Five For Your Hive: Have You Said No?

Every Bone In Your Body, YouTubers, Quentin Tarantino, Elon Musk's Idiot Index, Do Less, Better

Have You Said No?

Jony Ive, the legendary designer who designed the iMac, iPod, iPhone, Apple Watch, Macbook…reminisced conversations with Steve Jobs. “One of the things Steve would say was ‘How many things have you said no to?’” Steve, the proponent of "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication," believed that it does not just apply to the design of good products, but also in the way we live and dissect our lives. “Focus means,” Ive said, “saying no to something that—with every bone in your body—you think is a phenomenal idea, and you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you’re focusing on something else.” Cutting things out, delegating, and focusing on the essential so you can get the best outcome—that’s the idea for today.

Gotta Find Your Hearts

Marques Brownlee, aka MKBHD, is one of the top tech review channels on Youtube. Having started the channel in 2008, he has, as of this writing, 18.6 million subscribers. At the time of this video, there was a wave of OG YouTubers [Matti Haapoja, masteroogwgay, MatPat, Tom Scott, PewDiePie, Leon Hendrix] who were quitting the scene. Reasons cited were new priorities, business pivots, and burn-out. “When you ask the children of the 2010s and 2020s what they want to be when they grow up,” Brownlee says, “the most popular answer is YouTuber.” “But the point is,” he continues, “[even though] it’s a very sought-after job, a dream job is still a job.” In most cases, when you start out as a creator, you’re not paid. You’re just focused on being a creator. You find all sorts of way to make the content fun and interesting. Then comes your first gig. Your second gig. Then your third, your fourth, your fifth. Suddenly, money starts rolling in and everything begins to look serious. Now, you’re no longer just a content creator, but also “a full-time writer…a full-time cinematographer…a full-time editor…you’re managing the inbox…you’re doing the invoicing…you’re working with brands…taxes…financial accounting…the PR…the management…all that content strategy that's a bunch of different hats.” You wouldn’t mind all that, but “that is some more time spent doing something that isn’t being creative when the job is still supposed to be the being creative part.” So becoming a creator is like becoming an octopus, a creature with eight arms and three hearts. You’re doing everything all at once. It’s crucial that, if you want to stay in the game (and survive), “you want to find [aspects of the job] that you specifically want to cut off,” by giving it to someone else who is better than you at it so that you can focus on the essentials that “you cannot cut off”—the three hearts—the core of the job that made you fall in love with in the first place. You gotta find those hearts “as early and deliberately as you can and hopefully you can run on the treadmill with other people who control the other arms.”

You Just Need To Understand Your Vision

Quentin Tarantino once asked the British filmmaker Terry Gilliam [Life of Brian, The Meaning of Life, The Monty Python and the Holy Grail] for advise on how he so successfully captured vision in his work. “Well Quentin,” Gilliam replied, “you don't really have to conjure up your vision. What you have to do is you just have to know what your vision is, and then you have to hire really talented people. It's their job to create your vision.” As director, you have to pass the other arms to more talented people who can do the job better to focus on the core of the job—to be the master visionary of the film. “You don't need to know how to grab the light stands and create this kind of lighting effect,” Gilliam said, “You don’t need to know how this fabric goes with that wall or anything, you just need to understand your vision and you need to articulate it.” “If you can hire the right costume designer…the right production designer…the right cinematographer…you hire the right people who get what you're trying to do…and then you articulate your vision and they're talented they will give you your vision.”

Idiot Index

As it was for Steve Jobs, Elon Musk was also a maniac when it comes to efficiency. More specifically, manufacturing and production. At SpaceX, he famously coined the term idiot index: the ratio of the cost of a finished product versus the total cost of the raw materials required to build it. For instance, if a component costs $100,000 to produce but the raw iron in it is only worth $1000, it would have a high idiot index of a 100 due to inefficiencies somewhere along the factory line. Once, Musk was working on the Raptor, the main engine of the Starship. When he found out that it was being produced with a skyhigh idiot index, “he fired the person in-charge of its design and assumed the role of vice president of propulsion.” His goal: to slash the Raptor’s cost from $2,000,000 to $200,000. When an analyst met with Musk to report on the idiot indexes of the Raptor, he had the 20 parts with the highest scores listed on a PowerPoint slide. “It’s mainly the parts,” the analyst explained, “that require a lot of high-precision machining. We need to cut out as much of the machining as possible.” Musk smiled. His fiery passion for production efficiency was based on the theory that “if a product had a high idiot index, its cost [should] be reduced significantly by devising more efficient manufacturing techniques,” that is, to filter down to the essentials—changing material type, producing raw materials in-house, sourcing for new suppliers—to bring the overall cost down. If anyone questioned that a certain material or technique must be used instead of a cheaper, more efficient alternative, they must justify their position based on “the laws of physics.” If not, Musk repeatedly instructed, “all requirements should be treated as recommendations.”

Do Less, Better

Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius examined the idea that doing less and focusing on a few things “brings double satisfaction.” What he was saying, essentially, was that the fewer things you do—the more arms you cut off—the more it balances on the satisfaction scale. You get “to do less, better.” Gladys and I begun 2024 with this word for ourselves: Acceleration. Accelerated learning. Accelerated creating. Accelerated pursuits. We are on a mission to claim what we believe to be our purpose and converging everything we have into making our hearts come alive. And since our resources are limited, there comes a viciousness to say no to things that may seem important or urgent. We want to do less, better. Actor Matthew McConaughey also said it interestingly: “I was making B’s in five things. I want to make A’s in three things.” Those three things: his family, his foundation, his acting career. I’m a husband to a great wife, a father to a growing toddler. Every time I say yes to another takes away the time I’ve promised to set aside for the two most important people in my life. How much thinner can the slice be? Ultimately, your effectiveness as a creator, a business owner, a parent, can only be as good as the hearts—the reason(s) why you fell in love with it in the first place—you choose to laser-focus on.