The missiles are the destination

By Garrett,

One of my uncommon enjoyments is the work that happens right in the middle of a big problem that needs to be solved, or even a nosedive. A calmness kicks in, the path gets clearer and I can usually tunnel vision my way through to course correction.

I used to think this was special, but it’s really not.

As it happens, this is a requirement of the job. Especially for founders and leaders, and especially for founders and leaders in the tech industry.

The missiles are the destination.

I was watching an interview recently between David Senra and Brad Jacobs, a billionaire businessman, talking about the perspective of “I’ve got too many problems to deal with” v.s. “the more problems I solve the more value I create”. That’s a summary, but you can see the original here:

Two owners of smaller shops recently told me similar advice to the following that they had been given:

“You just have to find the magic bullet and then X will happen.”

I’ve looked for that, on and off, for a long time and wasted a lot of money trying, but eventually came to the conclusion that it’s a million pretty good decisions over the course of a longer-than-expected period of time that mostly sprouted into plants instead of weeds.

At some point I heard or read that the gift of solving a problem is that you get a new problem to solve, which is what Brad is saying above. That’s the magic bullet (except it’s definitely not magic and it’s much slower than a bullet).

The missiles are the destination.

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