Smoothies and Printers

One of the clearest signs of who is going to make it is ownership. You can tell immediately from a simple conversation who is high ownership and who isn't.

High ownership people take responsibility. No matter if it's their personal life, their work, etc. -- they express things through the lens of what they could've done better. Because those who take responsibility for their actions ultimately take responsibility for their outcomes. It's not only incredibly valuable, but also incredibly rare.

There's a great talk from Keith Rabois on How To Operate. He articulates this idea by classifying people as either barrels or ammunition. A barrel is defined by someone who can take an idea all the way from start to finish. In his talk, he uses this example about trying to get smoothies to engineers at night.

I was frustrated, our engineers were working really hard, and maybe 20%, 30% would stay late in the evening and we had already served them dinner but I wanted to give them something cool to reward them. But nobody could get smoothies to show up in my office at nine o'clock sharp, that were cold, that tasted good, and that were delivered in the right place that the engineers would find them. You would think this is simple but in fact it took two months to get this done. So we had an intern start, and I think on his second day I was explaining this problem, and he said, well I will do it. And I was looking at him like there was no way. I have seen my office manager fail, my assistant fail, who were actually pretty good. This just isn't going to happen. And low and behold they show up. On time, cold, delivered at the right place, and my first instinct was great. Nothing about the smoothies, but now I can actually give him something more important that is more complicated to do.

What I love about this example is that it shows that real ownership is not only for big tasks. It can be for something as simple as getting smoothies delivered. Ownership is a mindset that is applicable for everything, big and small.

There's another example I love from Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital. In a now unfortunately deleted Pandomonthly interview, he describes an intern tasked with getting a new printer.

So the intern gets on the task, and the next day a printer shows up at the office. Everyone assumes it's over. But then 30 days later, some people show up and take the printer away. Later, another set of people come and wheel in a new printer. Josh asks the intern what's going on, and the intern says they discovered that printers had 30 day trials. And so they contacted over a dozen office shops and built a rotation where they could get a new printer every month and be set for the whole year without paying for anything.

Obviously this isn't the best use of money or time, and so they ultimately just bought the printer. But again what is amazing and emblematic of an ownership mindset is to understand the problem at the core, including both the stated and unstated goals.

The job is not only to get a great printer (stated), but also at the best price (unstated). And so someone who can deeply understand not only the job, but the context, the business, etc and then not only infer the unstated goals but then also execute on them is incredibly valuable.

Now the inverse of ownership is excuses. You can always tell who isn't going to make it by how many excuses they have. Something is always somebody else's fault, there was always some external factor that led things a certain way, etc. They often take ownership in what went well, but then the things that didn't go well was someone else's fault.

Even outside of a conversation, you can also generally tell who is full of excuses by the decisions, outcomes, and actions they've taken. Generally people full of excuses have a slew of failures, bad relationships, and a trail of destruction behind them. And while this isn't always emblematic of an excuse driven mindset, it is closely related.

And so learn to take ownership. Unintended things happen all the time. But some people deal with them and succeed in spite of them, and others blame them. Don't be the latter.