Mediocrity Is Biggest Risk

Shaan Puri believes that for anyone with high potential, the biggest risk isn't failure—it's getting stuck in mediocrity. Spending your life doing a really good job at the wrong thing will drain your will, time, resources, energy, and belief in yourself. He learned this through ten years of doing things only for hypothetical future payoffs, and now operates by a simple rule: only do things you genuinely want to be doing, not things you're suffering through for some future reward.

Key Points:

• Mediocrity is More Dangerous Than Failure:

  • For high-potential people, failure is not the real risk
  • The risk is getting stuck in something that's just "okay" for too long
  • It will sap your will, time, resources, energy, and belief in yourself
  • Failure is quick and painful but you bounce back and keep your time
  • Mediocrity takes all your time away—your most precious asset

• The Inertia Problem:

  • Objects in motion stay in motion unless there's a force to resist it
  • You'll keep doing something just because you're already doing it
  • His friend asked: "If the company closed tomorrow, would you call the same people and do this same thing?"
  • If the answer is no, you're only doing it because of inertia
  • After six years and ten different product pivots, he realized he was doing the wrong thing

• Opportunity Cost is Everything:

  • For sufficiently smart people, the biggest cost is opportunity cost
  • Not your taxes or expenses—it's what you're not doing
  • The biggest waste of time is doing something well that needn't have been done at all (Elon's principle)

• New Rule: Work Must Be the Win:

  • No longer does things for future payoffs
  • Either doing it because he likes doing it, or doing it for a result
  • The work has to be the win—not some future hypothetical payoff
  • If you do it that way, you win by doing it AND might win from results
  • Spent ten years doing things only for "if this worked it'd be amazing"
  • When things don't work (which is most of the time), it feels like a waste

• The Flywheel of Enjoyment:

  • Because you enjoy it, you do it all the time
  • Because you do it all the time, you get really good at it
  • Because you get really good at it, you do get the results
  • That's the flywheel

• Taking Action on Realization:

  • After his friend's intervention, he immediately told his cofounder they should sell or end the company
  • Went to the investor and asked for 30 days to sell (ended up with 45 days to signed agreement)
  • Once he had that intention, he really went for it
  • Better to get a clean slate than pivot for the eleventh time