https://www.piratewires.com/p/choose-good-quests
Today, Silicon Valley faces a crisis of nonsense. With no shortage of problems, and no shortage of both young technologists and well-capitalized former founders capable of solving them, our best and brightest have largely lost themselves to easy money, the attention grind, and early retirement. In tech especially, for all of the industry’s rare potential, such abdication of responsibility does not only constitute a failure of progress, but a moral failure.
*Trae Stephens is a partner at Founders Fund, and cofounder of Anduril. Markie Wagner is the founder of Delphi Labs, a frontier tech research and advisory firm with a focus on applied AI. They are also both wonderful, committed nerds, and they guest this week with a helpful framework for parsing the problem of problems —*
Where do you choose to dedicate your life?
Choose Good Quests
At the dawn of the 20th Century, the Wright Brothers embarked on a quest to build the first controlled airplane. A half century later, NASA embarked on a quest to put a man on the moon. Combustion, penicillin, nuclear fission; the discovery of America, the drafting of the Constitution, Normandy — history is defined by protagonists pursuing good quests.
What’s your quest?
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.
In the most simple terms possible: a good quest makes the future better than our world today, while a bad quest doesn't improve the world much at all, or even makes it worse.
Today, we are in a crisis. Silicon Valley's best — our top operators, exited founders, and most powerful investors — are almost all on bad quests. Exiting your first startup only to enter venture capital and fight your peers for allocation in a hot deal is a bad quest. Armchair philosophizing on Twitter is a bad quest. Yachting between emails in de facto retirement at age 35 is a very bad quest.
Even among the talented who choose a path of building, most take safe, incremental bets — another SaaS company, another turnkey consumer startup, another digital Beanie Baby. Such pursuits not only fail to push the world forward, but pose a cost in opportunity. There are important challenges facing humanity that no one is working on, including critical, and even existential challenges. In other words, if you are an exceptionally capable person, failure to pursue a good quest is not neutral. It constitutes a loss for humanity.
Among our very best, dropping out, or chasing nonsense, is actually unethical.
Most Good Quests are Hard
Quests vary in difficulty.
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.
An easy quest is typically more straightforward, with a well-understood playbook for success. Achieving top marks in your high school class is an easy quest. Losing or gaining weight in accordance with some modest personal fitness goal is, for most people, an easy quest.
There are certainly bad quests that are hard, and (a few) good quests that are easy. But most of the remaining good quests are difficult to make profitable, require heavy research and development spend, or are just incredibly technically challenging, to the point of near impossibility.