Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it.
Hard work isn't enough. And more work is never the real answer. The sort of grit you need to scale a business is less reliant on brute force. It's actually one part determination, one part ingenuity, and one part laziness.
Some people mistake grit for sheer persistence - charging up the same hill again and again. But that's not quite what I mean by the word 'grit.' You want to minimize friction and find the most effective, most efficient way forward. You might actually have more grit if you treat your energy as a precious commodity.
Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that's really powerful.
Broadly, the meaning of life comes from how we interact with each other. The Internet can reconfigure space so that the right people are always next to each other.
We need to invest in technologies that amplify human capacity, not replace it.
If you contrast the productivity that comes from a networked or capitalist distribution of resources versus a centralized planning system, frequently referred to as communism or socialism, the network approach does much better when it's applied accurately.
And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don't.
The same instincts that make us good students can make us lousy entrepreneurs.
I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not.