"Just out work them"

...and other sources of advantage.

International Newsreel"A Part of a Day's Work for an Endurance Flyer"1930

When I was a child, my parents enrolled me in a Japanese math program called Kumon. Kumon involves learning math through independent study and repetition. Early 2000s Kumon was also fiercely competitive: there were levels, and beating your friends was entirely the point.

I’ve never been a math genius — most of my friends in Kumon were naturally better at math than me — but I could out work everyone. I could simply do more Kumon packets than all of my friends, and thereby climb the levels faster than they did. I could stick with it longer, too: I did Kumon until high school. The honest fact is that if my peers did as much work as I did, they would have beat me, thanks to their superior natural ability. But I could work harder than them. It probably helped that my parents locked the TV on weekdays.

I think we underestimate the value of just grinding to produce better outcomes. Read more. Find more data points. Spend more time. It’s a luxury to be able to do so, certainly. But I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t matter.

Here’s a five great examples:

1. A guide to finding B2B PMF: Lenny’s posts, like this one on finding PMF, are the result of putting in the work that nobody else does in order to get really valuable information. There are 100 thinkpieces on product market fit, but only Lenny went to each company who attained fit, charted their progress, and turned it into a comprehensive post. Absolutely incredible, refreshing, and helpful.

2. Tattoo Regret: Viv Chen does the same thing for fashion. Again, it’s easy to write a think-piece about the hypothesized existence of a social phenomenon like tattoo regret, it’s much more compelling case to do a 500+ person survey on the topic over O(1000) people. It makes for a much richer, more nuanced take.

3. Friction logs: I often say that product sense is a matter of “how many user and market data points you need to get to the right product opinion.” The takeaway from that? If you get enough data points, anyone can have good product opinions. Other than user interviews and sales calls, the best way to get data points so that you can have good product opinions is to review products and write friction logs.

4. The Last Dance: The best episode in this series is watching what MJ does during vacation compared to the rest of the team. MJ is scrimmaging, he is working in the weight room every day. The rest of his team? Hanging out, taking a well earned vacation.

5. It’s not just about hard work sprints, it’s about hard work marathons: This X post (intentionally just screenshotted and not linked!) is one of the most transformative things I’ve read this week. The real world, the post explains, isn’t a single consequential exam. It’s about your “average” over the course of many, many games. Cultures like Stripe’s corporate culture or Singapore’s entire national culture over-rotate on point in time assessments as a determinant of someone’s quality, while the much more accurate form of assessment is closer to a “batting average.” This explains so much about a) why I liked Stripe (because it’s Singapore, lol) and b) why sustaining work over a long period is such a differentiator.