I loved the phrase “day 1 thinking” from Jeff Bezos when I first heard it in a Lex Fridman podcast episode. From early adolescence, being raised as a competitor and hence living with the drive - read it anxiety - to win, just as another race horse on the track or “another brick in the wall”, I have been dealing with what I now learned to call “gravity problems” from another YouTube video, those infinite abysses pulling you down from the life you always dream of. For me, “day 1 thinking” has been the survival rope bringing me out of the abyss. That is why I love it so much as one of the few principles I have chosen to live by.
Now, even after 20 years, I still find myself getting stuck in these holes as I’m treading the path of life, or as Ali ibn Abi Talib and Seneca have put it, “the path of death”. Driving a car on a newly asphalted highway is never a pain, but running a business or product in the uncertain world of fractal probabilities with ever-increasing complexity of people and products is like riding a horse on an unpaved dirt road, not sure where it’s heading, with a ton of hidden from sight, Black Swan-like, gravitating chasms awaiting you. The tragedy comes when you love the bridle path over The Autobahn.
I have recently come out of another pit, as hard yet insightful and humbling as the previous ones, acting as the master and teaching the young pupil valuable lessons. I learned invaluably from it while climbing the rope to get out of the abyss, holding on to a "beginner's mind,” another name I found for the rope but I’m not sure where I heard of it. As with other Black Swans, what happened is not just down to a single reason, but rather a mix of beliefs and events happening to gravitate toward a single outcome.