What does it take to get things done?
I've been thinking a lot about this lately. About how we accomplish things and how effort and productivity are so nonuniformly distributed across people.
I had a conversation with my friend Paul Bohm the other day over drinks where we started talking about Founder Mode.
I don't feel very strongly opinionated about Founder Mode - if anything, I think the basic premise that no one can ever be as effective as a founder is a bit overwraught. There are definitely examples of founders hindering companies from growing past a certain point by being unwilling to delegate or change their minds, so I think blindly accepting Founder Mode as a doctrine is not a good idea.
One thing I do like about the concept is that it's a useful mental model for understanding what it takes to accomplish something. The most important quality that founders have in a higher concentration than others is unreasonableness. No one will care about your idea as much as you do.
This is where delegation gets difficult.
You could try to find someone who is capable of executing at the same level as you and hire them, but you'll almost certainly pay far more and wait far longer than if you just followed through on your idea yourself.1
Why is this true? Fundamentally no one is as motivated as you are to accomplish your goals. Most very smart people want to accomplish things, but they also really want a nice lifestyle for themselves. They want to be able to go on vacation when they want, buy the things they want, etc. These are completely reasonable wants.
Problems arise when you put a team of reasonable people together and ask them to accomplish something. Timelines get pushed back week after week due to reasonable problem after reasonable problem until things get done at a glacial pace. This tax incurred for reasonableness is often budgeted for explicitly in the form of generous timelines, which further incentivize people to prioritize reasonableness over execution.
Worse still, the reasonableness tax is O(n^2) as projects scale in size and their communication complexity balloons, making it harder and harder to get things done.
This is why unreasonable people are so crucial. Having just one unreasonable person on a team can uplevel the entire team's ability to get things done dramatically. So how do we find these unreasonable people?
Everyone is reasonable with respect to their own preference function, some people just have unreasonable preferences
Unreasonable people are rare, but easily recognized. One of the hallmarks of unreasonable people are that their preferences are very rarely aligned with the status quo. They don't care about things because they're the status quo, they care about things because they're what they want.
For example, if you asked Elon Musk tomorrow if he'd trade his fortune for a self-sufficient Mars colony, he'd probably take the deal. That is an entirely unreasonable thing to do, and you'd be hard pressed to find many other people in the world so intent on seeing their goals through that they'd rather realize their ambition than have the wealth of the richest person in the world.
If you're lucky, you've worked with a few unreasonable people in your life. They're a bit of a pain in the ass, they're always pushing you to do more, and at the end of the day there's no one else who cares as much as they do. You can't really fake it. You either are unreasonable, or you're not. Either way, you should try to maximize your exposure to unreasonable people.
Footnotes
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This obviously doesn't generalize outside your domain, you should concentrate all of your efforts on what you're best at and make everything else as frictionless as possible through outsourcing - founders don't need to add plumber to their job description. ↩