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Choose Good Quests
As a culture, we have a tendency to celebrate status that emerges from net worth and network signaling rather than the work ethic of a second-act founder using his net worth and network, while he grinds on a project, to drive the world forward. This is totally backwards.
Markie Wagner • Choose Good Quests
To the public intellectual, one must ask: if your ideas are so good, why aren't you executing on them? It is much easier (and less impactful) to write about the importance of “green tech” than to build Tesla. Moreover, many self-titled public intellectuals are not even particularly intellectual. They are just... public.
Markie Wagner • Choose Good Quests
To the public intellectual, one must ask: if your ideas are so good, why aren't you executing on them? It is much easier (and less impactful) to write about the importance of “green tech” than to build Tesla. Moreover, many self-titled public intellectuals are not even particularly intellectual. They are just… public.
Markie Wagner • Choose Good Quests
A player's ability to complete their quest is a function of the quest and their own skills, resources, and powers. Quests that are easy for certain players are nearly impossible for others: Olympic runners will regularly run sub-5 minute miles during training, even though this would be an incredibly ambitious goal for most people.
Markie Wagner • Choose Good Quests
Since it is difficult to find a quest that is easy and good , most people optimizing for an easy goal will end up on a quest that is both easy and bad. Now, the degree of “bad” varies depending on who you are, and what you can do.
Markie Wagner • Choose Good Quests
In the 1980s, a venture capitalist could truthfully say their investment was the difference between life or death for an important, generational technology company. Funding such companies, in this way, was absolutely a good quest. But today there are more people "helping the builders" than actually building, fighting one another in a zero-sum game
... See moreMarkie Wagner • Choose Good Quests
Quests tend to manifest as an objective we center our lives around. Your quest might be to reach a specific milestone: to become a senator, to publish a book, to make a million dollars. But not all quests have an end state. You might be on a quest to maximize your net worth, or to bench-press more weight than anyone else at the gym. Maybe you’re j
... See moreMarkie Wagner • Choose Good Quests
But today there are more people "helping the builders" than actually building, fighting one another in a zero-sum game for allocation in competitive deals. Incredibly, being an investor has become one of the highest status jobs in Silicon Valley — higher even than playing an important operating role at a great company. This has led to an over
... See moreMarkie Wagner • Choose Good Quests
In the most simple terms possible: a good quest makes the future better than our world today, while a bad quest doesn't improve the world much at all, or even makes it worse.