00:21:57 · Markie Wagner
[00:21:57] S1: The GoodQuest article really is about the problem that a lot of the top operators, exited founders, powerful investors of tech, and kind of broadly, are almost all on bad quests. For example, someone exiting their startup just to go work in venture capital and fight their peers for allocation in a hot deal is not a good quest. A lot of people do a lot of really boring things like being a public intellectual or being a Twitter personality or just starting a business that is essentially a commodity business where there's already lots of competitors providing that same service is easier than working on a good quest because a lot of good quests are really hard. In a good quest, we, Trey and I, this idea comes from an essay that Trey Stevens and I ended up writing and publishing in Pirate Wires. Kind of in the simple terms, a good quest makes the future better than it looks today, while a bad quest doesn't improve the world much at all or even makes it worse. And so I think making the future look distinctly better than it is today is a very hard, risky endeavor. Whereas providing more capital or doing a copycat startup that you already know has some fit in the market, but you just want to compete on it anyways is easier and often less risky. That's kind of how we thought about it.
00:23:17 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:23:17] S0: Why the language of quest? There's a lot of vernacular around, hey, one should be long term focused or focused on the sort of the world as opposed to oneself. But I think the reason why I think the article really connected to me was the language themselves felt almost game like, And that you almost have to think about your both career decisions and your company decisions very much like it's a game. Why did you choose the quest framing as the way to explain this concept?
00:23:51 · Markie Wagner
[00:23:51] S1: Trey and I had a really long conversation about this thesis and ended up being this quest framing and your player card and almost seeing what kind of Pokemon you are and what superpowers you have ended up being the clearest way to talk about how we're thinking. And for me, I tend to want to stay away from overly contrived framings on what are like kind of simple problems to work through relative to simpler framing. I think it's easy to lose sight of what matters when frameworks are contrived or ways of talking about things highlight and emphasize the wrong parts of the problem. And so thinking about like, okay, how do you think about being long term? Well, why does it even matter to be long term? It matters because if you look on a wide view and if the aliens come down five hundred years from now and they're saying, hey, what happened in the 2000s? Like a couple of things will be mentioned. And I guess that means being long term. But I think there are sometimes phrases that gesture towards something important, but don't necessarily hit it on the head where it's like, is the thing that you did important or not? Did it matter or not? Was it remarkable or was it like a copycat of something? A harsher framing can kind of wither away the like cognitive dissonance that you might have about what you're doing. It's like, oh, is my work important? Okay, yeah, because like we make all this money and we make all this impact. It's like, if you didn't do it, would the world look the same? Yes. Okay, then why are you doing it? So we try to stay away from language that could be repurposed and skewed and contrived to justify something that wasn't a good quest, basically.
00:25:30 · Nikhyl Singhal, Markie Wagner
[00:25:30] S0: Yeah, and I think that in some ways, my interpretation is there's sort of almost like side quests and main quests. And maybe the thing that I realized and what language I want to incorporate from your article is, I've always said that, look, people are working in a job. Those jobs may last two years, three years, four years, five years. You work on a product moving something from here to there. And in the process of doing that, it definitely improves that product or maybe the users' lives or maybe helps your team. But over time, it's unclear that those products are even going to be around. [00:26:05] S1: It's Exactly. It's like these micro optimizations.
00:26:05 · Markie Wagner, Nikhyl Singhal
[00:26:05] S1: It's Exactly. It's like these micro optimizations. [00:26:08] S0: Exactly. And so you could argue that your job today, and this is maybe a little harsh, is your side quest. And what you really wanna do is look at the sort of the combination of each of those pieces put together to see if you are on a general good quest. Oh, there might be an opportunity for there to be a distraction here or distraction there. Maybe you need economic needs. Maybe you're starting your family and you're pulling back away. That's all went and good. But if you look over the test of time, if you're on a path that doesn't lend itself to a long term conquest, then you might look and back and feel like there's more emptiness. And the vice versa, maybe the more optimistic thing is that even if your current role or the current job or you get laid off, maybe not worked out as well, but if you were on this good quest and you feel very good about your general behavior. That's how I interpreted the note. I really like that framing of what's side versus what's main as a way to sort of help people get a little bit less tethered on the day to day and more tethered on the overall.
00:27:14 · Markie Wagner
[00:27:14] S1: Yeah. I think the side quest framing is really important. We actually didn't touch on it too much in the article, but went back and forth about a section that dove into side quests. And I think the reason why it cut out is people have different opinions about the importance of side quests. For me and a few others, side quests are fun, but I think often you'll have a new grad that's a McKinsey and they'll say, okay, this is what I want to be doing forever, but I'm just going be here for a little while. And they'll say, oh, maybe McKinsey is a side quest or going to grad school for business is a side quest. And I think calling something a side quest or saying this isn't my forever thing is almost like a stop sign to say it's okay that this doesn't matter because it's not going to be my main thing forever. I think that's really, really dangerous. And I think that the labeling of something as, oh, it's just a side quest. It's not my main quest is a really easy way to waste a bunch of years. If you're going go on a side quest, like go have fun or do something crazy. Don't do something that is both taxing and unimportant. I do think that side quests do distract from a main quest, and to do anything that enters the canon takes like extreme herculean efforts of will. A good side quest can be great and also lead to lots of other fun things. But having a suboptimal main quest and calling it a side quest, I think, is dangerous.