Another way to think of this is in terms of opportunity costs. Every day you spend working on A is a day you're not working on B, C, D, etc. So, assuming you have a list of ideas that includes some game winners, you'd be remiss to spend time on other things. Even if you don't have any game winners, you have to measure the cost of working on mediocre ideas vs brainstorming for good ideas.
Specially if you're a builder, you tend jump on building things as soon as something excites you. Sometimes it works, but sometimes the ideas might exciting but not that meaningful.
I wish I had read this and thought about it a week ago, before I decided to teach myself golang, which ate up my free time. Is learning an experimental unpopular language going to help me win? Fat chance.
Working solely on what makes you win (always) seems to be at odds with 20% time, or "slack" (where you focus on whatever you want, regardless of priority)
Good point. In the really early stages of a startup, it would seem best err on the side of focusing on maximizing the potential / value of "what makes you win" given the danger at that stage tends to be doing too many (unfocused) things. I still think "slack" time is important, but only after what "makes you win" is running out of juice or you need a different stepping type / level of stepping stone when expanding (say, when you cross $10,000 users and you've run out of friends / acquaintances to sign up). As you get bigger, it's probably easier to more formally dedicate people and time to "slack"
It all sounds good in theory, but if we all KNEW what makes us win, we would all just do it and be super successful right?
So maybe someone first needs to come up with a formula for how to know what makes you win
