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.

Today, we are in a crisis. Silicon Valley's best — our top operators, exited founders, and most powerful investors — are almost all on  bad quests.  Exiting your first startup only to enter venture capital and fight your peers for allocation in a hot deal is a bad quest. Armchair philosophizing on Twitter is a bad quest. Ya

And for the rare successful operators who do go on to start a new company, most opt to copy a successful product and compete for market share. Today, the market is overrun with luxury credit cards and task management tools. While often lucrative, these are also generally  bad quests . While the players may profit from winning market share from

A  hard  quest is high-risk and operationally complex, with a low chance of success. Reversing aging, going to Mars, curing cancer, building a supersonic plane, creating AGI, or founding a new country — these are all  hard  quests, and most players attempting these quests will fail. 

An easy quest is typically more straightf

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.

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.

The world is filled with good quests that require massively leveled heroes to complete: semiconductor manufacturing, complex industrial automation, natural resource discovery, next-generation energy production, low-cost and low-labor construction, new modes of transportation, general artificial intelligence, mapping and interfacing with the br

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