My First Million
The best business ideas come from noticing what's working and doing it better, faster, or for a different audience.
High Effort Low Opportunity Trap
Situation where extremely capable entrepreneurs (10/10 talent) apply themselves to mediocre market opportunities (4/10), resulting in suboptimal returns despite high effort and skill.
Decision Rule
Evaluate opportunity quality separately from execution capability. Even perfect execution of poor opportunities yields mediocre results. Better to find better opportunities than work harder on bad ones.
How It Works
Talented people can succeed at almost anything, making it hard to distinguish between good and great opportunities. Success in poor opportunities creates false confidence and opportunity cost of not pursuing better options.
Failure Modes
Staying too long in comfortable but limited opportunities
Mistaking execution success for opportunity validation
Not regularly re-evaluating opportunity size
Letting sunk costs prevent pivoting to better opportunities
Example Decision
“Emerson Spartz was clearly talented (built successful site at 12, viral content empire) but viral media was arguably a limited opportunity. Recognition of this mismatch led to pivot toward AI safety work with potentially unlimited upside.”