Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing
Peter Thiel:
The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate them only on that one thing.
The “main thing” is the challenge that, at the present moment and to the best of your knowledge, determines the majority of your long run chance of success.
Identifying and working on the main thing is the definition of the job of a startup founder, and indeed anyone striving for an ambitious goal. Even so, it’s extraordinarily easy to reach the end of the week (or month or more) having made no real progress against your biggest challenges.
For early stage startup founders, the main thing is typically validating that anyone wants what you’re building. Later, it might mean building a go-to-market with attractive margins or pulling off the technical feats that will allow your idea to graduate from MVP to mass market product.
Why Do We Lose Focus on the Main Thing?
You might wonder, given your business is presumably of great personal importance, why you wouldn’t run headlong into the biggest challenge ahead of you. I believe there are 2 easy answers and 2 harder answers:
2 Easy Answers
- You aren’t really sure what the main thing is — It is very easy to get lost in the weeds, where everything looks important. My best suggestion is to be hypothesis driven about what to focus on.
- You’re cosplaying — I.e. your stated and revealed motivations are divergent. Do you want to solve the challenge or are you in the arena for other reasons? The main thing is almost certainly not appearing on podcasts or going to conferences. If you’re reading this I wouldn’t worry too much about this one, if I’ve hit a nerve then maybe you should.
2 Harder Answers
- You’re “too busy” — You’re in the middle of a storm, with water flooding in. The temptation is to grab a bucket, the right thing thing to do is look for the hole in the bottom of your boat. The moments when it seems you don’t have time to step back and consider what actually matters, are the ones when that is precisely what you need to do.
- Analysis Paralysis — Most decisions do not affect the long term outcome, but a few really do. Importance is massively power law distributed. The skill is figuring out which ones matter without the benefit of hindsight. Perhaps more perniciously, often the problems that squeal the loudest to be attended to, are the ones you’ll forget.
Identifying the Main Thing
The harsh realities of the main thing are that it looks just like any other “important” thing and, it’s constantly changing. Most things simply don’t matter and what actually matters today may not matter tomorrow. With that in mind, we need some heuristics to begin to identify our main thing.
1. It’s often related to a customer problem
A good place to start is to ask very critically if you are solving a real problem for your customers. Are you really attending to what they want, even if they don’t tell you directly? Or are you building what you want and hoping its close enough to a solution to be acceptable?
The good news is that very often, by doing this exercise, you’ll learn the challenges you’re worried about are not remotely relevant to your customer’s needs.
2. It’s often not that “hard”
The main thing is an important problem, but don’t confuse important with hard.
Talented people spend a significant portion of their early lives being set successively harder problems, with greater prizes as reward. Rewards in the real world don’t scale with hardness, because impact doesn’t scale with hardness. Main things often involve hard work and tedious effort, but they are very often not “hard” (as in, difficult) in and of themselves.
Allowing your focus to be stolen by the hard, rather than the important, is doubly pernicious. Unimportant hard problems, in contrast with simply unimportant problems, take a long time to solve and look (all the way until they are solved) like they must be important as a result.
If you find yourself gravitating towards the hardest problems you face, take a second to ask if solving this problem would actually matter to your eventual outcome.
3. It’s often the thing that nags at you
Your unconscious mind is an incredible bellwether for what is truly important. Like flossing or working out, the main thing is often the thing you know you should be focused on, but which you’re neglecting.
Firstly, you need to trust that you understand your domain enough to determine when you’re prioritising the wrong things. Secondly, you need to have the presence of mind to zoom out of the day-to-day and think critically. Your mileage may vary but walking (with no headphones) and a pocket sized notebook is invaluable for me in this regard.
4. It’s often obvious to someone else
Others have a remarkable tendency to reveal what we cannot see clearly in our ourselves. Likewise, when evaluating the possible risks and opportunities ahead of you, it’s helpful consult with someone that doesn’t have the same history with the problem. They come to their view without the same biases and without preconceived notions of what matters.
They also don’t have to do the work of implementing their own suggestions. Whether the eventual work is sexy or unsexy, high or low status isn’t of concern. This leads to an interesting corollary — when identifying your main thing, it’s helpful to pose the question as if the person doing the work was someone besides yourself.
Instead of asking “what problem should I solve?” ask “what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?” — Paul Graham (Schlep Blindness)
Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing
It is a continuous battle against the distractions that tempt you from working on the main thing. For that reason, I want to leave you with some ideas of how you can remain squarely focused on your main thing:
1. Say “No” a lot
Saying “yes” too much necessarily means that the main thing, whatever it is, will never get your full attention.
I believe confusion arises because it’s well understood that the startup journey is not a straight line path. Therefore, failure and iteration is to be celebrated and encouraged. However, being nimble does not mean being unfocused. You should always have a singular focus on the problem you’re solving.
Learn to say “no” or, if it makes you feel better, “not yet” to ideas that seem interesting but are ultimately not critical right now. Return to what actually matters for your customers and use your creative energy to iterating on your solution rather than trashing around in idea space.
2. Don't be a Midwit
The “dumb” idea and the genius idea often look pretty similar. “Rockets cost a lot, maybe we shouldn’t throw them away after every launch”, is both silly and obvious in retrospect.
Some of the most impactful innovations have this property of seeming both naive for their time and completely obvious in hindsight. This suggests an interesting attack vector for figuring out what you should be working on — try to understand why you’re not taking the most obvious path to your goal. Most times there are good reasons, but occasionally — maybe due to your unique perspective or changes in market or technology — the obvious path absolutely could work, given the right execution.
Additionally, this mental model proves useful against a common trap that ensnares otherwise smart people. It's what Visaken Veerasamy calls "Advanced Stupid" - where one gets so fixated on trying to optimise something complicated, that one forgets to optimise for survival, and subsequently gets knocked out of the game.
3. Maintain a Spaced Repetition Model of the Main Thing
As you gain conviction in your approach to solving a given problem, you can turn the vast majority of your attention to execution. However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t regularly re-evaluate whether you’re still working on the correct problem.
The mental model I find helpful is to think of every big decision as having some re-evaluation timer attached. When the decision is fresh you should re-evaluate frequently as you gather more evidence. On each evaluation you can double the timer such that you rarely need to return to very old decisions. If you’ve ever used Anki for studying this will be a familiar idea.
Identifying and committing to your main thing as the most impactful decision you face. Make sure to return to it regularly.