Rockternal

Be serious about what you do. But never take yourself seriously. In mid-May, I posted about wokeism. Over 100 million views. Picked up by a ton of media outlets. And right after, Elon Musk and Javier Milei followed me. I'm not telling you this to flex. I'm telling you because it made me look at these two much more closely. And the more I watch them, the more convinced I am that they embody exactly what entrepreneurs will have to become. First, they don't take status seriously. Elon posts memes at 2am between rocket launches. Milei campaigned with a chainsaw. You can find that ridiculous. I find it deeply healthy. Because I'm so done with guys who, after a bit of business success, give themselves an air of importance that Elon doesn't have 1% of. The grave tone. The persona. The distance. As if a fundraise or an exit turned them into sages. Second, they're driven purely by infinite-sum games. A finite-sum game is a fixed-size pie: whatever you win, someone else loses. An infinite-sum game is one where the goal is to grow the pie and keep playing. And here's what I've come to understand: in finite-sum ecosystems, people almost always end up behaving badly. Not because they're bad people. Because the structure of the game pushes them there. When the pie doesn't grow, the only way to move forward is to take someone else's slice. Office politics, rent-seeking, backstabbing, envy. This is exactly what Peter Thiel understood when he wrote "Competition is for losers." It's not a VC punchline. It's a thesis about human nature. Thiel had René Girard as a mentor at Stanford, and Girard spent his life showing one thing: we desire what others desire. Mimetic desire. And when everyone wants the same thing in a limited space, rivalry turns destructive. Competitors become so obsessed with each other that they forget what they were supposed to build. Thiel's lesson: don't fight over the same pie as everyone else. Create a pie that didn't exist. And I believe that in the age of abundance that's coming, with AI, energy, robotics, this is precisely what will redefine capitalism. We're moving from a capitalism of capture to a capitalism of creation. Those who play finite games will tear each other apart over crumbs. Those who play infinite games will build what comes next. Elon doesn't take market share, he creates markets. Milei is trying to do the same thing at the scale of a country: pull Argentina out of a logic where people fight to divide up scarcity, and put it back into a game where wealth gets created. I deeply admire them both. And I think these two qualities are connected. Not taking yourself seriously isn't just a nice personality trait. It's a competitive advantage. It's what lets you keep learning. Because the day you start taking yourself seriously, you have a persona to protect. And when you have a persona to protect, you're afraid of being wrong, afraid of looking stupid, afraid of asking the naive question. You stop listening. And you stop learning. Status is a finite game: there's only one spot at the top, and everyone's fighting for it. Learning is an infinite game. Be serious about what you do. Never take yourself seriously.