Stop Being an Entrepreneur. Start Being a Survivor.

Disclaimer

What I'm NOT saying: I'm not saying war is good, or you need to live in a warrior mindset, per se. The point of this line of thinking is to deliver a sense of urgency, immediacy, intentionality, intensity, and appreciation for approaching goals in a structured way, versus not at all, or simplistically like with an Eisenhower matrix. I aim to provide a framework for achieving consistent strategic thinking, which is otherwise hard to achieve. I aim to put in the forefront what actually jeopardizes goals (in short: lack of attention to threats), and shy away from innate qualities that most attribute successful goal completion to (in short: generational intelligence or prescience).

This is a framework for both avoiding pitfalls and being successful in the long term. It's not against the concept of "trusting the process", which I would argue is sometimes all you can do when you're out of options. Though, I do try to set you up to avoid cases where you have no options, where you really do have little choice but to trust the process.

Introduction

This is my blog in which I mainly discuss two things: strategy and how things work. And right now I want to talk about the single most important shift you can make in how you think about what you're doing with your life.

Throw out the notions of entrepreneurship, work, and offices. All of them. Replace them with survival, strategizing, and war rooms. Not an office -- a war room. Not a business plan -- a battle plan. Not a team -- allies. Not a product roadmap -- a map of every threat vector and every opportunity to take ground.

This isn't metaphor. This is the most honest framing of what you're actually doing when you try to build something in this world. You are trying to survive and take resources in an environment full of other people trying to do the same. The sooner you name it, the sooner you start making decisions that actually protect you.

I know how that sounds. But hear me out, because this shift isn't about becoming paranoid or cynical. It's about waking up to a way of thinking that is more useful, more honest, and more strategically powerful than anything the "entrepreneur" mindset will ever give you.

What Changes When You Think in Terms of Survival

When you think in terms of survival, you don't evaluate an opportunity by asking "how much can I make?" You evaluate it by asking "how many ways can this kill me?" You stop treating risk as a line item and start treating it as the thing that determines whether you stay on the board. You become hungry to figure out how everything works -- not out of curiosity, but out of necessity.

Here's a real example. I'm working on Bidet NY right now -- fantastic market. But think about what it actually means to run a big workforce doing manual labor, entering peoples' homes, in New York City, adjusting water lines. Damage from water if the process isn't done right. Inevitably you're modifying something that was shoddily installed originally or hasn't been properly maintained -- it's like setting off a water bomb. And while insurance exists to cover that, you're much less likely to underprice your service when you consider all the ways it, and through it you, can be defeated and bankrupted.

That's not pessimism. That's strategy. And it's the kind of thinking you never get to when you're sitting in a coworking space calling yourself a founder.

Thinking about survival forces you to evaluate opportunity in a much more relativistic way. Sure, you could do that. But given the risks, the costs, and the other options on the table, is that really the smart move? When everything is framed in terms of opportunity and risk, you have a great singular thing to reason about. You stop chasing shiny objects and start making actual strategic decisions. And models become your best friend, because models are a way to group various different things in the same terms so you can actually compare and decide.

The world is not passively waiting for you to succeed. There are people who want what you have, right out of your mouth, and will take it if you let them. Because to them that's easier than going out and extracting it for themselves. In everything you do, there are downfalls. The partners you choose, your employees, the businesses you choose, the choices you make while you run them -- all potential threats. Yes, there's real opportunity with every choice, but there's also a set of threats that arise from each one. And unless you value that and constantly consider it, you will not be as strategic as you need to be, and one day might find yourself regretting it.

You Don't Have Time Not to Think This Way

Here's the trap that gets most people. They feel like strategy is something you get to once the urgent stuff is handled. Once the fires are out. Once there's breathing room. But that's backwards. That's fatally backwards.

You don't have time NOT to prioritize strategy. Every hour you spend putting out fires without thinking strategically is an hour you're falling behind someone who is. Every day you spend "just working" without considering the threats, the leverage points, the escape routes, and the angles of attack is a day you're more exposed than you were yesterday.

There's a feeling sometimes that it's "too late." That you're already behind, already locked in, already committed. Well, it's never too fucking late. You are going to live a long time if you play your cards right. And you live once, so go for it. You are going to die one day -- you do know that, right? Life is a game with only one round. So the question isn't whether you have time for strategy. The question is how you ever convinced yourself you had time for anything else.

Brilliance Is Not Enough: The SBF Lesson

I want to talk about Sam Bankman-Fried for a minute, because he's the perfect cautionary tale for what happens when you're brilliant but you don't think in terms of survival.

Here's a guy who was, by any honest measure, an exceptional trader. One of the best of his generation. He built a multi-billion dollar empire in a few years. At his peak, he was on track to be worth $80 billion or more, easily. He had the intelligence, the market intuition, the network, the momentum -- everything. And now he's doing 25 years in federal prison.

Why? Because he was playing the trading game, not the survival game.

What SBF did -- using customer funds from FTX to cover losses at Alameda Research -- wasn't some exotic, unforeseeable failure. It was the most basic kind of exposure there is: he created a single point of catastrophic failure and then didn't protect it. He commingled accounts, left no firewall between his entities, and operated as if the only thing that mattered was the upside. He treated risk the way an entrepreneur treats risk -- something to manage on paper while you focus on growth. Not something that could end you.

And it ended him.

Now think about a guy like Bobby Axelrod from Billions. Yeah, he's fictional, but the archetype is real -- you know the type. Guys who are maybe not as naturally gifted at pure trading as SBF was. Guys who might never have hit the same peak valuation. But guys who are still on the board. Still playing. Still free.

Why? Because they're survival-minded. They're constantly evaluating risk -- not just market risk, but legal risk, political risk, relationship risk, reputational risk. They think about what to avoid as much as what to pursue. They think about how to attack AND how to defend. They surround themselves with people whose entire job is to insulate them from damage -- lawyers, fixers, loyalists, people who will take a bullet because it's in their interest to do so. They build back doors, escape routes, cutouts, and plausible deniability into everything they do. Not because they're planning to break the law, but because they understand that the line between legal and illegal is drawn by people who might not be on your side, and enforced by people who are looking for exactly the kind of exposure SBF left wide open.

To someone on the ground, SBF and an Axelrod type might have looked similar. Both rich. Both powerful. Both playing in the same arena. But one was playing a game that was recoverable -- where even the worst-case scenario left him standing -- and the other is doing life in prison. That's not a difference of intelligence. It's a difference of framework.

SBF was smarter than most people will ever be, and it didn't save him. Because intelligence without the survival framework is just a faster way to find the edge of the cliff. You can be the best trader in the world, the best dealmaker, the best engineer -- it doesn't matter if you're not simultaneously thinking about every way your position can be attacked, every person who has an incentive to take you down, every structural vulnerability you've left exposed.

This is the thing that keeps me up at night, honestly. Not that I'm not smart enough. But that I might miss something. That I might get comfortable. That I might treat some risk as theoretical when it's actually the one that takes me off the board entirely. SBF is a reminder that the game doesn't care how good you are. It only cares whether you're still playing.

What You Actually Get

By the way, I know how all this sounds. You may think, "imagine living your life considering everything a potential threat, every person a potential enemy, never just letting go." But here's the thing: there is no freedom like knowing you are genuinely protected in every way you can conceive. Your mind is at ease -- and it's vigilant to stamp out anything that threatens that ease. Anything less is a form of ignorance that ends up biting most people.

When you adopt this framing, you don't just get paranoid -- you get curious. You get hungry to understand how everything works, how every system can be navigated, how every threat can be neutralized. History goes from a school subject to a playbook. Every conqueror, every dynasty, every survivor becomes a case study in the only thing that actually matters. It's the most powerful motivator for learning I've ever experienced.

It puts everything on the table. No illusions, no comfortable stories, no scripts. Just the actual game, as it's actually played. And once you see it, you can't un-see it.

Life is a game with only one round, and it ends when you stop surviving. So don't stop. And don't ever tell yourself you don't have time to think about how to win. You don't have time not to.