This post about work may make sense to some people but for a lot of people it won't make a lot of sense because I write for a very niche set of people. I have a a very narrow idea of the type of people I want to work with and the type of work that I want to do. Because I don't have an aversion to working hard, my preferences have not hurt my ability to make money. Some people may just want to do work that is not very intense or is simple enough that it does not require a lot thinking. My process of choosing what I want to work on based on what I like will not work for these people. This approach would also not work if I preferred working with people who were extremely agreeable or who were nice because these people are not always the best people to work with. The type of people I want to work with are high in certain attributes. They're earnest, they're high IQ, they have high levels of obsession, they're hard working, they're skeptical, they read a lot and they have high energy. The problem is that getting this combination in a person is not easy because these traits are by definition extraordinary traits themselves and having all of them in one person is extremely extraordinary. So I usually have a tough time finding the people I want to work with. A few years ago I was fortunate enough to accidentally end up as a founding member at Markaz because I contacted Umair about some questions I had for YC founders in Pakistan immediately after Umair had gotten into YC and Umair asked to hop on a call later that night. It was a funny story because Umair being a night owl, asked how long will I be up and me not knowing that told him I'd stay up until he calls and I ended staying up until 4AM and then we talked for 2 hours. Near the end he asked if I would consider moving to Islamabad to work at a startup. I knew Umair was the kind of person I wanted to work with but I couldn't tell if the rest would be like that, so I thought that I would go to Islamabad for two weeks and see, and in my mind the most likely scenario was that I was not going to find the rest of the people like him and that I would probably come back after 2 weeks. I ended up staying 2 years. Also, please note that if you try telling your parents you're moving to a different city after talking to someone at 4AM, it's going to be rather difficult to explain. Also, because I hadn't packed for a long term stay, I ended up having to buy basic stuff like kambal which is a funny story in itself because I went to buy one thinking it'd cost like 1k and when the guy said 7k I told him "bhai aap rehne do mei mattress upar le lu ga" and then left. Anyways, coming back to the type of people I want to work with, other than the explicit attributes there are some implicit attributes as well. Generally, I just try to imagine working with them every day for the next few years. And if I can't imagine myself doing that, I don't try to work with them. This can partially explain why I am turning down an investment offer of $125k from Antler (startup incubator). It was because I'd already worked with Antler for two months and couldn't see myself working with them. It wasn't the right fit for me. Although some may argue that you don't actually have to work with investors after taking their money and it's mostly just some communication. But for those of you who've done house work you know that it is not possible to paint a wall without getting paint on your clothes or even stand next to someone painting a wall and not get paint on your own clothes. So your only options are to not care about getting paint on your clothes or never go close enough to paint. There is no middle path. I am maybe exceptionally picky about the type of people I want to work with. But one justified reason for this is that I think I am going to end up spending more time with the people that I work with than I will spend with my family. Also because you are the average of the people you spend your time with, I don't want to work with people I don't want to turn into. Moving on to the second part of the equation, the type of work that I want to do is based on my idea of absolute productivity which might be a remnant of my time spent in mechanical engineering. Productivity is basically the amount of work you do to get the amount of results that you want. Absolute productivity is basically doing only the things that would add value to the result you want while avoiding everything else. I've seen that it is possible for a lot of people to adjust their level of effort based on the rewards they expect. Like if someone is being paid less or not expecting a bonus, they can lower the effort they put into their job to match the salary that they are being paid. And I've also known that this is impossible for me. Even as a kid whatever I did I did to extreme. I would often be immersed in things for so long during the day that I would forget to drink water and would end up at the hospital for dehydration. I still often carry a water bottle for this reason. It's not that I don't get thirsty. It's that if I'm doing something, I can fail to notice it for an entire day until I need to go to the hospital because of it. I have this thing where I will get so narrowly focused on something that I even stop hearing people around me. Which initially led my parents and my cousin to think I had a hearing problem and I ended up getting checked for hearing multiple times only to find that my hearing was perfectly fine. The same cousin is now a VP at a hospital and I hope his diagnoses are better now or that his patients are less unusual than me. People I've worked with are already familiar with this thing. My first company, there were multiple videos of people trying to say my name or try to get me to pay attention and seeing how long I could not notice. At Markaz, the product designer sat in front of me and had gotten into the habit of throwing her ballpen at me as her way to break my stance. Though she might've also actually liked hitting me with her pen because I used to annoy her by bypassing design concerns and shipping things looking ok. That was a very long tangent but it will help explain why I choose to work on startups. Because if I can't lower my effort to match the rewards of work, I can choose the type of work where rewards are proportional to the effort. If I'm going to work on something to the extreme and spend most of my time on it, it doesn't make sense to work on things where rewards are not proportional to the effort. So I work on startups where the rewards are not capped by some artificial constraint like my boss's discretion, willingness or his ability to gauge my value addition. So it makes sense to try to do a startup. There are very few other arrangements where the upside is not capped. There are other things that make productivity go further away from absolute productivity. Meetings reduce the productivity to a level much less than absolute productivity. Or having to convince or explain things to people that are dumb because you end up spending time on things that don't add value to the actual work. I'm personally in favor of giving an exceptional severance package of 6 months if the company feels someone is being let go haphazardly but making sure they don't come back to the office. The problem with this kind of person staying in a startup for 8 months is that a lot of people have to work around them and a lot of times people have to do their work for them because they either were unable to or made so many mistakes that they spilled into other people's work. Super dumb people are not uncommon. In corporate, these people normally don't get fired either. They get performance managed out over a long enough time period. For big companies, they can afford the slowness or losses that come from these few individuals. But for startups, these individuals can be catastrophic. There are also other cascading effects from having dumb incompetent people that smart and competent people get fed up and leave and this in itself can be catastrophic for a startup because it is one of the few things that make or break a startup. I talk more about things that are important in a startup here. One thing that is the biggest enemy of absolute productivity inside a startup is that you don't focus on building an MVP. It is so important and so common a mistake that almost all of startup advice is focused around it. I also talk more about MVP in this article. The problem is that when you focus on anything else, you're spending time on things you shouldn't be spending time on. The process of MVPs is a continuous recalibration to the highest absolute productivity by changing focus or refocusing on things that are the most important for customers. There are no exceptions to this. If an industry veteran says he knows what he needs to build and spends 2 years building the thing instead of starting with an MVP and validating assumptions, he is fooling himself. He will be building upon stacks of assumptions all of which depend on each other. When he launches 2 months or 2 years later, and just one assumption fails, the whole thing comes down like a Jenga tower. You can gauge whether this claim is true or not by looking at the success rate of industry veterans vs random kids building things. Industry veterans have just as hard enough of a time building a successful startup as kids otherwise most of VC funding would go to industry veterans. Now that's a lot of things I'm certain about. But there's one thing I have not yet figured out. How to gauge earnestness without having to spend a few months working with people. My guess is that my ability to gauge earnestness is only slightly better than average and this is something that is very important to just be average at. One of the reasons YC did not get scammed out of their money by people who were not earnest was that YC had Jessica Livingston who worked as a social radar for YC and was able to judge people on their level of earnestness much earlier than others. Which is an exceptional ability. And YC would've been a hub of people doing startups for the wrong reasons and would've had much fewer successful startups had it not been the case. This ability of YC was also one major reason I could decide to join Markaz over the weekend as opposed to trying to figure out if the founders were earnest or not. You can have everything right but working with someone who's not earnest is going to be catastrophic because they're going to want to do things not for the sake of doing those things but to get money or to get status or both or something entirely different that has nothing to do with building something people want. And I plan to spend a lot of time trying to get better at this because me being slightly better than average at this is not a good enough bar. Thanks to Taha Ashraf, Shanze Naim and Rumaisa Shaikh for reading drafts of this.