David speaks with Luca Dellana, an author, business consultant, and lecturer who helps companies increase their revenue through better people and risk management. Luca has been featured at Nudgestock, the largest behavioural sciences conference, as well as on Econtalk, among other platforms. More than 25,000 people around the world read Luca regularly. He’s the author of over ten books, with his latest being Winning Long-Term Games: Reproducible Success Strategies to Achieve Your Life Goals.
They talked about:
🎯 Why success is a long-term game
🤝 The value of investing in people
📉 The limits of compounding success
💪 The power of long-term commitment
⏳ The importance of strategic time management
⚖️ The impact of asymmetric risk on decision-making
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📄 Show notes:
[00:00] Introduction
[02:51] Why slow and steady wins
[05:59] Great things don’t happen overnight
[10:41] Big wins come from small acts of trust
[13:27] Your craft is your best calling card
[16:37] Developing relationships is more than just networking
[20:14] Success is a marathon
[24:07] Short-term focus, long-term vision
[27:22] Why you can't just wait for success to come
[30:39] When career progression means moving on
[33:48] The role of trust and relationships in career progression
🗣 Mentioned in the show:
Elon Musk | https://www.tesla.com/elon-musk
Peter Thiel | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel
David Sacks | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_O._Sacks
PayPal | https://about.pypl.com/about-us/default.aspx
Winning Long-Term Games | https://amzn.to/3OQuD9T
J.D. Vance | https://www.vance.senate.gov/about/
Babak Nivi | https://www.linkedin.com/in/bnivi
AngelList | https://www.angellist.com/
James Clear | https://jamesclear.com/about
Warren Buffett | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett
AG1 | https://drinkag1.com/
Nassim Taleb | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
👤 Connect with Luca:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DellAnnaLuca
Website: https://luca-dellanna.com/about/
Book: Winning Long-Term Games | https://amzn.to/3OQuD9T
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
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📜 Full transcript:
Luca Dellanna: If you have a medium time horizon, you will probably not do neither the short term things, nor the long term things which are necessary to really try and upscale.
And so I think that there is a benefit to kind of like, instead of optimizing for a single time frame, asking you both things. Part of the time you ask yourself, how can I get more now? And the other part of the time, what actions should I take right now, which bring no immediate benefit, but are necessary for sustained growth over time.
This week I'm sharing part of my conversation with Luca Dellana who was gracious enough to come back on the podcast. Luca is an author, a business consultant and a lecturer who helps companies to increase their revenue through better people and risk management. He's also written a ton of great books, notably including Ergodicity which I think has captured the zeitgeist somewhat and become incredibly popular. You may have come across him at Nudgestock which is one of the largest behavioural sciences conferences or on Econ Talk with Russ Roberts, which I love to listen to. So I was really glad to have Luca back on.
In this part of the episode, you're gonna hear Luca and I talking about long term games. It's the title of his most recent book. I've got a copy of it here Winning Long Term Games. We talk about why success is a long term game, we talk about the value of investing in people, we talk about long term wins and short term sacrifices and the extent to which it is worth trading off the long term for the short term and vice versa.
We talk about the concept of the 1 percent rule and why it doesn't work for everything. This idea that competence compounds and you can just do a little bit each day, get a little better each day. That usually works but not in every circumstance and Luca is going to explain why. We also talk about the true cost of instant gratification and the power of strategic time management. So really just being able to conserve and allocate your resources more effectively.
And then finally, we talk about the impact of asymmetric risk on decision making. So overall, this episode is really about playing long term games, planning for the long term, figuring out what sacrifices are worth making, how to utilize your resources effectively, both in terms of time and energy.
You can get the full show notes, the transcript, and read my newsletter at theknowledge.io and you can find Luca online on Twitter @DellanaLuca. I'll have all the links to his Social profiles, his books, everything in the description below and you can check out his personal website at LucaDellana.Com.
If you love this episode, please do me a tremendous favor and share it with a friend and don't forget to leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Whether that's on on Spotify or Apple podcasts because it helps us tremendously to find other listeners just like you.
David Elikwu: Okay. Awesome. So I know there was quite a few things that I wanted to talk to you about. First of all, you're prolific as usual. I always enjoy reading your stuff. I have next to me here. You probably can't see it from,
Luca Dellanna: Yeah, I can see.
David Elikwu: but I've got your Winning Long Term Games book, it's in good company on my bookshelf here, and you have a, you know, quite prolific writing pace, but a lot has happened in the world since you wrote that book, and I'd be interested to know the extent to which it has might change or update either confirming some of the things you already suggested or maybe you've evolved some of your thoughts on some of the things you suggested and I know that, you know, when we were speaking previously, one of the things I mentioned was, I guess, two maybe main characters in a sense of this recent era, one being Elon Musk, who we did talk about last time, but a lot has happened with him since then, and then maybe also Peter Thiel, who, I don't know if you saw just today as we're recording this, David Sachs, has been given a government position and David Sachs also worked for Peter Thiel at PayPal.
And so you have a very interesting, like the vice president is a mentee of Peter Thiel. Elon Musk worked for Peter Thiel. David Sachs worked for Peter Thiel. There's a whole web of people that are now going to be part of the current or the upcoming government administration that all connect to this one person. And I can't think of anything that screams long term games more than that.
So I'd love to know, yeah, maybe if you could set out some of the initial thoughts with, with the book and what the framing of long term games are, and then we can get into some of that other stuff.
Luca Dellanna: Yeah. So the basic framing of the book is that you cannot win long term games consistently if you always try to optimize short term gains. And that's because, for example, like if you try to maximize sales today, you will have to do things such as over promising, pushing customers and so on, for example. That prevent you from achieving larger objectives later on, they effectively create a plateau to your growth.
What you pointed out with Musk and Sachs. This idea that they both engaged in ventures that not necessarily paid off in the short term. Like, I'm not too familiar with American politics as much, but I suppose that part of the reasons why they got chosen was because of certain things that they did and said and time that they spent in the previous years. Time that was spent building trust or at least building trust that they have certain ideas that they would be able to to bring a certain type of value.
And only now, for example, you see some ways in which this value could pay off. And I think that in general, this is just an example of the principle of how valuable it is to build long term assets, such as skills, trust, and relationships.
Then, of course, I don't know too much about David Sachs to comment specifically on him or on Peter Thiel.
David Elikwu: Sure, no problem. I mean, I can maybe fill in some gaps either, some might be factual, some might just be my thoughts and opinions, but part of this is what I find interesting is that looking at J. D. Vance, for example, and I probably can't give the precise timeline, but roughly speaking, he grew up poor, went to Yale at some point, I'm not sure if he wrote the book first or if Peter Thiel came across him first, but Peter Thiel basically gives him a job. He becomes a mentee to Peter Thiel, works with him for a while and then goes on to have this career, eventually becomes a politician, etc. But it's this idea that Peter Thiel seems to have been, okay, on one hand, you can definitely say a great picker of talent in some way, but also, and this is where I think it connects to some of what you wrote about in the Long Term Games idea, is that, first of all, JD Vance, picking him as your, your mentee, just because he wrote this book that captured the zeitgeist for a little while, he'll be the elegy a while ago, but I don't think, if you could take a time machine at any point before one year ago and say, do you think someone like J. D. Vance would ever become president? I don't think you would ever have heard someone say, yes, like this is the guy that will become a vice president at some point in time and potentially a future president. So you start there and then obviously you can go back and you can look at PayPal, a lot of the PayPal mafia, you know, infamously have gone on to do great things, but it's interesting. I think this is now a very different level. There's one level of success where you can say, I built a startup and I hired people for that startup and all of them were great people. And this startup did well to then, I can actually still get every, almost all of those same people now into government and being in positions of power in, in one of the most powerful countries in the world.
And then the other level where I think some of the long term game stuff comes in is that in president Trump's first election. So I think this was 2016. Peter Thiel was one of the most vocal backers of him in Silicon Valley. And he came out, he gave him a lot of money and he was very vocal about how he was advocating for Trump. And at the time, I think Silicon Valley politically was very different. It was a lot more liberal, at least openly liberal. And so at the time that was something he was lambasted for. And, you know, he was a bit of a pariah for that reason. He was in the news a lot. Because of that being vocal, going against the grain then. So it seemed like short term, this is a bad decision. You're losing out on opportunities. People are distancing themselves from you. All of these things are happening somehow in the period of, you know, four to eight years, a lot of that turns around. He stays the same, hasn't changed his position at all. In fact, in this election, he's now a lot less vocal. He didn't need to say that much. I don't know if he even gave that much money. I think he may have, but he wasn't that vocal, but everyone around him has now changed. And so now suddenly a lot of the other people in Silicon Valley are also quite conservative. A lot more people are coming out for Trump and suddenly, you know, the, the wave is carrying itself. And there's a sense in which he ends up being right long term and putting himself quite quietly without, he himself doesn't have a position, but all the people around him that he had built up and cultivated over the years have these positions.
And, you know, I think there are parts of this that connect to the book when I think about, you know, you wrote about maybe from a manager perspective of, okay, it's quite common that a manager might say, Hey, I'm too busy. I don't have time to invest in my mentees. I don't have time to invest in people. We've got too much to do. There's things at hand. There's things at stake. We've got yearly targets to hit. And it could be very easy just to optimize for here's what we need to do this year. And I think for someone in his position, maybe he didn't plan and orchestrate all of this out, but it is quite interesting that there are a lot of other things he could have optimized for. On a much shorter time horizon and it's very clear now in retrospect that he did not. And simply because he was playing this different game that was very difficult to see at first because, you know, by picking Trump in 2016, he got very close to Trump. Then it able to influence him to then pick a VP. The VP that he picks is also one of his mentees. Now that he's got two of the mentees in there the person that is another major backer of Trump in this election is the person that used to work for him and replace him as a CEO, which is Elon Musk. Elon musk also then helps to get in some other people like, David Sachs who also worked for him.
So again this idea that by not optimizing for the short term gains, where you could be popular, where you could make more money, where you could develop opportunities in different ways. Somehow, you end up being incredibly important in a way that no one quite anticipated.
Luca Dellanna: Yeah, there is a quote on this that I like very much from Nivi, the co founder of AngelList, where he said something along the lines of a lot of what looks like 3D chess is actually just keeping options open. And I like that very much because if you keep options open, not in the sense of never committing to anything, but simply about building long term, flexible, reusable assets, such as skills, relationships, and trust, automatically, there will be options that open up to you that you can get or that materialize thanks to this and to an external observer, it might look like it's a 3D chess. It's a master plan and so on. Whereas actually, it's just this idea of building skills, building relationships, building trust and letting that in a way playing out, not fully passively, but not necessarily in a super active way either.
David Elikwu: Yeah. Why do you think people find this so hard? Because there were a lot of situations just like this. Obviously, this is a very political example, but I use it because I think it's quite poignant of how it reflects in people's daily lives in much more innocuous ways. This idea that there are a lot of things that seem obvious in retrospect.
If you already know how things would play out, Oh, I should have been friends with that person, or. I should have cultivated this relationship better, I think even in my life, not necessarily in a nepotistic sense, but the idea that there may have been places that I worked at where I didn't make enough effort to cultivate deep and long lasting relationships where, you know, you might regret in retrospect and you say, Hey, I wish I kept in touch with this person. It would be great to have maintained this relationship, not specifically because you need something down the line, but simply because, you know, there's lots of compounding benefits to building these relationships. But I think maybe an easy response or an easy answer might be, if you know that this is possible, it's possible that simply by cultivating some optionality, simply by building trust and making good friends, that loads of options open up for you down the line, then why doesn't everyone do it? And perhaps you might say, well, actually what happens in real life is that a lot of the time people choose things that are convenient and people choose low hanging fruit of rewards. You know, I could back this person or support this person, but actually there's another opportunity that I could go for myself. You know, I might compete with them instead of trying to collaborate with them. I might prioritize my own career or my own chances of advancement over them you know, there's loads of ways that could play out. I wonder why somehow it consistently is the case that people don't prioritize the right things in that way.
Luca Dellanna: And I think that there are two components. One is the mistaken belief that if you get the most out of each day, you will also get the most out of the year, which is false. Before you mentioned managers, for example, if you're a manager and you want to maximize this week's output, it's relatively easy to do. You just cut on anything like, training, management, you cut on everything. You just spend the time doing, doing, doing, and you will maximize the week. However, you will hit a ceiling faster than a certain thing with the current skills, you will not be able to go. And therefore it means that you can only achieve that much over the year, and you will find that you cannot go beyond that.
And instead, the solution is to realize that if you want to go beyond a certain point, you need to start doing, spending part of your time doing things that have no immediate return but have the potential to change where you will be in a few years. So this is the first component. And then more specifically about relationships, I think that people overestimate how much of building relationships is about becoming friends with someone. As I'm talking about business relationships, like business relationships that open opportunities. And I think that instead, like, it's much more about a component, of course, of become acquainted with someone so that the other person knows that you exist. But then they also need to know that not only you are a person that they will grab a beer with gladly, but also that you are a person that can bring value and that they can trust that if they need you, they can call you and not only you will pick up the phone, but you will also be able to help them.
That part requires that you are not fully like in relationship building mode, but maybe you spend like, 80 percent of your time doing your own thing. Like, developing yourself, learning skills do getting good at your craft or at your job, and then a little bit of time networking so that other people get aware of you. But I think that the ratio is closer to 80 percent building value and 20 percent building relationships than other way around. And I can see that a lot, I'm thinking about my early twenties in the context, for example, of me and my friends trying to get girlfriends. Like, there was a moment in our stage of life where we all had this idea that the fastest way to get a girlfriend was to just go out every night in bars and so on, so that we could meet the highest number of girls.
However, that was not bringing much because we were not also spending time on ourselves, for example, I don't know, going to the gym, learning a few things, having a life that other people would be interested in joining in, and so on. And I think that the same applies a lot in business relationships.
So this idea that if you want to get the most relationships, you should only spend a little bit of time building the relationships and a lot of time building trust and skills.
David Elikwu: There's a number of things that I'd like to go off from there, but mainly where I'd start is going back to part of the definition that you gave of this idea that long term games, or at least the problem that a lot of people have, is that this assumption that making small gains each day. If you prioritize each day, then that is what's going to add up to a great year. The reason that you give is that the things that you optimize for in the short term are not necessarily the best things to optimize for in the longterm. And also the risk that you might take on in the short term on each given day is not the same optimal risk that you might take if you are planning for the longterm.
And even within that, there's a few things I'd love to get into, but where I thought I would ask is the question that, you know, there's also a popular framing of competence compounds. And you know, even I talk about that sometimes, this idea that, and I think James Clear popularized the little graph where it says, if you get 1 percent better each day, then you have a 37 times output by the end of the year. I'd love to know how you compare and contrast these two views. Are these competing or do they correlate?
Luca Dellanna: Well, take, the example of the 1 percent every year you get the 365 percent or what, whatever it is. That is only true if either you do the same thing and that's something that can infinitely scale. Which applies very little life. Or you're doing different things. So it's true that if you do 365 of small things, one each day, you will go very, very far over the year.
But some of the things you do in those days will be long term things. So need to be long term things. Things that have no effect today, but are necessary to grow beyond a certain point in the long run.
Let me make an example with going to the gym, for example. If I want to grow the most muscles this week, probably the solution has some component of, I go to the gym every day and I just spend the time working out, working out, working out. However, if I just do that, I will hit a plateau. Either because if I do the training plan of going every day for a year, I increase my chance of injury. Also, muscles need recovery to grow. And also, if I ask myself, if I go to the gym every day, But still didn't hit the target in one year. What could be the most likely reason?
The answer is probably something like, Oh, you probably were practicing with poor form. You didn't get good feedback from your coach. You were practicing the same exercises over and over, and you didn't try to develop a broader range of exercises. And these are things that, again, do not make sense if you want to maximize the week, but are necessary to go beyond a certain level over the year.
David Elikwu: I am interested to compare Two types of mindset maybe just going off what you were saying. So something I wrote about recently is this idea, the paradigm of like two months versus two years. You know, part of it touches on what you just said that on one hand, there were many things, a lot of timelines are basically false in a lot of workplaces, someone might ask, how long is this project going to take? The default answer is, Oh, maybe two months, right. And actually, if you sat down and think about it, If you just had a frame change in your mind and said, what if I only had two weeks, what would change? How would I update my beliefs. It's not to say that we might achieve the exact same, 100 percent version of the same thing in that time, but what constraints, if we change the constraints, what would we change to be able to do as much as possible? Can we hit 80 percent within that time? Then a lot would change, right? And then you can apply this to lots of areas of your life. You could say, for example, using the Gemini analogy, Oh, if I had Two years to get healthy. Then, you know, what might I do? Maybe that's not, not the best example, but there's loads of circumstances where you're working on a project, but you and I have written books. You've written books. I've just written a book now. But very often for people, they think, I want to write a book, maybe it's going to take four years. What if you just had one year? How would that have changed the way that you approach it? How would that change, you know, the way you structure your days, etc? And you might find, I think there's a famous quote from Warren Buffett, maybe that it's something along the lines of, you know, we underestimate what we can do in 10 years, but we overestimate what we can do in a day. And so it's this idea that actually you could accelerate a lot of these timelines. However, you know, in the two weeks versus two years framework that I mentioned, you could also flip that and then you could say, well, actually, there are a lot of things that we act as though we only have two weeks to do it. But what if you gave yourself two months? What if you gave yourself two years?
And the point is not to say that you should just stretch out the timeline infinitely. But actually to say, and I think this applies more easily to the gym example that I mentioned or to money or to a lot of things like this, if you are optimizing for how can I make as much money as possible in the next two weeks? You have to take a lot of risks because the timeline is so short. You have to then go and try and invest in some random cryptocurrency, or you have to look for some random bet that you could take. You might just put all the money on a horse racing game, or a football game, or something like this. But if you say, if I had two years, what can I do to guarantee that this outcome happens? And assume it's an achievable outcome, something that could have been achievable, maybe in an intermediate period.
So you could have done it in one year. But if you say, what can I do to guarantee with no shadow of a doubt that this happens in two years. Actually, maybe it's a much smaller thing. Suddenly I don't have to make this big bet. I could just invest a hundred pounds a week or a month or something like that.
And you know, the corollary to this, maybe in fitness might be, Oh, if I need to lose a lot of weight in the next two months, maybe I need to go on a crash diet, maybe I need to start drinking apple cider vinegar or AG1 or looking for whatever the latest hit thing is or Ozempic or something like this. But if I said, okay, but if I need to lose the same 10 pounds or however much, but over two years, what can I do to guarantee that I lose that money in that period of time? Suddenly, actually, you don't have to do very much. You could make a tiny tweak each day and say, Hey, actually, you know, as long as I go for, I do 10, 000 steps a day, or as long as I do a bit of this, over the course of two years, which is actually a very long time to lose a small amount of weight, but you just guarantee it happens. Because if you change your lifestyle in those small little ways, it's definitely going to happen, no shadow of a doubt.
And so it's interesting how your approach can change when you take these two different mindsets. I'd love to know, you know, how that resonates with you and what you think when you consider this in the context of, you know, playing long term games effectively.
Luca Dellanna: I think you nailed this, the spot when you mentioned both frameworks like, I think that both of these frameworks have a lot of explorative value. In the sense of, you have an objective. You both ask yourself, how can I achieve it in 30 percent of the time, for example, and how can I achieve it in three times as much of the time that will generate ideas. And then you pick the ones that make sense and probably it will be a mix, a mix of ideas.
In particular, for me, I like to think in terms of, because they are not mutually exclusive, so I like to think in terms of, I'm launching a book. So, of course, like, the focus is, for example, on planning the promotion for the next month, for the month in which I'm launching the book.
However, there is also the question of, if I gave myself four years to promote the book, and I didn't care about the sales that come during those four years? I just care about the sales that come after that. What would I do? That's a great question. And that could be, you get some things that you wouldn't do otherwise. For example, I don't know, distributing some copies for free to some influential groups participating to some events and so on.
And then, of course, you also want to ask yourself the other thing. So imagine that now I made this plan for promotion with imagining a budget of one month. What if I only had one week? Which parts are unnecessary and I will cut off? And if you apply both, both these frameworks, at the end you get with something which is much more effective both in the short term and in the long term.
David Elikwu: Sure. I love the, that, that first question in particular. It's very applicable to me having just written a book, but I think it is very interesting thinking
Luca Dellanna: And I just, I just want to build one second, one second on this because something that I reflect a lot on like, unfortunately, my family, like, uh, we faced a lot of well, let's say reminders that life is short. My father died when I was very young of cancer. I had cancer some years ago. Thankfully, everything is fine, cured and everything.
And so I always thought about the thing that I don't know what's my time horizon. Like, maybe I will die at 100 years old, maybe I will die at 60 years old, maybe I will die in two months. So how do I optimize my life? Which time horizon do I optimize for? And for me, the answer is, I don't optimize for a single time horizon. I do something that's optimal for each of the time horizons. So every week, I try to spend a little bit of time doing things which are optimal in case I died in a few months. And I also try to spend some part of my week doing things that are only optimal if I live until 90 or 100 years old. And I think that this is a great framework.
So imagine you're promoting the book. And so what I would do is, part of my time I spend doing it with things that only make sense if my book would be relevant for the next year. And part of my time I spend it only in the ways that make sense, only if I knew that my book will only become relevant in a few years, but will pick up for very long.
David Elikwu: Does the asymmetry of the potential outcome change the way that you should approach the risk? And what I mean when I say that I'm thinking of, very commonly in a startup perspective, people might say, look, if you're trying to build a startup and you're acting like, you have the next 10 years to build it and you can build it as slow as you like.
And sure, you might guarantee that you will eventually build a successful business, but actually, the market conditions will have changed sufficiently in that time because other people will be moving fast that you can end up, you know, you don't get to just do that in a linear way just by itself. It's not considered in isolation. You also have to consider the wider market circumstances. There are circumstances in which the delay that you take and the time that you take when you're considering your own timeline in isolation can actually be impacted by the timelines of other people and the extent to which others are working, you know, even when you think about it in a work context, you might say, actually, I don't want to get burnt out. I want to be able to maximize my sustainability in this role and in this career, but what happens when you have other people on your team that you might be competing with for a promotion and they are going the extra mile and they are working the extra hours and doing a lot of these things, because for them, they are thinking, Hey, I've got a baby on the way, I want to make sure that I can get this promotion in the next six months or in the next 12 months.
And so there's this sense in which actually, sometimes you can't just look at your own timeline in isolation. Sometimes the timelines of other people might force you to adjust or force you to consider making adjustments to the way that you plan for yourself.
Luca Dellanna: I think that it's very important what you mentioned, like the asymmetry of rewards. Like, let's take the example of startups or companies. You get two, basically, sides of the spectrum. On one side, there is the high reward of making it big. And on the other side, making it big, which probably requires also like, some long term investment. And then on the other side, you have the day to day pressure that you cannot fall behind too much compared to your competitors. And I think that part of the key is to understand that the best way to manage these two points is not in the middle, but it's alternating between them. It's a bit like, Nassim Taleb's barbell strategy.
So, Taleb puts the barbell in the context of investments. And he's saying that the strategy that is split between low risk, low return and high risk, high return produces better returns than a strategy that is medium risk, medium return. Why? Because the strategy that is medium risk, medium return has still considerable risks and doesn't bring enough of upside to compensate for those risks.
And the same applies with time horizons. If you have a medium time horizon, you will probably not do neither the short term things, nor the long term things which are necessary to really try and upscale.
And so I think that there is, there is a benefit to kind of like, instead of optimize, again, instead of optimizing for a single time frame, asking you both things. Part of the time you ask yourself, how can I get more now? And the other part of the time, what actions should I take right now, which bring no immediate benefit, but are necessary for sustained growth over time.
David Elikwu: Does this still apply depending on the type of system that you're in, for example, whether something's ergotic or non-ergotic. And I'm thinking of this specifically in the context of sometimes let's stick with companies and venture capital as an example. Venture capital is an industry that is specifically predicated on ergotic outcomes or non-ergotic outcomes.
The entire point is that most of your investments will not do well and not only do you believe that, but you have to cultivate that in your founders as well. They have to believe that, you know, 9 times out of 10, this is going to fail. And you have to work enough that you make sure this is the 1 out of 10 where it does do well. And obviously when you're the founder, the experience is different. You're pouring your entire soul into this one business. This is the shot. This is the thing you're going to spend the next 10 years working on from the venture capitalist perspective. It's completely different. And they're thinking, actually, I've invested in 50 companies. We just need one to have a billion dollar outcome. The rest, sadly, if they don't make it, you know, I will just write a letter to my LPs and say, sorry. Overall, we, we still maximize the money. Nobody writes a letter to their investors and say, Oh, we made you lots of money, but these other 49 companies didn't do well. Nobody really cares unfortunately.
But the reason I bring it up in that context is also this idea that because the entire system works like that is there an extent to which, it looks different to play long term games for the system versus the individual. And actually for the individual, you kind of have to play the game of the system to achieve the long term outcome.
So for example, let's say you have an employer at work and you're the employee. You want to do well, technically for you as the employee playing the longterm game for your career. May not be the same as playing the long term game for the company. The long term game for the company is we want this company to do well over the next 10 years, the long term game for your career is specifically optimizing for how much can I progress in my role, whether that's experience, whether that's salary, it could be a bunch of things. And perhaps, you know, as has become the common path for a lot of people these days, the best way for you to optimize for your long term career is actually, I'm only going to be here for three years and then I have to maximize what I do within the three years or within each year that I'm here to then be able to leverage that for another role, to then be able to get more experience or more seniority or something like this. And so there is a sense in which it can look like you're paying, you know, to play the long term game of eventually over 10 years, having the best outcome possible for your career in terms of money or in terms of seniority, it can look like playing the short term game in each of those years relative to the company, from the company's perspective, you're playing short time games because we are here to build for the future for this company for the next 10 years.
So this is kind of a flip of the venture capital thing where the founder is thinking I'm trying to build this business for the 10 years. But the industry is saying, actually, you know, we need you to build as quickly as possible for the next few years. So those are maybe slightly contrasting, but I think it reflects the same point where sometimes there's that misalignment. So I wanted to know what you think of that.
Luca Dellanna: There is definitely a misalignment. I'm not sure that I agree with the idea that if the individual maximizes their short term or career growth, they necessarily maximize their long term career growth. In the sense that I think that a lot of these is taken by survivorship bias in the sense that the people who tend to work very hard at maximizing the next two years of their career with the idea that then they will hop on another road in another company, for example, they also tend to work harder than the average person, let's say, and so the counterfactual would be what if they put the same work ethic and talent that they bring, but making some longer term strategies in a way.
But then again, I think that what you will realize is that especially at the net of survivorship bias, which is really the big thing here, I really think that it pays off to build trust, skills, and relationships, first of all, like, those are things that paradoxically, they even help more with finding the next job very often than just trying to maximize hitting the milestones at your current career, especially if you consider the time frames of more than one hop, let's say, because I know a lot of people who maximize the first job, they hop, and then they stall because they discover that the second company, they lack the skills and relationships to do well.
And then the other component is that, it's not a dichotomy, like it's not, either I do what's best for the long term of my company or I maximize hitting my personal advancement for the next with the idea that then I can, I can hop to the next job from a better position. These only applies if you ended up working for a bad company.
Because if you ended up working for a good company, most probably, the two are much more aligned. and of course it's probably the optimal point is not 100 percent on I do the best for my company, for the long term of my company, but probably it's something where you discover that if you 80 percent do the best for the long term of your company, you also 80% do the best for you and people will notice that you are doing both and you will find yourself at a very valuable intersection when there are a few people and that probably will be excellent for your long term career. People will notice.
David Elikwu: Thank you so much for tuning in. Please do stay tuned for more. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps the podcast and follow me on Twitter feel free to shoot me any thoughts. See you next time
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