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September 2009  
  
Like all investors, we spend a lot of time trying to learn how to predict
which startups will succeed. We probably spend more time thinking 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 is
determination. At first we thought it might be intelligence. Everyone likes to
believe that's what makes startups succeed. It makes a better story that a
company won because its founders were so smart. The PR people and reporters
who spread such stories probably believe them themselves. But while it
certainly helps to be smart, it's not the deciding factor. There are plenty of
people as smart as Bill Gates who achieve nothing.  
  
In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because
it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being
lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like
talent.  
  
I can't think of any field in which determination is overrated, but the
relative importance of determination and talent probably do vary somewhat.
Talent probably matters more in types of work that are purer, in the sense
that one is solving mostly a single type of problem instead of many different
types. I suspect determination would not take you as far in math as it would
in, say, organized crime.  
  
I don't mean to suggest by this comparison that types of work that depend more
on talent are always more admirable. Most people would agree it's more
admirable to be good at math than memorizing long strings of digits, even
though the latter depends more on natural ability.  
  
Perhaps one reason people believe startup founders win by being smarter is
that intelligence does matter more in technology startups than it used to in
earlier types of companies. You probably do need to be a bit smarter to
dominate Internet search than you had to be to dominate railroads or hotels or
newspapers. And that's probably an ongoing trend. But even in the highest of
high tech industries, 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 can cultivate?  
  
The simplest form of determination is sheer willfulness. When you want
something, you must have it, no matter what.  
  
A good deal of willfulness must be inborn, because it's common to see families
where one sibling has much more of it than another. Circumstances can alter
it, but at the high end of the scale, nature seems to be more important than
nurture. Bad circumstances can break the spirit of a strong-willed person, but
I don't think there's much you can do to make a weak-willed person stronger-
willed.  
  
Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on
yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called
determined. Determination implies your willfulness is 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, the less anyone will be
able to argue with you except yourself. And someone has to argue with you,
because everyone has base impulses, and if you have more will than discipline
you'll just give into them and end up on a local maximum like drug addiction.  
  
We can imagine will and discipline as two fingers squeezing a slippery melon
seed. The harder they squeeze, the further the seed flies, but they must both
squeeze equally or the seed spins off sideways.  
  
If this is true it has interesting implications, because discipline can be
cultivated, and in fact does tend to vary quite a lot in the course of an
individual's life. If determination is effectively the product of will and
discipline, then you can become more determined by being more disciplined.   
  
Another consequence of the melon seed model is that the more willful you are,
the more dangerous it is to be undisciplined. There seem to be plenty of
examples to confirm that. In some very energetic people's lives you see
something like wing flutter, where they alternate 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 with temptation. Which
means, interestingly, that determination tends to erode itself. If you're
sufficiently determined to achieve great things, this will probably increase
the number of temptations around you. Unless you become proportionally more
disciplined, willfulness will then get the upper hand, and your achievement
will revert to the mean.  
  
That's why Shakespeare's Caesar thought thin men so dangerous. They weren't
tempted 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 is crushed down by excessive
discipline, and who would achieve more if they weren't so hard on themselves.
One reason the young sometimes succeed where the old fail is that they don't
realize how incompetent they are. This lets them do a kind of deficit
spending. When they first start working on something, they overrate their
achievements. But that gives them confidence to keep working, and their
performance improves. Whereas someone clearer-eyed would see their initial
incompetence for what it was, and perhaps be discouraged from continuing.  
  
There's one other major component of determination: ambition. If willfulness
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 component of
determination, but they're not entirely orthogonal. It would seem a misnomer
if someone said they were very determined to do something trivially easy.  
  
And fortunately ambition seems to be quite malleable; there's a lot you can do
to increase it. Most people don't know how ambitious to be, especially when
they're young. They don't know what's hard, or what they're capable of. And
this problem is exacerbated by having few peers. Ambitious people are rare, so
if everyone is mixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people's
lives, then the ambitious ones won't have many ambitious peers. When you take
people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bloom
like dying plants given water. Probably most ambitious people are starved for
the sort of encouragement they'd get from ambitious peers, whatever their age.
  
  
Achievements also tend to increase your ambition. With each step you gain
confidence to stretch further next time.  
  
So here in sum is how determination seems to work: it consists of willfulness
balanced with discipline, aimed by ambition. And fortunately at least two of
these three qualities can be cultivated. You may be able to increase your
strength of will somewhat; you can definitely learn self-discipline; and
almost everyone is practically malnourished when it comes to ambition.  
  
I feel like I understand determination a bit better now. But only a bit:
willfulness, discipline, and ambition are all concepts almost as complicated
as determination.   
  
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
most types of work consist of doing things for other people, and it's very
unlikely that the tasks imposed by their needs will happen to align 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.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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