Step by step

We get these questions a lot from the enterprising young. It’s a very intelligent question: You look at some old guy who’s rich and you ask,

“How can I become like you, except faster?”;

Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. But you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts… Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day, at the end of the day – if you live long enough – most people get what they deserve.”

—Charlie Munger

When starting a company people often say, “execution is king.”

I never really understood what that meant. Does it mean I need to get customers? Raise money? Make a product? Over time, I realized it means all of the above.

Let me explain through an analogy of walking.

When walking one needs:

  1. A clear destination or a vision of the endpoint
  2. To take one step at a time to move forward

On the way to a destination, there’s also the chance of running into an obstacle.

When starting a company the difficulty isn’t in creating a grand vision. The hard part is making a daily, monthly, yearly plan and seeing it through no matter the obstacle.

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