Craft v/s Outcomes

I am always surrounded by people who are working on very interesting projects. But when I think about how each of them would approach a problem, it is widely different.

I have friends who are deep into the execution nuances, while others who play at the high level - vision setting type of stuff. Both are doing quite well, at least from the perspective of our little group. This made me wonder, on which side do I fall, and more importantly what works.

There is an argument to be made for speed, shipping things fast and iterating fast. Not getting consumed by the edge cases, making sure it is 70% okay and figuring out the rest later. This is the pragmatic approach. The one you would take when you know exactly where to go, and are not bothered by the path as much. You are like the shortest path finding algorithm, and in the process, if you stumble into a different path, you quickly re-align and get back to business. These are people who are not very interesting, but they are incredibly reliable. You can give them a project and trust them to complete it on time. Like Jared from Silicon Valley.

Then, there is the “journey over destination” guys. These are people who are consumed by the craft. They don't just want to make things, they want to make things a certain way. They have taste and very stern opinions. These are the ones generally who are hard to work with. Because they don’t respect people who lack their own convictions. These are the people who would spend hours obsessing over the details. They would spend an eternity trying to make perfection before launching it out and seeking feedback instead. These people are incredibly interesting. You can talk to them about geopolitics, the new deepmind paper, nietzsche's maxims and chances are, they would have something to say about it. And if not, they would be super open to learn about it (only to form an opinion). And as you can guess, these people are not very reliable. They halt projects, go into tangents, and more than anything, don’t follow a plan. Like Gilfolyle from Silicon Valley.

Now, obviously, both kinds of people do well… But what works exceptionally well is the combination. If you are somehow able to maintain velocity with creativity - you would be unstoppable. Akshay Kumar and Amir Khan are two very successful actors in the Indian film industry, they both fall on either side of the spectrum. Shah Rukh Khan, who appears to balance the yin and the yang, is more successful than them both combined.

But as most things in life are, it is incredibly difficult to balance both. Hence most successes are always a combination of two people (Jobs + Wozniak, and later Jobs + Tim Cook; Larry & Sergey, Sherlock + Watson, etc.)

While this might seem quite obvious in retrospect, either one of the personalities is not going to make it to the helm. But if you were to choose (if it were something we could even choose), then try to be the creative one. Try to be someone who is fascinated by things, as opposed to going blindly behind a made up goal. Life is more fun when you care about the details.