One Seed, A Thousand Possibilities

Every idea is a seed that needs to be nurtured. As you can tell, everything grows or dies, and everything is interesting and has the capacity to become a forest, an entire ecosystem, an industry with a multitude of lives depending on it. This is why it is necessary to have a very long-term outlook on things, so you don’t quit.

Everything in this life has value and immense potential in it. It starts becoming, growing, flourishing, and then births something entirely new, which becomes a base, an infrastructure for a new thing as well. So you have to nurture things and give them the attention they deserve.

To list a few of these kinds of ideas that have become entire industries: computers, burgers, cars, planes and information theory.

This is why it’s important to drill down on one idea and stay long enough on it. You don’t need many ideas and blessings; you only need one, like Esau. Then you need to cultivate that one to exhaust all the possibilities it contains.

Dietrich Mateschitz exhausted just one sports drink, Red Bull. Nike exhausted running. Apple exhausted personal computing. Oracle exhausted databases. OpenAI exhausted the “Attention Is All You Need” paper. Anthropic exhausted developmental AI. Nvidia exhausted GPUs. Tesla is exhausting electric cars. Alexander the Great exhausted conquering Persia. Ray Kroc exhausted burgers. Jeff Bezos exhausted buying on the internet. AWS exhausted creation, the book. Sam Walton exhausted retailing. John Paul Getty exhausted oil. MrBeast is exhausting adventure + YouTube. David Attenborough exhausted nature’s fascination. You get the point by now.
What this means is that there are immense possibilities in an idea. It is those who stay and cultivate it who have the capacity to exhaust it. This is why it is important to stay with one thing. Spend long enough to convert the seed into a forest.

Some ideas on achieving this:

First, you must have a long-term vision. Jeff Bezos was thinking of Amazon 20 years from when he started. That is crazy. When I listen to Steve Jobs, it is almost like this guy was ahead of his time. So a long outlook is very important to make you stay.
Avoid all distractions. When you have a long-term outlook, you realize lots of things are distractions, including good things. John Paul Getty wrote about the wildcatters. They were also in the business like him, but they went for just good and not great. Having a long outlook helps you ignore useless competition.
It would help if you developed an immense passion for this seed, because that is what will keep you going. As you know, the beginning of an idea is filled with motivation, but after a while, motivation wears out. That is where the work actually begins. If you love it, you will take the pain, do sleepless nights, study, and work 12–16 hours nonstop like Michelangelo, Steve Jobs, or Sam Walton. Fall in love with the problem so that you are in love with the work. Remember Napoleon. This guy just kept working. You have to find that thing that will make you take pain, all to produce excellence, and just do it.
The long-term view makes you develop patience. The man who treats the seed as a forest is patient. He is not bothered by today’s weather or the year’s climate. He has immense active patience with life. Such is the patience you must develop. Dietrich Mateschitz ran Red Bull for 15 years before it started paying dividends. MrBeast ran YouTube for eight years. Arnold Schwarzenegger was training for years and years before he even appeared. You see this also from Sam Walton or Jim Sinegal. It took Julius Caesar over 50 years before he became number one in Rome.