Inspiration is Perishable

Don't get excited about something, put it on the shelf for three months...you almost certainly won't have the spark and the energy that you need to push you through the trying early moments

You've got to follow your gut on this sort of thing...you'll find out if it's going to work or not only when you put it on the market

One of the reasons is because they squander that motivation on doubt, on other people's opinions, on market research, on everything else but building

If you take two ideas and there's one of them you're really motivated about...always go with the one you're more motivated for

Motivation actually needs to be protected...You need to find ways to prevent all that doubt from seeping into the foundation

Motivation is the most important thing...there's so many things I've done purely because I've been motivated and sucked at just because I was motivated to do it

Virtually everything that was turned out to be a huge idea started out as a stupid idea...that had all sorts of reasons why it wouldn't work

Move into doing mode, build mode, design mode...Don't ask other people what they think...Just go. Just make the thing and stop getting bogged down in the tedium

You can't say, 'Oh, this is going to take three human weeks to do.' No, when you're in that phase...you can just jump these enormous distances in ways that seem unrealistic

Get something live, get something real. Be excited about it because you're using it and you're getting closer to it

If you think of it in that way, it's actually really helpful...pick a launch date without having any idea about whether that's even feasible or possible

We need to take every single shortcut...the motivation to do that, the energy to pushing it forward, to pulling a team along with you happens in that space where the inspiration is perishable

The distance between what you're working on and you being done is not linear...you can hop through and jump over huge distances if you use that inspiration fuel to get going

The early moments usually have the most fuel and will give you the most burn that you're going to need to achieve escape velocity

If you're fired up about something, you kind of got to get going on it because it's probably not going to last

Inspiration perishes quite quickly if you go through every checklist and...study this and we need to study that

If you're just an excitable person, or have ideas all the time, you can start to chase too many things at once, and not know which ones we're doing. And so I think it's better to let things marinate a tiny bit. And then if you're still excited about it, 24 hours later, 40 hours later, then go for it. But the bigger point is like, don't get excited about something, put it on the shelf for three months

I had this really clear notion that we need to go quite far, like way off into the galaxy, we need to get all this stuff that we built into the cloud out of the cloud, it took us years to get into the cloud. I'm not going to spend years to get back out. We need to find a frequent wormhole here that allows us to jump through much quicker

The motivation to do that, the energy to pushing it forward, to pulling a team along with you, happens in that space where the inspiration is perishable. It's not always that clear that you get such a fixed moment of time that it needs to happen within that. But I think if you think of it in that way, it is actually really helpful

I think the inspiration perishes quite quickly if you go through every checklist, and if you go through like that. We also need to study this, and we need to study that, and we do get something live, get something real, be excited about it because you're using it, and you're getting closer to it

Especially in the beginning, this sense of inspiration often comes from an idea that's not even fully shaped in a way you can articulate to other people. So it's actually often difficult to convey your excitement to others and get them infected. Because most people, when they hear a new idea, will think of all the reasons why it won't work

There's so many things I've done purely because I've been motivated and sucked at just because I was motivated to do it. And there's so many things I've not done that I could do well that I'm just not motivated to do and we'll never get to. Motivation is the key thing to look at here

When you have that motivation and you feel it, wow, I'm really burning for this. You need to get your, your claps out. You need to actually reject a lot of reality since you can focus towards one point. You need to not ask other people what they think about it. You need to find ways to prevent all that doubt from seeping into the foundation because you know what, it's just, if that's true, we're gonna find out eventually

If you take two ideas and there's one of them you're really motivated about, it may be a slightly worse idea than the other one that seems on paper to be better but you just can't muster the enthusiasm for. Always go with the one you're more motivated for

Other people's opinions are not great for motivation unless of course they all support your point of view. Now you could say, well, wouldn't you wanna know what other people think? Like you're going down the wrong road. Why do you put so much value in other people think? How do you know they're right?

Just like, no one's gonna be as excited about this company as David and I, we own the place. It's unrealistic to think everyone is going to feel like us or whatever. They're just not and it's okay that they're not. That's not what we expect out of people

If Jason says like, you know what? Let's go to Mars, like then someone else saying like, no, I'd like to go to Venus. Oh, I want to go to Jupiter. I want to, you know what, that doesn't work. We can sign up for this ship and it's going to frequent Mars and then we can figure out like how to get down. There's going to be all these interesting problems along the way, but there can really only be one or a handful of people deciding ultimately, what is the destination?

The Venn diagram where we have like a slice of overlap and then we also have our own separate spheres is a really good way to sustain working together for 20 plus years. I don't think anyone is gonna be as excited about everything all the time as any other individual in the world and allowing each party to have some space to pursue their ideas