Hard work is an overrated success factor, ranking fourth or fifth in importance. The most critical variables are project selection (what you work on) and people selection (who you work with). Working hard in a bad market or with the wrong team yields limited returns. Choose your playing field first.
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For hardworking and talented individuals, the single most important variable for success is the project they choose. Working on a weak market opportunity or a poor founder-fit project can waste years of effort, regardless of skill.
Early in your career, output is key. Past a certain threshold of success, however, you are compensated for the quality of your judgment, not the quantity of your work. Your highest leverage activity becomes making correct bets, which requires reorienting your life to maximize decision-making quality.
Success is often attributed not to a relentless personal grind, but to a superpower in attracting and retaining top talent. True scaling and outsized impact come from empowering a great team, embodying the idea that "greatness is in the agency of others."
Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer reframes productivity as 'ability times motivation times your environment.' This model posits that an individual's output is significantly multiplied by being surrounded by high-caliber talent. The quality of the people in an organization elevates everyone's work, a factor more critical than individual drive alone.
Winning in business requires three core components. First, a tangible money-making skill like sales or marketing. Second, a tenacious, scrappy mindset forged by necessity. Third, the ability to select good projects, a skill often learned by first pursuing and eliminating bad ones.
An entrepreneur's success rate dramatically shifted from 0 for 12 to 5 for 5 not because his execution improved, but because his project selection did. He stopped chasing high-risk, "one in a million" moonshots (like building the next social network) and focused on businesses with clearer paths to revenue (e-commerce, services).
The very best engineers optimize for their most precious asset: their time. They are less motivated by competing salary offers and more by the quality of the team, the problem they're solving, and the agency to build something meaningful without becoming a "cog" in a machine.
Contrary to the popular trope, you learn far more from success than from failure. It's more informative to see how things are done right than to analyze what went wrong. To accelerate your career, you should prioritize joining a winning team to observe and internalize successful patterns.
A superior prioritization framework calculates your marginal contribution: (Importance * [Success Probability with you - Success Probability without you]) / Time. This means working on a lower-priority project where you can be a hero is often more valuable than being a cog in a well-staffed, top-priority machine.
The most important job of a leader is team building. This means deliberately hiring functional experts who are better than the CEO in their specific fields. A company's success is a direct reflection of the team's collective talent, not the CEO's individual brilliance.
