed on their presentations. Often Tesla folks will be on stage wiggling around, mumbling into the microphone, and sometimes struggling to speak in complete unbroken sentences. Instead of dressing to impress with suits, they just go out in matching t-shirts, Silicon Valley style. They are breaking all the rules.
And yet…who really cares? I’m actually glad they don’t waste a bunch of time practicing. I’m also glad they seem to select whom to put on the stage based on subject matter expertise instead of appearance or public speaking skills. This choice also makes the presentation seem more authentic and human, which makes (wise) people trust them more and want to listen more.
Substance takes precedence over style. Content over form. Style is nice to have, but in the final analysis it’s just decoration. Would you rather live in an hideously ugly house, or a snazzy, beautiful tent?
Moreover, instead of hiding from the mistake and downplaying it, Tesla turned it into yet another goofy merchandise opportunity.
Being Underestimated
Tesla was able to get a huge head start on EVs largely because competitors at legacy auto companies didn’t believe EVs were going anywhere and they scoffed at the notion that Tesla would amount to anything except yet another bankruptcy in the long history of failed car company startups.
If you want your competitors to laugh at you and unwisely discount and dismiss the exponentially growing threat posed by your presence so that they don’t stomp on your head like a little bug while you’re still small and vulnerable enough to be killed, then it probably helps to present your brand and culture as a poorly polished, hit-and-miss comedy act and frankly discuss in public all the embarrassing mistakes you’ve made.
Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak. - Sun Tzu, The Art of War
If your competition is trained from prior experience and conventional wisdom to view polished presentations, large headcounts, skillful use of buzzwords, $3,000 pressed wool suits, storied legacies, and slick advertisement campaigns as the ultimate signs of a serious threat, then imagine how they’re going to respond if you walk out on stage in a t-shirts and jeans, with hair you cut for yourself, and then you wing it on your presentation and demo instead of having practiced much beforehand because, shockingly enough, you instead spent that time actually making progress on winning the long game.
If your competitors are haughty and conceited, you can exploit their weaknesses of ego and desire for admiration and respect, while you win with innovation and lateral thinking. For the high and mighty, the mere act of responding to a puny, joke of a challenger can be perceived as a sign of weakness by onlookers, because surely someone so powerful with so much social status doesn’t have anything to prove from the fight and has more important stuff to be doing anyway. On some level, it makes sense. I mean, if a 13-year-old boy trash talking on TikTok challenges Conor McGregor to a no-holds-barred fight, it would indeed be strange for Mr. McGregor to take up the challenge, as everyone already knows that a top professional fighter could easily incapacitate a kid and Conor does indeed have better stuff to do. The problem is figuring out how to distinguish actual wimps from wimpy-looking upstarts that actually are much stronger than they appear, like the loosely organized United States launching the first large-scale rebellion against European colonialism and winning largely by getting help from France via brilliant diplomatic negotiation.
Hey, look! Another relevant Paul Graham thought about successful startups. Does this sound like what makes Tesla unique today?
Y Combinator … seemed laughably lightweight. Startup funding meant series A rounds: millions of dollars given to a small number of startups founded by people with established credentials after months of serious, businesslike meetings, on terms described in a document a foot thick. Y Combinator seemed inconsequential. It's too early to say yet whether Y Combinator will turn out like Viaweb [2022 Update: YC turned out a lot better than Viaweb.], but judging from the number of imitations, a lot of people seem to think we're on to something.
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I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.
When I first laid out these principles explicitly, I noticed something striking: this is practically a recipe for generating a contemptuous initial reaction. Though simple solutions are better, they don't seem as impressive as complex ones. Overlooked problems are by definition problems that most people think don't matter. Delivering solutions in an informal way means that instead of judging something by the way it's presented, people have to actually understand it, which is more work. And starting with a crude version 1 means your initial effort is always small and incomplete.
I'd noticed, of course, that people never seemed to grasp new ideas at first. I thought it was just because most people were stupid. Now I see there's more to it than that. Like a contrarian investment fund, someone following this strategy will almost always be doing things that seem wrong to the average person.
As with contrarian investment strategies, that's exactly the point. This technique is successful (in the long term) because it gives you all the advantages other people forgo by trying to seem legit. If you work on overlooked problems, you're more likely to discover new things, because you have less competition. If you deliver solutions informally, you (a) save all the effort you would have had to expend to make them look impressive, and (b) avoid the danger of fooling yourself as well as your audience. And if you release a crude version 1 then iterate, your solution can benefit from the imagination of nature, which, as Feynman pointed out, is more powerful than your own.
As an outsider and upstart, you have no prior reputation to uphold, no existing social status to protect, no face to save, and no rigid habits and mental frameworks accumulated from fighting prior battles.
In the ancient allegory of David versus Goliath, the Israelites and Philistines were preparing to do battle in a great clash of armies, but then an alternative was proposed: to hold a duel between two champions as a proxy battle instead of a full-scale bloodbath. Everyone liked that idea except for the fact that the champion of the Philistines was Goliath, a giant, muscular, intimidating, expert swordsman who talked a big game. It seemed impossible for one man to defeat him.
For forty days, Goliath walked out into the valley and taunted the Israelites. King Saul offered fabulous riches and his daughter’s hand in marriage for any Israelite soldier who would step up to the challenge, but no one was brave enough to do it considering the overwhelming odds of being slaughtered by Goliath. However, a young shepherd named David, who wasn’t even old enough to be in the army, heard about the situation and decided to volunteer. David’s youthful, immature physique wasn’t much to look at, and he no military training whatsoever, but he had a clever mind and precise stone slinging skills from extensive practice fending off predators to protect his flock of sheep. He used first-principles thinking to reason: Everyone is looking for someone to fight Goliath in hand-to-hand combat, but why? If I can slay a bear or a lion with a sling and stone, why can’t I kill Goliath? The stone will do all the work from a distance where Goliath’s sword and spear can’t reach me. I can win this fight on my terms with the element of surprise. King Saul was apprehensive about the idea at first, but with no other reasonable option, he acquiesced and gave his own suit of armor to David to wear during the fight. However, the king soon discovered that David was too small and weak to walk around effectively in armor meant for a grown man, and in any case it threw off David’s slinging motion. David didn’t fit the standard mold, and so if this gambit was going to work and save Israel, he was going to have to do it 100% his way.
Walking out to the front lines wearing nothing but his shepherding clothes, David looked weak and pathetic, but hidden underneath those humble garments were a leather pouch, a pair of strings, a few smooth stones, and courage, and that was all he needed. Goliath laughed and insulted David and the Israelites. Seconds later, Goliath fell to the ground with a stone lodged in his forehead, and the Philistine army fled. Brutal, lethal, unorthodox simplicity. The best armor is no armor. The best sword is no sword.
Bottom Line
Drop ego
Become less wrong
Have fun and laugh along the way
Keep working hard and improving
Win
My stock portfolio is almost all-in on Tesla via TSLA shares and call options. These are notes for my model that I’m sharing. I fully believe what I have written and I’ve put all of my money where my mouth is, but this is not advice regarding your personal investment or financial decisions. I'm not a certified professional investment or financial advisor and even if I were one, broad buying or selling advice would be inappropriate because there are so many variables to take into consideration such as your goals, risk tolerance, financial outlook, income, age, tax situation, dependents, and so on. Make your own choices. Thanks for reading.
Fantastic, Saxon!
Brought back a lot of memories and laughs. Thanks!