Make money doing the work you believe in
I interviewed a guy “Jeff” (successful entrepreneur who wanted to be anonymous) who gave the great analogy of trying to optimize Halloween (that’s the day we talked):
“Imagine optimizing Halloween. You're gonna have a schedule for when you get your costumes on. You're gonna have a quota for how many candy bars you give away. And you're gonna have a review of your goals and a system process review… [etc.]
Like, we just ruined Halloween, right?”
We talked about what would happen if my son didn’t meet his candy-collecting quota. How would I hold him accountable for this failure?
“And when you're running a business, that's really helpful.
But it's not a Halloween business, man. It's just Halloween.”
Optimizing, like this, is a skill that can get you far in a lot of places.
And also make your life miserable.