Ben Horowitz: evaluation

Transcript context

…So we're not going to do that. Just to give a glimpse, he was in prison for 19 years. He was in solitary for seven years. He led a huge prison gang. You wrote about him in your book as a great exemplar of great culture in the prison gang that he ran. So interesting. But something that he learned from you that he told me I need to ask you about is about success and how to be successful and how it's not what people think. And he said that you learned this lesson from a pilot. What is that story? What is that lesson? I mean, I would say it's a long life lesson. But the pilot story is I actually, I ask people silly questions sometimes when they meet them. And so I met this gentleman who was a pilot and it was right around the time JFK Jr. crashed his airplane and ultimately died. And I asked him, I was like, "What happened? " Because there's always the story in the press, and I know this from them writing about me or anything, is it's always what's the best narrative not what's true. So you can never actually find out what happened, you just find the best story version of what happened. And the story in the press was all about, "Oh, he wasn't trained on instrumentation was flying at night." And I wanted to know is that right? And the pilot said, "Well," he said, "really, it's like all plane crashes are a series of bad decisions. And none of the decisions by themselves is that bad, but when you add them up, it's bad." So the first decision was he needed to get wherever he was going and that was the priority. And in flying, that can't ever be the priority because there are conditions, there are things that happen. And then the second one was, "Well, his timing of when the sun would go down was wrong." So he thought he'd be flying in sunlight and he wasn't. And then once he got up there, it was when the plane was going down making it go up was a bad decision because he was upside down. And so it was like, I can't remember all the things, but this guy had 17 bad decisions in a row. And the big thing for me that I felt was really true is it's one decision leads to another. And so if you can break psychologically, you can take the sunk cost, then that gets you out of a lot of bad paths. And then a little good decision may be difficult, but you have to believe it's going to lead to the next one. And a lot of success is about that. It's a small thing, a small thing that's hard to do that doesn't seem to have a high impact, but it leads to the next small hard to do thing and then eventually you get an outcome, so that was kind of the concept. So the lesson there is just success is just a bunch of little things. It's not this, "Cool, I got here in a big thing."…

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