Choose Good Quests

Quests tend to manifest as an objective we center our lives around. Your quest might be to reach a specific milestone: to become a senator, to publish a book, to make a million dollars. But not all quests have an end state. You might be on a quest to maximize your net worth, or to bench-press more weight than anyone else at the gym. Maybe you’re just on a quest to have the most fun possible before you die. A far cry from refrigeration or running water, but a nice life. As you’ve probably already intuited, not all quests are created equal (View Highlight)

Exiting your first startup only to enter venture capital and fight your peers for allocation in a hot deal is a bad quest (View Highlight)

A hard quest is high-risk and operationally complex, with a low chance of success. Reversing aging, going to Mars, curing cancer, building a supersonic plane, creating AGI, or founding a new country — these are all hard quests, and most players attempting these quests will fail. (View Highlight)

Note: Starting a new country Yes

But if a talented nuclear physicist with compelling insights into the field, ample resources, and many well-connected peers decides to open a tiki bar in Bali that is an extraordinarily bad quest. (View Highlight)

History is the record of top players completing good quests. (View Highlight)

The quintessential example of successful founders using their social capital for good are the billionaire space cowboys — Musk, Branson, and Bezos (View Highlight)