The cheap part is execution

Everyone thinks execution is the hard part. It's not. Picking what to execute is.

Every founder I know who's been at it for more than a few years eventually lands on the same reluctant conclusion: the execution was never the hard part.

The hard part was picking the right thing to execute on.

Why this is counterintuitive

In the moment, execution always feels hard. The product is broken, the hire quit, the campaign is bleeding, the investor passed. Every day is a grind.

But the grind is trackable. The steps are known. You ship, you measure, you iterate. Hard work, but the process is clear.

Picking the right thing is the opposite. There's no process. You're trying to decide between options whose outcomes you can't know in advance. And unlike execution, nobody can do it for you.

The decision spike

Most people I know who've built successful things have a similar trajectory: a long period of average progress, then a decision point, then a sharp rise. The average progress is execution. The sharp rise isn't, it's the compound effect of picking something with actual leverage.

If you look only at the sharp rise, you see extraordinary execution. If you look at the decision point, you see a different story entirely.

What this changes

Once I accepted this, I started spending more time on decisions and less on execution. Not because execution doesn't matter, it does, but because my execution was already pretty good, and my decision-making was pretty bad.

For most ambitious people, this is the asymmetry. You've been rewarded your whole life for good execution. You're good at it. It feels productive.

But it's the cheap part.