We want something we can keep pushing up against that won’t budge. This will serve as our intellectual foundation. We need ideas or beliefs that are not open to interpretation. Much of wisdom is relative. Did the startup fail because of vain ambition or did it fail because you didn’t try hard enough? Ask Zizek, he agrees:
Wisdom is the most disgusting thing you can imagine… whatever you do, a wise man will come and justify it… you do something risky and you succeed… there will be a wise man who will come and say something like… “only those who risk profit and so on…”. Let’s say you do the same thing but fail. A wise man will come and say… “you cannot urinate against the wind” or something like that.
The only way to know is to try as hard as you can at whatever it is that you do. Even then, you never know. Maybe the company failed because you were too early; maybe you weren’t smart enough. This same question can be asked fractally about any task within the startup. Did you focus too much on hiring talent, should you have spent more effort on sales. Did you keep your main sales guy for too long? Did you not give his strategy a chance? Did you give it too much of a chance?
The standard advice for entrepreneurs is to not try to innovate in all places at once, but to focus. Ultimately, every startup is about one thing, and nothing else about the functioning of the business should be any different than any other business unless it conflicts with your primary goal. This makes the rest of your decisions much easier. What makes a company work is focus. But what if the focus is wrong, or what if it’s too difficult to tell what that focus should be?
Why are billionaires more trusted than politicians? Aren’t billionaires corrupted by money while the politicians have limits to disincentivize them pursuing politics for the wrong reasons? Isn’t pursuing money evil? Then again, if you’re a billionaire, do you really care about money after a certain point? If you’re good enough at prioritizing and reprioritizing to succeed as an entrepreneur, then at some point you’ll run into the limits of what money can buy.
If you cared about material success, wouldn’t you call it quits once you got $500 million? Maybe Jesus was right, a rich man can enter into the kingdom of heaven — it’s just unlikely. Billionaires are rare. If you’re a millionaire, you can still meet and find people more impressive than yourself. You haven’t maxed out what you can do with wealth; you’re still in the rat race. Once you’re a billionaire, your biggest constraints may be legal, and not financial.
If you’re truly motivated by something approximating pleasure or greed, you can find yourself in a seedy world like that of Jefferey Epstein. At an abstract level, the problem is that being able to delay gratification doesn’t make you a good person. I’ve written about the confusion of defining “goodness”. Passing the marshmallow test doesn’t make you a good person if what you want to ultimately do is sleep with underage girls and willing to put in decades of work to make that happen. You might be a conniving communist and again, you may patiently work to bring about a bloody revolution not because you care about people, but because the current system is weak, people are excited by the new system, and you can find a way to personally benefit from it.
So if you’re not motivated by money, what should you be motivated by? Arguably, the best you can aim for is space travel. And if so, there’s a Biblical story for you: The Tower of Babel. From our vantage point, we see their project was doomed from the start. They could never reach heaven because we now know heaven is an abstract place and not a physical place… or do we? Are we building another Tower of Babel? If so, will it be different this time?
Why can’t Biblical “heaven” be literal? Why not go literal? If creationists can be justified in any way by taking the Genesis account literally, why not take “literal heaven” at least as seriously? One reading of the Babel story is it’s a warning about taking “heaven” literally. Well, yes, they were foolish to try to reach heaven when they had neither airplanes nor jet propulsion.
Interestingly, the Bible seems to be claiming that in order for us to reach the stars, we need to be moral down to the fiber of our being. So it’s promoting a kind of consequentialism, but over the course of multiple lifetimes rather than just one.
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