September 2009Like all investors, we spend a lot of time trying to learn how topredict which startups will succeed. We probably spend more timethinking about it than most, because we invest the earliest.Prediction is usually all we have to rely on.We learned quickly that the most important predictor of success isdetermination. At first we thought it might be intelligence.Everyone likes to believe that's what makes startups succeed. Itmakes a better story that a company won because its founders wereso smart. The PR people and reporters who spread such storiesprobably believe them themselves. But while it certainly helps tobe smart, it's not the deciding factor. There are plenty of peopleas smart as Bill Gates who achieve nothing.In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partlybecause it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookersan excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determinationstarts to look like talent.I can't think of any field in which determination is overrated, butthe relative importance of determination and talent probably dovary somewhat. Talent probably matters more in types of work thatare purer, in the sense that one is solving mostly a single typeof problem instead of many different types. I suspect determinationwould not take you as far in math as it would in, say, organizedcrime.I don't mean to suggest by this comparison that types of work thatdepend more on talent are always more admirable. Most people wouldagree it's more admirable to be good at math than memorizing longstrings of digits, even though the latter depends more on naturalability.Perhaps one reason people believe startup founders win by beingsmarter is that intelligence does matter more in technology startupsthan it used to in earlier types of companies. You probably doneed to be a bit smarter to dominate Internet search than you hadto be to dominate railroads or hotels or newspapers. And that'sprobably an ongoing trend. But even in the highest of high techindustries, success still depends more on determination than brains.If determination is so important, can we isolate its components?Are some more important than others? Are there some you cancultivate?The simplest form of determination is sheer willfulness. When youwant something, you must have it, no matter what.A good deal of willfulness must be inborn, because it's common tosee families where one sibling has much more of it than another.Circumstances can alter it, but at the high end of the scale, natureseems to be more important than nurture. Bad circumstances canbreak the spirit of a strong-willed person, but I don't think there'smuch you can do to make a weak-willed person stronger-willed.Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to behard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgentwould not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulnessis balanced by discipline.That word balance is a significant one. The more willful you are,the more disciplined you have to be. The stronger your will, theless anyone will be able to argue with you except yourself. Andsomeone has to argue with you, because everyone has base impulses,and if you have more will than discipline you'll just give intothem and end up on a local maximum like drug addiction.We can imagine will and discipline as two fingers squeezing aslippery melon seed. The harder they squeeze, the further the seedflies, but they must both squeeze equally or the seed spins offsideways.If this is true it has interesting implications, because disciplinecan be cultivated, and in fact does tend to vary quite a lot in thecourse of an individual's life. If determination is effectivelythe product of will and discipline, then you can become moredetermined by being more disciplined.[1]Another consequence of the melon seed model is that the more willfulyou are, the more dangerous it is to be undisciplined. There seemto be plenty of examples to confirm that. In some very energeticpeople's lives you see something like wing flutter, where theyalternate between doing great work and doing absolutely nothing.Externally this would look a lot like bipolar disorder.The melon seed model is inaccurate in at least one respect, however:it's static. In fact the dangers of indiscipline increase withtemptation. Which means, interestingly, that determination tendsto erode itself. If you're sufficiently determined to achieve greatthings, this will probably increase the number of temptations aroundyou. Unless you become proportionally more disciplined, willfulnesswill then get the upper hand, and your achievement will revert tothe mean.That's why Shakespeare's Caesar thought thin men so dangerous. They weren'ttempted by the minor perquisites of power.The melon seed model implies it's possible to be too disciplined.Is it? I think there probably are people whose willfulness iscrushed down by excessive discipline, and who would achieve moreif they weren't so hard on themselves. One reason the young sometimessucceed where the old fail is that they don't realize how incompetentthey are. This lets them do a kind of deficit spending. When theyfirst start working on something, they overrate their achievements.But that gives them confidence to keep working, and their performanceimproves. Whereas someone clearer-eyed would see their initialincompetence for what it was, and perhaps be discouraged fromcontinuing.There's one other major component of determination: ambition. Ifwillfulness and discipline are what get you to your destination,ambition is how you choose it.I don't know if it's exactly right to say that ambition is a componentof determination, but they're not entirely orthogonal. It wouldseem a misnomer if someone said they were very determined to dosomething trivially easy.And fortunately ambition seems to be quite malleable; there's a lotyou can do to increase it. Most people don't know how ambitiousto be, especially when they're young. They don't know what's hard,or what they're capable of. And this problem is exacerbated byhaving few peers. Ambitious people are rare, so if everyone ismixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people's lives,then the ambitious ones won't have many ambitious peers. When youtake people like this and put them together with other ambitiouspeople, they bloom like dying plants given water. Probably mostambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they'dget from ambitious peers, whatever their age.[2]Achievements also tend to increase your ambition. With each stepyou gain confidence to stretch further next time.So here in sum is how determination seems to work: it consists ofwillfulness balanced with discipline, aimed by ambition. Andfortunately at least two of these three qualities can be cultivated.You may be able to increase your strength of will somewhat; you candefinitely learn self-discipline; and almost everyone is practicallymalnourished when it comes to ambition.I feel like I understand determination a bit better now. But onlya bit: willfulness, discipline, and ambition are all concepts almostas complicated as determination.[3]Note too that determination and talent are not the whole story.There's a third factor in achievement: how much you like the work.If you really love working on something,you don't need determination to drive you; it's what you'd do anyway.But most types of work have aspects one doesn't like, because mosttypes of work consist of doing things for other people, and it'svery unlikely that the tasks imposed by their needs will happen toalign exactly with what you want to do.Indeed, if you want to create the most wealth,the way to do it is to focus more on their needs than your interests,and make up the difference with determination.Notes[1]Loosely speaking. What I'm claiming with the melon seed modelis more like determination is proportionate to wd^m - k|w - d|^n,where w is will and d discipline.[2]Which means one of the best ways to help a society generallyis to create events and institutions that bring ambitiouspeople together. It's like pulling the control rods out of areactor: the energy they emit encourages other ambitious people,instead of being absorbed by the normal people they're usuallysurrounded with.Conversely, it's probably a mistake to do as some European countrieshave done and try to ensure none of your universities is significantlybetter than the others.[3]For example, willfulness clearly has two subcomponents,stubbornness and energy. The first alone yields someone who'sstubbornly inert. The second alone yields someone flighty.As willful people get older or otherwise lose their energy, theytend to become merely stubborn.Thanks to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morrisfor reading drafts of this.
