The Long Game 161: Executive Physicals, Self-Help Paradox, Strategic Cope, Go Big or Go Small, Founding Sales
🚰 Water Quality, Documenting Everything, Friendship, Attractiveness & Confidence, Downfall of Modern Podcast, Grip, Building, and Much More!
Hi there, it’s Mehdi Yacoubi, and this is The Long Game Newsletter. To receive it in your inbox, subscribe here:
Friends, long time no see! Thanks to Substack’s recommendation feature, we’re welcoming hundreds of new readers since the last episode. I was busy with other areas of my life (more on that at some point) and not in the right type of content diet to keep shipping The Long Game as I wanted to, so I took a long pause to come back with more inspiration.
In this episode, we explore:
Executive physicals
The self-help paradox
Strategic cope
Going big or going small
Water quality
Let’s dive in!
🥑 Health
💼 The Executive Physical
I’ve been fascinated by this topic of executive physicals. This is a great write-up on how it goes in the US.
My first visit began with an hour-long meet-and-greet in a room that felt more Amangiri than medical facility, and my doctor had all the time in the world for even my smallest worry, pausing every now and then to engage in small talk unheard of in normal medicine. The more embarrassing parts of a medical visit — the head turning, the coughing — were orchestrated behind a series of sheets. When they needed a urine sample, the request came delicately, in veiled euphemism. Could I “rest” in a private waiting area featuring piped in ocean sounds, until “nature called”? I could deliver my urine discreetly to a dropbox, so no one would know about my bodily functions.
The three days were a blur. I went through comprehensive blood work, full chest imaging, a treadmill test that included a DIY chest waxing experience I’ve yet to recover from, a full ultrasound exam of my vascular system, a hearing test (my hearing, perfect, except for my girlfriend's voice range, a result they offered to print and send home with me), a sports medicine consult that promised to fix my tight hamstrings, an eye exam, a secondary cardiac exam, and countless other check-ups. These appointments were offered alongside a battery of not-so-medical services: massages, nutritionists, haircuts, personal training, and even cosmetic surgery. My requests for certain “lifestyle” drugs, including semaglutide, were firmly denied.
Each appointment was unrushed, but began precisely on time. Any concern I had was addressed same-day, not months later as is common with specialist appointments. The lounge and its constant flow of snacks, refreshments, and strange company made it all too easy to lose track of time. One day, in conversation with the general contracting king of eastern Oklahoma over some non-alcoholic beers, I missed multiple appointments. They were promptly rescheduled.
Despite the rumors I’d heard, the operation wasn’t a backdoor pharmacy for off-label medications or off-shore bloodboys. It was just diligent and exhaustive care. It was everything we should want out of the medical industry. But in the favela of American medicine, it also felt like everything we can’t have.
Pair with: Vitalism
If you’re interested in longevity and extending human lifespan, you’re going to love what my friends at Vitalism are building.
🌱 Wellness
🍂 The Self-Help Paradox
This piece correctly describes what’s increasingly wrong with the culture of self-help and personal optimization.
Many of the goals and processes which are top-of-mind in society have only flourished because they were allowed to grow in a soil which was rich already in self-doubt, feelings of inadequacy, and low self-esteem.
Along comes somebody successful who tells us we need to work one hundred hours a week, setting up our own business, in order to become rich and successful, and who are we to say otherwise? Even better, we now have a pathway to follow, something which gives hope and a sense of trajectory.
Similarly, this exists in our personal lives, where we are sold the idea that working out 7 days a week, getting big muscles or stretchy hamstrings will give us the body which our would-be dream partner craves. Therefore, we must be productive in order to live up to this deal.
These goals, although sounding realistic and positive, can come with insidious baggage when given free-reign, especially in the developing mind.
As I started to pay attention, I noticed that most people I admire around me are not obsessed with self-help and optimization and manage to have more flexibility in their lives.
Here, Amjad suggests there is something called the total stress load. From personal experience, I’m inclined to think this is real.
Pair with: The case against morning yoga, daily routines, and endless meetings
🧠 Better Thinking
🗯 Strategic Cope
I read this banger from Du in January and kept thinking about it since then.
One of the most powerful skills is the strategic cope. Being able to believe whatever you want, whenever you want, with conscious intention
In times of struggle, you tell yourself that this is what it's all about. Obsessing over doing the hard things. Embracing discomfort. Value leisure and you're never making it out
Then you inevitably hypnotize yourself out of the trenches and the switch turns off. You're happy now so struggle is cringe. Yeah the cold plunge thing was cool while it lasted but I'm over it. Life is too short to not enjoy
Identity is seasonal. Can literally just lean into any perspective and it suddenly becomes real. The less seriously you take yourself, the more fun you can have with it all
A general theme of personal study I’m interested in these days is all the mindset manipulations necessary to weather the ups and downs of building a business. That’s one of the main reasons I think biographies are really the best thing to read.
It’s way more important to understand how someone you admire managed to get themselves out of a rut rather than understanding the latest trendy business concept.
Talking of biographies, I’ve stopped listening to nearly all podcasts except for Founders. Here are my favorites:
Dyson
Brunello Cucinelli
Sam Walton
Larry Ellison
Estée Lauder
Ed Thorp
I pay particular attention to those who managed to build great things while also building a great family (this is a small percentage of the episodes list, but there are a few notable exceptions that could inspire you!)
Nothing has ever worked more to combat emotional pain for me than simply knowing others have gone through similar
At my worst, the mere act of reading Reddit threads was able to envelope me with the calmness necessary to clear my mind enough to think of a plan
The solution was never found in a list of steps, rather just the feeling of relatability. All I needed was to be aware of someone else's misery and know that I wasn't alone. The path forward always appeared on its own thereafter
Pair with: Humans are not automatically strategic (h/t
)But there are clearly also heuristics that would be useful to goal-achievement (or that would be part of what it means to “have goals” at all) that we do not automatically carry out. We do not automatically:
(a) Ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve;
(b) Ask ourselves how we could tell if we achieved it (“what does it look like to be a good comedian?”) and how we can track progress;
(c) Find ourselves strongly, intrinsically curious about information that would help us achieve our goal;
(d) Gather that information (e.g., by asking as how folks commonly achieve our goal, or similar goals, or by tallying which strategies have and haven’t worked for us in the past);
(e) Systematically test many different conjectures for how to achieve the goals, including methods that aren’t habitual for us, while tracking which ones do and don’t work;
(f) Focus most of the energy that *isn’t* going into systematic exploration, on the methods that work best;
(g) Make sure that our "goal" is really our goal, that we coherently want it and are not constrained by fears or by uncertainty as to whether it is worth the effort, and that we have thought through any questions and decisions in advance so they won't continually sap our energies;
(h) Use environmental cues and social contexts to bolster our motivation, so we can keep working effectively in the face of intermittent frustrations, or temptations based in hyperbolic discounting;
.... or carry out any number of other useful techniques. Instead, we mostly just do things. We act from habit; we act from impulse or convenience when primed by the activities in front of us; we remember our goal and choose an action that feels associated with our goal. We do any number of things. But we do not systematically choose the narrow sets of actions that would effectively optimize for our claimed goals, or for any other goals.
⚡️ Startup Stuff
🛣 Go Big or Go Small
I found this piece from Mike Karnjanaprakorn very interesting. It mirrors a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about for the last few months.
Founders often ask me where they should go big or small as they navigate the idea maze. As with many things in life, the answer depends on your risk tolerance, lifestyle preference, and personal goals.
If you choose to go big and aim for a billion-dollar company, you’re signing up for a high-risk, high-reward journey. You’re competing in the ‘business Olympics’ against the smartest, most well-funded, and most ambitious teams in the world.
Success rates are low (less than 2.5% if you’ve raised a seed round), equating to roughly a 1 in 40 chance. These are not bad odds if you can repeat this 40 times in your lifetime, but considering each startup takes about 5-10 years to build, this is unlikely, and you might end up with nothing.
On the other hand, if you choose to go small, you might enjoy a slower, more predictable, and balanced path. This path can be better for those who value stability. The success rate is higher (let’s say it’s 50% for a straightforward cash-flowing business), though the upside is limited (let’s say it’s $10M if you’re in the top 10%).
I wrestle with this question myself, and looking back, I would have opted for a smaller company in my 20s to accelerate my growth as a founder. This path would have taught me about building products, recruiting talent, marketing, finance, and all the other company-building skills.
With some luck, I might have even become a millionaire. If so, I would have banked that money and then went big. It sounds counterintuitive, but having a financial safety net can enable you to take more risks, reduce stress, and make long-term decisions.
Don’t get me wrong; I learned a lot from working at an early-stage startup, but it didn’t teach me much about being a founder and entrepreneur. In my experience, there are aspects of being a founder that can only be learned by being in the trenches and doing it. No amount of articles or blog posts or tweets you read will ever replace this experience.
At the end of the day, the decision between going big or going small is a personal one. It should be made based on your preferences, ambitions, and desired lifestyle. There’s no wrong answer.
Regardless of the path you choose, luck plays a significant role but to increase your odds of success, I find this advice from Suhail very useful:
“Startups are a whole lot of luck but how hard you work, who you know, your taste, your ability to hire talented people, your perseverance, your area of genius, your urgency, your capability to accept painful moments reduce the luck to something more deterministic.” — @ Suhail
And who knows, the small thing you’re building can turn into something massive. Or, you completely miss your moonshot which paves the way for your next big thing. Life is funny in that way.
📚 What I Read
📈 Founding Sales: The Early Stage Go-to-Market Handbook
I picked up this book to learn more about sales as an early-stage founder.
PUT ACTIVITY ABOVE ALL ELSE
Everyone’s a fan of working “smarter, not harder” in the modern knowledge-worker economy. Well, sometimes you just have to grind. Sales, like recruiting, is all about activity and leverage. Generally speaking, activity in equals value out. There are certainly ways to ensure that your activity is high quality; you can also lever it with technology to get more in less time, and higher impact out of each unit of activity. We’ll dig into that more later. But to quote Joseph Stalin (likely apocryphally), “quantity has a quality all its own,” and internalizing that is key.
More time on the phone. More demos. More proposals sent. More emails sent. More dials. More keystrokes. All of the above is activity, and activity is the goal.
This is often in direct contravention to typical notions of “quality” work. Thinking deeply about the perfect response to that email. Spending five minutes to game out a call before you make it. Reading, and rereading, that email to understand every nuance. “Studying up” on the materials to make sure that your pitch is perfect.
No more. Just as you need to shift your mindset from scarcity to plenty, the reality is that in order to move opportunities down the pipeline and close deals, activity is job one. Jump first, prepare midair. Template all communication. Drive activity, and output will follow.
📝 You Don't Need To Document Everything
“Stop selling your life off so cheaply to strangers”
Influencers are of course the most extreme examples—but this impulse is so ingrained in everyone now. This pressure to post everything. And I think it’s a massive cause of anxiety for Gen Z. There’s a sense now that something didn’t happen if you don’t share it. There are young people who wouldn’t understand going to an event, travelling somewhere, being in a relationship, if they couldn’t post about it. They would not see the point. They simply cannot conceive of a life that exists without an audience consuming it. Like, for example, the popular belief now that if your boyfriend doesn’t post photos of you he’s cheating or doesn’t really love you. Or it’s a red flag if you meet someone and they aren’t on social media (just me who thinks this is a major green flag?)
On this note, I’m strongly in favor of banning smartphone usage in schools.
🤝 Friendship and Social Fitness
“It is nearly impossible to be happy without friends”
One lesson here is preventive — don’t let your friends become strangers. The more time that passes between conversations, the more they become an unfamiliar person.
This is important for a society that is growing increasingly concerned about loneliness and friendlessness. Some even suggest that we are in a “friendship recession,” with 20 percent of single men now saying they don’t have any close friends. It’s not just men, though. A 2019 survey found that 30 percent of millennials of both sexes said they are always or often lonely, and 27 percent said they have no close friends.
Gen Z doesn’t look much different and might even be in a worse position. In her 2023 book “Generations,” the psychologist Jean Twenge points out that from the 1970s into the 2000s, teenagers spent about two hours per day with friends. By 2019, this had dropped to just one hour per day. In the 1970s, more than half of 12th graders got together with their friends almost every day. By 2019, only 28 percent did.
🛠 So you wanna de-bog yourself
“What I found in the mire”
The mediocrity trap
About half of my friends kind of hate their jobs, so they're moderately unhappy most of the time, but never unhappy enough to leave. This is the mediocrity trap: situations that are bad-but-not-too-bad keep you forever in their orbit because they never inspire the frustration it takes to achieve escape velocity.
The mediocrity trap is a nasty way to end up in the bog. Terrible situations, once exited, often become funny stories or proud memories. Mediocre situations, long languished in, simply become Lost Years—boring to both live through and talk about, like you're sitting in a waiting room with no cell reception, no wifi, and no good magazines, waiting for someone to come in and tell you it's time to start living.
(I have previously written about this phenomenon as an underrated idea in psychology.)
🔨 What I'm building next
A friend of mine is thinking of leaving his corporate job and starting a company. I sent him this great piece by Andrew Rea.
What being “ready” looked like for me
Financial savings – Over the previous year I had saved ~18 months of personal financial runway. (there were no trust funds involved in the making of this company or blog post)
Health – Physically, I was coming off multiple long distance races, lifting weights regularly, and generally felt like my body and mind were in the best shape they’d ever been in.
Skills – I had picked up enough skills in my past few roles that I felt generally capable of taking something from zero to one. (or at least not completely useless)
Judgment – My taste in picking opportunities worth working on had significantly improved since I first started working in tech / startups. IMO, this is an underrated facet of careers and entrepreneurship.
Confidence – I’ve long struggled with imposter’s syndrome. Feeling like I didn’t belong in the room. Like I was fooling everyone. Etc. The things that most of us have faced at one point or another. While that wasn’t gone, I had a genuine belief in myself that hadn’t existed before.
Side note – Being around and working with people you think are better than you day-in-day out is the best way to fix this. It teaches you that the people you put on pedestals are human too.
🍭 Brain Food
💅 Hot at the top: The influence of self-rated attractiveness on self-perceived status
Interestingly, good looks make people feel socially superior:
Multiple studies have documented that physically attractive individuals enjoy a wide array of favorable life outcomes. However, most prior research has focused on third-person assessments of a target's attractiveness and the target's likelihood of receiving social or economic benefits. Our research sought to examine how first-person perspectives of physical attractiveness predict self-inferred social status.
Across a pilot test, a correlational study, and a between-subjects experiment, we found consistent support for our main hypothesis that self-rated physical attractiveness positively predicts higher self-inferred social status. We also found exploratory evidence that this association is mediated by self-perceived social likeability. As such, our findings suggest that people who believe they are more (vs. less) physically attractive also believe that they are more well-received in social settings, which in turn gives them a sense of higher social status.
Notably, the effect of manipulated attractiveness on self-inferred social status extended to a more objective metric, one's estimated annual income, as demonstrated experimentally in our final study. This unexpected finding has several possible explanations, each with important implications for future research.
First, it suggests the possibility of failed randomization across the attractiveness conditions. This, however, is unlikely because further analysis suggests no effect of manipulated attractiveness on other demographic factors such as gender or age. Moreover, the execution of the data collection was set to randomly assign participants to conditions online. Nevertheless, this finding deserves further research to tease out the effects of manipulated attractiveness on subjective versus objective income. We suggest that readers interpret the results of Study 2 with caution.
Second, our attractiveness manipulation may not only have inflated participants’ subjective perceptions of their social status, but it could have also prompted dishonest, self-enhancing reporting on ostensibly objective measures.
🎥 What I’m Watching
📉 The Downfall Of Modern Podcasts
Couldn’t quite put my finger on why I fell out of love with podcasts but this video exposed it perfectly. I used to love the idea of two people sitting down and having conversations about their passions and sharing ideas but something changed within the past two years.
🤌 The Ultimate Grip Strength Guide!
I’ve been geeking over grip training lately. This is a great video if you want to get started.
Bonus: if you want to explore more underrated muscles, try neck training.
🔧 The Tool of the Week
🚰 Do you know what's in your water?
We hear about microplastics, and water contaminations all the time these days, and rightfully so. Ever wondered how the bottles of water you’re usually consuming rank against what’s on the market? This is a great website to see what you’re drinking, and potentially make the adequate swaps.
Pair with: Rapid single-particle chemical imaging of nanoplastics by SRS microscopy
🪐 Quote I’m Pondering
“Hard work never killed a man. Men die of boredom, psychological conflict, and disease. They do not die of hard work.”
— David Ogilvy
👋 EndNote
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Until next time,
Mehdi Yacoubi
Thanks many links in here that got me pondering on new ideas. I appreciate you 🙏