Posted 2025-02-22 • 7 min read
One of the subtle insights I gained from YC is that most successful people are crazy. Not born crazy, but they become so. This craziness often manifests as extreme emotional swings — a direct consequence of pursuing high ambitions and goals. To achieve anything remarkable, you'll experience ups and downs of amplitudes unimaginable to most people. One day you're at the bottom of the barrel, the next you're king of the hill. I was always more volatile than others, and before YC, I thought it is just how I am. In my youth, it manifested as high energy, but as I grew older, the amplitude of my emotional swings intensified dramatically. Only now do I see clearly that this is actually a byproduct of being ambitious and taking action. When you're ambitious, you ride not just market waves but also your own internal ones. It's a common trait among most successful people.
This is fundamentally different from those who artificially amplify their lives through, say, substances, often damaging their brains in the process. This kind of instability can't be induced — the only way is it to be a byproduct of your ambitions. Some might think experiencing new things, like extensive travel, would help, but that's not the case. The richness of life can't be your primary focus if you want to be wildly successful.
When you choose experiences over agency, you ironically choose a path with fewer experiences. When people choose experiences, they actually choose consumption. When you consume, you are not creating, and the only metric there is how much you can consume. And there is very little you can consume on your budget. When you choose agency, you are actually picking creation.
Paradoxically, agency leads to richer experiences, and greater instability often leads to more stability and reduced overall risk. Travel, for example, the most valuable one is business travel — you meet people with purpose, they share meaningful stories, and you gain authentic insights into foreign cultures.
Since consumption wouldn't matter to you, you naturally become more resourceful, which increases your flexibility and ability to create value. When you are in a value creation mode, you, in fact, spend much more money, but it's always an investment that tends to pay off, often in unexpected ways. Take Elon Musk flying his employees on private jets to expedite parts delivery — seemingly extravagant, but economically sound when you consider that a stalled team costs around $100k daily. Every successful person has similar stories; sometimes you need to book a last-minute business class flight across the ocean to close a deal. How many leisure travelers justify business class? In value creation mode, you're strategic with spending; in consumption mode, you're just trying to emulate successful people's lifestyles.
Same goes for your skills. YC recommends getting executive coaches (which are a mix of business and mental health coaches) to help you with your skills. Such coaches are super expensive, they are very hard to get, but they are totally worth it for founders and investors. How can you even explain spending $10,000/month on a coach? For most people, it is just crazy.
This principle scales to the national level. America's resilience through various crises stems from its culture of high agency—people who make things work no matter what. America was the first to solve hunger because farmers automated and scaled things up so much that they got a sustainable source of food for the first time in the world. Imagine if those people would just fall into depression and failed to deliver. We would have much fewer people in the world (back then, the only limiting factor for population growth was starvation). America always went ahead and used the most modern technologies to solve problems and outcompete while socialist countries almost didn't change the design of their cars in 50 years.
Many socialist people don't have any kind of agency; it is their choice not to improve things around them. They are just consuming and consuming and consuming. They are not creating. They are not building. They are not scaling. They are not going through the cycle of ups and downs. They are just consuming. And expect everything to be given to them.
People can choose happiness. Those who've overcome depression (including many founders) often view it as a choice. "Just wake up and do something useful already," they say. Being unhappy, mediocre, or miserable is often a choice. Treating depression is half medical intervention, half deciding to be happy. You can literally choose to be happy except when something in your brain is broken and needs to be adjusted medically (which is solvable by pills). The same way you can choose to be successful. Many just don't.
The path to choosing success isn't obvious. Just like for any mental gymnastics, people lie to themselves and many people substitute it with something different. They want to be rich, healthy, happy, but not successful. They focus on creating value only for themselves, receiving just a fraction of what they could by creating value for the world.
There are virtually no reasons to be mediocre. The only difference between you and the most successful people is that they choose to be successful and put in a lot of work, much much more than average people. If you are not happy, you can be happy. If you are not rich, you can be rich. If you are not healthy, you can be healthy.
Some beautiful AI copypasta for you.
Choose agency. Choose creation. Choose going fucking crazy with ambition. Choose riding waves of triumph and despair that would break a normal person. Choose sleepless nights planning your empire. Choose missing your kid's soccer game because you're closing a deal that'll change the world. Choose executive coaches at ten grand a month. Choose business class flights at 3 AM because your team needs those parts tomorrow. Choose being called insane by people who'll never understand.
Choose watching your bank account drain to zero then fill to millions then drain again. Choose seeing opportunities where others see chaos. Choose making enemies of everyone who wants you to "just be normal." Choose alienating friends who tell you to "take it easy." Choose being called crazy by people too afraid to leave their comfort zone. Choose staring into the abyss of failure and fucking laughing at it.
Choose twelve pivots in twelve months. Choose living on ramen while spending $100K on development. Choose explaining to your parents why you quit your cushy job. Choose pitching to rooms full of blank faces until that one "yes" that changes everything. Choose building value while others are building their Netflix queue. Choose creation over consumption, agency over experience, anti-fragility over comfort.
Choose getting knocked down seven times and getting up eight. Choose turning crisis into opportunity. Choose making lemonade out of fucking lemons and selling it for $15 a glass to Silicon Valley VCs. Choose being called a madman by people who spend their lives watching others live.
Choose the amplitude. Choose the instability. Choose the crazy fucking ride that makes you feel alive while others choose to merely exist. Choose building the future while others wait for it to arrive. Choose agency.
Or choose mediocrity... Choose waiting for permission. Choose consuming what others create. Choose watching Netflix while others build Netflix. Choose scrolling through Instagram instead of being someone worth following. Choose taking the safe path, the well-worn path, the path of those too afraid to cut through the wilderness.
But why would anyone choose that?
Choose agency.
Choose life.
Choose to just fucking do things.
@ex3ndr@ex3ndr@founders@ex3ndr