If you got to the position of your bosses boss, would you be happy?

If you got to choose your job, would you choose the path of highest average gain with medium risk or highest possible gain with maximum risk?

Just as anybody who dedicates their life to music has at one point imagined themself as an international rockstar, anybody who willfully dedicates their life to the Internet has at one point imagined themselves being beyond a boss; being part of something magical.

Which websites represent the rockstars we aspire to be? You already know what they are, because they all reached a level where they registered resoundingly in the national consciousness, and there’s one every 18 months or so in accordance with Moore’s law.

Chronologically they are Yahoo, Google, Amazon, eBay, Myspace, Netflix, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter.

So you’re saying there’s a chance.

There are a few patterns uniting this batch of sites.

1. None of them solved an existing problem. Instead, they all created entirely novel experiences.

If your focus is on fixing a problem, you’ve given yourself a ceiling that’s too low.

2. None of them were carried by a brilliant or unique idea. Instead, they were all solid ideas that hundreds or thousands of people may have had concurrently — but only one team executed and executed well enough to be a leader.

If you’re focused on concept over execution, you’ll be sitting on a barstool lamenting the fact that someone else took “your” idea.

3. None of them were started by a lone individual.

If you’re not actively surrounding yourself with people who inspire and challenge you, it’s going to take you decades to catch up.

4. None of them were a first venture.

Overnight successes were underground for decades. The great ones have always had a sort of urgent patience, like stubborn turtles.

5. None of them were started with financial profit as the primary motivation (despite some having fantastic business models).

If the money’s anything more than a bonus of your endeavor, you’ve already lost.

What was all that one in a million talk??

If you’re going to pursue the Grail, you can’t be reliant on praise or encouragement from others. You’re going to have to discount 90% of what anyone not pursuing the same Grail says to you.

Most people, including your parents, will laugh in your face if you tell them that you’re going to make the next Facebook. “A few get lucky; for every one that succeeds theres a million that fail.”

Here’s the thing about other people’s advice though: no-one believes in you. When you yourself can’t even articulate what it is you know you’re capable of, no-one is going to make that assumption on your behalf.

Do you think Steven Tyler’s mom or dad looked at him when he was 15 and said “Son put down those books, you were born to be a rock star. Here’s a guitar and a bottle of whiskey, now get in your room and make some f*cking rock and roll”. No.

If you have a special gift, you also have a special burden of needing that gift to emerge and manifest itself and a special constraint of not being able to follow any of the paths cleared for you by friends and family.

Shoot for the moon and land on the damn moon.

The benefits of owning, creating, or otherwise being associated with a Grail site are obvious to any casual observer. Rich and famous, right? Wrong. Those are the symptoms, but not the disease.

There is a higher good than money or fame: glory.

As Gary and AJ put it, “Legacy > Currency”. As Lil Wayne put it, “I don’t want the glow, I want the glo-ry”. As Drake put it “It’s funny when you coming in first, but you hope, that you last/you just hope, that it lasts”.

Chris Rock originated a wildly accurate phrase that says you always lose money chasing women but never lose women chasing money. It goes up another level. You always lose glory chasing money, but you never lose money chasing glory.

75% of the time, you’re screwed anyway.

An abstraction of any challenge that can always embolden you is that you only control at most half of the variables. All you can control is your preparation and belief. It looks like this:

To some this chart is daunting — to me it’s freeing. You’re probably screwed anyway. Might as well try.

I gotta get back to work but…thoughts?

I then sat there and took a look outside of myself. I saw an individual who was under an extreme amount of pressure and had very little time to work with. I thought to myself, “AJ, you like to think of yourself as someone who responds well to pressure, well now is a great time to prove it.” So again, my mind raced – what was I going to blog about?

Then it hit me. The actual topic of being under pressure is something that has always interested me, and the concept of “live blogging” a situation in which I was under pressure would be something worth reading. I promise this post is not going to be edited, that’s why the grammar is off and the thoughts are so scattered. Another factor playing into this blog post is the fact that I am constantly being pinged on AOL instant messenger and having co-workers approach my desk asking if I have a second… I am respectfully passing in order to complete this post. Then again, these distractions are in fact helping me write this post.

One factor that I find interesting is that I no longer feel stressed. I have a good 5 minutes left to work on this post and I feel like I have already provided something worth reading. My curiosity is peaking at this point. I wonder what others would have done with 13 minute time frame and pressure to get a post out. There are a lot of different options and I wonder if “resorting” to one option or another truly represents the way you handle pressure in general. Is the fact that I am “live blogging” a situation in which I truly made a mistake a cop out? Is it something creative? Is it something lazy? Is it something that was in fact harder than merely coming up with a topic and writing a quick post about? Maybe it doesn’t matter at all. Maybe I just took the time I had, came up with an idea and put out a piece of content the most won’t read. Or maybe it does matter, and this blog post will be read by a large group of people.

Again I apologize for the lack of structure, and time put into this post. Also for reference, the image associated with this post was one of the first things I found via google images when I typed in pressure.

And…. posted, with a minute to spare.