Do you want it the most?

I'm not into tennis, but I'm intrigued by Rafael Nadal's biography. The book focuses on Nadal's match against Roger Federer at the 2008 Wimbledon Championships.

Federer was widely considered to be the more naturally talented player. He had won five consecutive Wimbledon titles and, on grass courts, held a 65-match winning streak.

But in 2008, Nadal shocked the tennis world by beating Federer at Wimbledon.

Nadal himself said, "If you say I play better than Roger Federer, then you don't know tennis."

So what made the difference?

As I read Nadal's book, the answer became clear: he just wanted it more.

Always pick the person who wants it more

I keep hearing folks quoting Josh Kushner:

"If you have to pick the person who is the smartest, the person who has the most experience, or the person who wants it more, you always pick the person who wants it more."

Almost everyone I know who's had success has "wanted it more." They were willing to go the extra mile when others weren't. They kept pushing themselves, worked nights and weekends, did whatever it took.

I think this holds true for those of us going into business.

When customers are looking for solutions, they're not looking for average; they're looking to buy the best option.

If you've ever competed for a search query on Google, you've seen this demonstrated: being result #1 gets you roughly 10x as many clicks as result #10.

Most of us assume rewards follow rank in a straight line. Fifth place? That's pretty good!

But it doesn't work that way. Being #1 isn't a little better than #5; it's dramatically better, even if #1 is only slightly better in quality.

Economists have a name for this: Superstar Economics (1981 paper). Sherwin Rosen noticed that the best surgeon doesn't earn a little more than an average one; she earns many times more.

So, if you're about to enter a new market, you need to ask yourself:

Do I have enough drive to get to the top 5% in this category?

For example, when tourists drive into my hometown of Vernon, BC, and search for a coffee shop, they're not asking Google for the "most average" option.

No! They want a coffee shop with a cool atmosphere, friendly baristas, good espresso, the tastiest pastries, and a great patio. My friend Andrew has built his shop, Ratio, to be that place. If you search for "best coffee shop," it's right at the top, which means it's packed with tourists in the summer.

And if you know Andrew, you know he sweats the details. He's spent years cultivating a culture at Ratio where they train their people to be excellent, use the best suppliers, and constantly improve "the vibe" at the shop.

Andrew makes it look easy, but sweating the details does cost you something.

There's a cost to this

My friend Caleb Porzio has succeeded with products for Laravel programmers (Flux, Livewire, Alpine.js). He's also talented in other ways and could be good in multiple endeavors. But he's hesitant to start anything new, because he knows what it would take.

"Whenever I think about getting into something else, I think: 'Where does this lead? And what's the work involved to get there?' Because I've put my whole life into something, and now I realize how much it takes to achieve any level of success; it takes your whole self. You have to be willing to bleed for it."

Caleb knows what it takes. And once you've felt it, you think twice about starting something new. This is why it seems like successful people are often trying to dissuade others from achieving what they did: when you know what it cost you to get there, you're hesitant to recommend that path to others.

Caleb talks about that at the end of this podcast episode:

"Of course there's a cost to this. What's dangerous about 'wanting it the most ' is you get what you want, but at a cost. With Flux, I had to crank morning, noon, and night in a way I'd never cranked on anything. It consumes your whole self. I'd look out my office window at my family playing in the backyard on a sunny day, and I'd just be in my office. It's a huge sacrifice: it really takes your all."

Once you've experienced the cost of achieving something great, it makes you think twice about what you commit to in the future.

You do it for the love of the game

Rafael Nadal trains four hours a day, 210 days a year. When you include matches, that's 1,000 hours of tennis a year. And he's been playing tennis since he was 3 years old.

In his biography, Nadal talks about what drives him:

"People sometimes say that I only play tennis because I was forced into it by my uncle Toni, that I am a kind of tennis robot. But that’s completely wrong. I love playing tennis. If I didn't, I wouldn't have done all this. I wouldn't have spent all those hours on court, training, repeating the same shots over and over. You cannot put that amount of effort into something you do not love."

My friend Alban Brooke experienced this first-hand. He was originally a lawyer, and realized: "I’ll never be good at this because I hate every minute of it." He gave up that career to get into startups and marketing, which he loves.

He later told me:

"For me, I think about it this way: ‘Do I get enough joy from this that I’ll be excited to get into the top 1%?’ I know I can’t get there by denying myself and white-knuckling through it. It feels like such a trap to 'focus on discipline' when the real unlock is just finding something that is easy because you’re having so much fun."

We could even reframe Kushner's line to: "Always pick the person who loves it the most."

When you love something, you'll do it every day, for hours. You don't need anyone to push you to do it; it's driven by pure passion, fun, or interest.

Arnold Schwarzenegger says people used to ask him how he built so much discipline for going to the gym, and he responded: "I have no discipline. It's an addiction. I have to go to the gym in order to feel good."

If I "make it," will it be worth it?

The follow-up question is: "If I make it, is it going to be worth it?"

Let's say you start a restaurant. You work hard and make it the top recommended place in your hometown. But what if you get to that number-one spot and it isn't actually that great? What if the business puts you in debt? Ruins your health? Destroys your relationships? That's a crappy prize for winning.

So if you're going to play the game, make sure it's a game worth winning.

Before you commit, do some research. Look at the people at the top right now. Take a restaurant owner out for coffee and ask what a typical week looks like. Do you want their life?

Here's how this looked for me. Back in 2015, I was struggling. I'd shipped nine products that year: books, courses, themes, a podcast. I was winning a bunch of small games, but none of them were getting me where I wanted to go.

So I started seeking out people who had the life I wanted. One of them was Ruben Gamez. Ruben had bootstrapped Bidsketch (proposal software for freelancers) into a seven-figure business, and he had the time and flexibility to be with his family.

I met Ruben for dinner in Portland. After I described my situation, he thought for a bit. Then he gave me an honest summary: I was working on too many "small bet" projects, and they weren't going to get me where I wanted to go.

"What do you want?" he asked.

"Right now? More financial freedom," I replied. "I want to be an independent entrepreneur."

"Then stop working on these little projects, and give yourself time to find a serious project that will get you there."

Did I listen? Not right away. The next year, I launched a challenge to make 100 things. (Old habits.) But Ruben's question stuck with me, and in 2017 I started pursuing it more seriously. At the end of the year, I started talking with Jon Buda about launching Transistor.fm together.

This time, I knew what I wanted, and I had a better idea of what it would take: a singular focus.

Building Transistor was hard. For the first year, I worked on it almost full-time without a real paycheck, and I didn't have much money in the bank. (If you listen back to our Build Your SaaS podcast, you can hear the financial stress.) But by July 2019, Jon and I were both full-time. Eventually, I got what I wanted: financial freedom. I paid off my debt, we moved into a bigger house, and I got to work on something I'm passionate about.

So it's worth asking yourself:

"What do you want at the end of this? And what will it take to get there?"

What does this look like in the age of AI?

AI is getting better at things that used to be hard: design, coding, automation. When hard things become easy, it changes the definition of what's "average" and what's "exceptional."

So what's left for those of us building businesses?

AI just means more people can be average. The mediocre middle is about to get very crowded.

But customers still aren't looking for average. They want the best.

The person who wins is the one who keeps showing up, keeps learning, and keeps pushing after everyone else gets bored.

Ruben is a good example. He took on DocuSign with SEO, one of the slowest, most manual ways to grow. And he thinks most people are using AI the wrong way:

"Everyone wants to jump to automation and skip the manual, grindy work that makes it effective. They don't know their customers and the buying process well enough. And they're doing all the same things everyone else is doing. And if everyone else is doing it, it's going to be harder to make it work." (Ref)

AI makes it easy to skip the hard parts. But the hard parts (talking to customers, understanding why they buy, sweating the details) are where the advantage is.

Who wants it the most?

As I've been writing this, I keep thinking about how I'd give this advice to my kids. And my worry is that one of them (or one of you) will read "you've gotta want it more" and work themselves into the ground.

You will have to work hard. But wanting it more doesn't mean doing everything. It means focusing on the stuff that matters.

If you open a restaurant, you could burn yourself out getting the perfect logo, the perfect website, the perfect Instagram account. Some of those details matter, but what really moves the needle is creating an experience so good that people come back again and again and tell their friends. Focus your energy on that.

That's what Andrew does at Ratio: training his people and obsessing over the experience. It's what Ruben does, getting to know his customers while everyone else rushes to automate. And it's what Nadal did, repeating the same shots over and over.

So figure out what you actually want. Find a game that's worth winning. Then be honest with yourself: are you going to be the person who wants it the most?

Cheers,
Justin Jackson

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