Look Stupid on Purpose.

Last week I stopped by a pickleball complex late at night. 15 courts, packed, almost all young people. I wasn't playing. I was just watching. And what I kept noticing is that a lot of them owned the 200 dollar paddle, the shoes, the headband, the sunglasses, the whole outfit, and couldn't actually play. They'd spent all their time and money looking like players and none of it becoming one. Once you notice that, you see it everywhere, and it's started to genuinely piss me off.

Looking the part instead of doing the part

Everybody wants to look like they do the thing. Almost nobody wants to do the reps.

Vapes are the perfect example. Half of it isn't even the nicotine. It's the cloud, the little device, the flavor, the way it looks in your hand. It's a costume. Vaping is still better than smoking, so fine, but the style of it, the whole identity people build around it, drives me insane. It's a generation optimizing for how things look instead of what things are. And I'm watching my kids grow up inside of it.

The old school version of a man has gotten soft. Not soft like weak. Soft like all surface. Guys who spend more energy looking the part than doing the part. The pickleball guy with the perfect gear who never practices. The founder who posts like a founder and never ships. Same disease.

The two guys who actually do the work

Two people fixed things for me this year that I could not fix myself, and neither of them looks like anything.

One is the auto shop owner. He told me exactly what my car needed and what it didn't, did the work fast, and runs most of the shop himself. No branding, no pitch, just a guy who got good by fixing thousands of cars.

The other is my chiropractor. He and his wife built their practice from nothing. He fixed my back with a system he worked out himself, by hand, patient by patient, over years of trial and error, and he can explain exactly why every piece of it works. He isn't performing expertise. He's just playing out his 10,000 hours.

That's why I want to help him. He helped me, so I want to return the favor with the thing I'm actually good at. I already see where his business is leaking. He doesn't ask for reviews in the moment people feel best, right after he's fixed them. He almost certainly has no idea what Google Search Console is, and he shouldn't. His focus should be on being great at what he does inside his practice, and outsourcing the rest to people who know the rest. That's me. He could also use a voice agent to handle his calls and his calendar so he can keep his hands on patients instead of the phone. I haven't figured out how to pitch it yet. I'm going to walk in and figure it out in front of him.

I actually did the thing

Here's the part that earns me the right to say any of this.

I just spent a week upgrading the voice agent I built for the auto shop. Deepgram for transcription, a GPT-4o mini cluster for the brain, Vapi's voice on top. I sat and listened to real customer calls and tuned it until it sounded natural and stayed cheap to run. Some leads came through clean. Some failed, and I fixed them live while it was already running. The one week trial is ending right now. I think I might have my first paying client.

It was never polished when I turned it on. It worked because I turned it on. You don't get good and then do the thing. You do the thing badly, in public, and that's how you get good.

Money is a game and I'm losing it right now

I'll say it plainly. I'm losing the money game right now. Trailing, not winning. And I'm strangely okay with that, because I can feel the skills compounding.

It's like teaching a kid to ride a bike. The first hundred times on the seat the bike barely moves and you look ridiculous doing it. Then the pedaling catches and it just goes, and every rep after that pays more than the one before. Skills are exactly like that. Looking the part never catches. You can buy the bike, wear the helmet, and film yourself standing next to it, and you still can't ride.

Three years ago I would have found a reason to wait. That was the whole problem. I waited and waited and didn't do anything about it. Now I've decided the opposite. Taking a giant leap of faith in the face of looking stupid is worth it 100 percent of the time. You might be wrong. You might also stay stuck forever if you don't take the swing. Every decision is hard. You make it anyway, because that's the only way anything in your life changes.

The guy building the fastest chips said the same thing

I listened to Jonathan Ross on David Senra's podcast recently, and it got me thinking.

He's obsessed with speed, and his reasoning is simple. Improvements and failures both compound. The faster you get to either one, the faster you learn from it, the faster you adjust, and the faster you build the next one. Over and over and over again. Speed is how you create anything new. That's true of chips and it's true of a guy walking into a chiropractor's office with no pitch.

Warren Buffett ran the same math from the other direction, just slower. He was worth about a million at 30, a few hundred million at 50, and he didn't cross a billion until he was 56. He's worth over 140 billion today. Almost all of it stacked up in the back half of his life, on top of decades of small, boring, compounding reps. Fast or slow, the reps are the only thing that pays.

Ross said two things I keep coming back to. "Success in the information age was about being able to answer questions. Success in the AI age will be about being able to ask the right questions." Asking a question means admitting you don't know. It's the smallest way there is to look stupid, and he's saying it's now the whole game.

He also said, "If you don't do things differently, you have no advantage." Doing it differently always looks dumb at first. That's the price of it.

He talked about confronting things head on. Jensen Huang runs Nvidia with almost no internal politics because he says the hard thing to the whole room at once instead of whispering it in private. Put the conflict in front of everyone and make them face it directly. Same muscle. Doing the real thing instead of managing how it looks.

And the one that stuck with me most, because it's how I want to write and talk and build: every word matters. Say the most with the least. Cut the decoration. Keep only the part that works.

So stop buying gear for a game you won't play. Put down the costume, get on the seat, and look stupid until the bike moves.

Earlier in this thread:

Sources:

Jonathan Ross on David Senra's podcast — Betting Everything on Fast AI | Groq's Jonathan Ross