# Garry's Channel: LEARN, EARN or QUIT | My job/career advice

**Author:** Garry Tan
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Jg-garry-s-channel-learn-earn-or-quit-my-job-career-advice
**YouTube ID:** eLelgy5zRv4

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If you're not learning AND earning... it's time to move on. You're wasting your life. In this video I’ll focus on how to
master BOTH and maximize your time on earth to make something great.

## Transcript

are you learning or are you earning if both you're in a great place if it's one or the other that's good too if it's neither it's time to move on you're wasting your life learn or earn and if you're smart hardworking capable and want to learn more about being successful and maybe even how to build a billion dollar startup click subscribe and hit the bell icon right now it's what we do every week right here let's get started

[Music] learning is where you need to start as early as possible and as quick as possible it's important to become good at doing things and that means either being a maker which means design product and engineering or being a hustler management sales and marketing the majority of people starting out in their careers really need to focus on learning first my friend steven sinovsky says this is

the protein before the carbs all right you say how do you actually start well first is learning about yourself what do you like what do you enjoy what allows you to enter a state of flow and then second once you know that you need to acquire those skills once you know you love design can you spend the 10 000 hours it takes to become truly great at it well if you answer that first part the second part comes easy because you won't even feel the 10 000 hours you'll just love doing it okay okay i

got it no really what do i do you ask well if you want to be a hustler you got to learn to market or sell marketing is about helping other people communicate their problem and how their solution is the best if you see a product website or service that you like and you have some improvements you can suggest you gotta build it or design it or write it yourself and then cold email them offer to do it or just do it and send it to them sales on the other hand is about getting customers so go get those customers without even asking

send those customers to a founder and they'll always take your email they'll always remember you it's a great way to break in if you're a builder on the other hand well you've got to build there's power and being able to do that yourself and not rely on others find a problem to solve and then build a first version that solves that problem when you're starting out it sort of maybe doesn't even matter what that problem exactly is a lot of people get hung up on this step they wait for the exact perfect problem it just has to be a real problem that

your software can actually solve it's no mistake that some of the best founders i've met started off by making gradebook software because they were still in school and they had access to teachers who were frustrated with their grade books many of them didn't stay in that education space they ended up making billion dollar companies in lots of other spaces but they learned to create in grade book software it's a great lesson creating you can only learn by doing so don't let the idea get in the way of you starting once you create something anything then

iterate to make it work and turn it into something really good when you create something impressive that users love it's better than a credential it doesn't matter if you didn't go to stanford if you can point to a beautiful app or website or github repo with elegant code that you created you have done a thing that will almost always set you up to be a top 10 percent player off the bat with no credentials when i was 14 i got my first job cold calling the yellow pages in the internet section and what i had was a website i could point to that had won

design awards it was for my junior high school underground newspaper you know after that i cold emailed my way to my first coding job it worked for me and it'll work for you here's bill gates talking exactly about this what it takes to create and learn how to be great at those things if you spend 10 000 hours doing something you'll be super good at it i don't think that's quite uh it's quite as similar as that what you do is you do about 50 hours and 90 drop out because they don't like it or they're not good

you know they do another 50 hours and 90 drop out so there's these constant cycles and you do have to be lucky enough but also fanatical enough to keep going and so the person who makes it to ten thousand hours is not just somebody who's done it for ten thousand hours there's somebody who's chosen and been chosen in many different times bill gates is absolutely right here it's the 10 000 hours where you choose to do the same thing over and over again until you become

great at it that is learning let's talk about earning what do i mean by earning well i mean putting money in your pocket what do you actually take home the best way to do it i think is still equity to make the most amount of money you need to create true wealth by owning the stock of a company that became worth a lot of money and when you started it you owned a hundred percent of something that wasn't worth anything but then you made it something in my book this is the highest form of

earning because you made it but of course you can also earn cash facebook and google pay engineers hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and stock and at the high end it's not unusual for execs to make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that's crazy but remember that google made over 166 billion dollars in total revenue if you divide that out by 135 000 employees that's over 1.2 million per employee in revenue that's an amazing way to earn but sometimes there's a catch

what if you're not learning i gotta say this is my opinion and my opinion alone but for me i feel like i need to be learning something otherwise i'm dying i'd be pretty unhappy in a place where i didn't get to learn about new things or grow my skills and abilities that being said let's take a step back millions if not billions of people on the planet make this trade-off every day trading a portion of their happiness for financial stability i'm not saying this is a bad situation they can take care of themselves and their loved ones and that's important

but if you really want to take steps to create things from nothing you got to be careful you might end up in a cycle earn money to spend it to get a bigger house or car or nicer things you'll spend more money and more money over time and before you know it you're running on a hedonic treadmill and the tricky thing about spending money to buy things that you don't want is they don't give you the satisfaction you really want here's philosopher alan watts talking about exactly that money never could buy pleasure

because all pleasures depend upon not putting down a symbol of power money but upon disciplines in other words now in sausalito where i live uh we have pier after pier full of fine boats motor cruisers sailing boats all sorts of things which nobody ever uses because they've been brought on the uh falling for the ad line that if you buy this thing you will have pleasure you will have status you will have

something or other but then they suddenly discover that having a boat requires the art of seamanship which is difficult but rewarding therefore nobody has time for it and all they do with the boats is have cocktail parties on them at the weekend if you know you want to create a startup save the money that boat or nice car or expensive clothes probably won't get you all the way to where you want to be if you're young and still thrifty don't change your lifestyle that money you spend needs to be saved so that you can invest your time in creating your own startup or

your own wealth engine i have one other big warning for you sometimes these high-paying jobs that feel meaningless are jobs here's david graber an intellectual of the occupy wall street movement talking about why some of these jobs exist in the soviet union they used to say well you know we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us they make up jobs which are completely unnecessary that makes sense because they had an ideology of full employment on the other hand capitalism that's exactly the thing that isn't supposed to

happen a private firm would never hire someone and put out good money to someone who they don't actually need but in fact if you talk to people who work for large corporations they do it all the time how does that happen i think part of it has to be explained by political pressure and in a way just as in the soviet union there was a central directive saying we need full employment they didn't say therefore make up jobs right but they didn't say don't do it isn't that weird sometimes the more you get paid the more meaningless the job

actually becomes you only get one life it's too short to waste on things that you don't find fulfilling even though they might make you comfortable hey you gotta remember if you choose a job you love you'll never have to work a day in your life if you don't learn and you don't love it you might have to leave once you earn enough to take the leap now let's talk about learning and earning if it wasn't obvious already it's the best if you start a company or are early enough you can learn

while you earn for founders this is easy math as a founder when you start a company you start off with 100 of the pie the pie might be worth zero at that moment but you're gonna go make it worth something if you do manage to get to product market fit you could have a company with an exit in the tens of millions hundreds of millions or billions of dollars if you own ten to thirty percent of that company by then you could be a sent to millionaire to billionaire that's pretty crazy for employees you might have 25 basis points 0.25 up to 2 or more

it can still be an outrageously good outcome and you might not even have to take as big a risk and being early means you might get less equity but you're not starting at a point where the company is literally worth nothing it can still be an amazing deal especially if the company is growing very fast when i was at palantir i was learning how to run teams and how to build product from scratch but also earning equity and what ended up becoming a 40 billion dollar company when i worked at y combinator i was

learning to be an investor and learning how to work with startups at the earliest possible stage but i was also earning some of the most valuable carry that exists in silicon valley as a part of that investment firm and i'm learning and earning every day now as the founder and managing partner of my own venture capital firm i learn every day from founders that i get to meet and the problems that they run across when it comes to youtube i'm doing this for fun i donate the proceeds from this channel to non-profits like code 2040 so while i

don't earn here i do learn a ton from all of you so keep the comments and dms coming hearing what resonates for you and helps you is what helps me learn the most of all finally there are places where you don't get to do learning or earning at all it might be working at a non-tech company a consulting firm and you're getting no equity in a low pay or what's worse you might be working at a bad startup really sorry if that's true for you i remember working for a startup as an intern my junior year of college

i got the internship through the stanford career fair and i'd never worked at a bad startup before by then it was an enterprise software startup that raised money but never seemed to close customers the founders spent a lot of time on business trips and i did a lot of work that summer creating marketing material mock-ups and prototypes and screenshots to use in sales pitches but they didn't close an entire sale my whole summer i don't think they ever did the startup died and i didn't earn much because interns don't get paid a lot but i didn't learn very much either it was basically a wash i ate a lot of

mcdonald's and watched a lot of hong kong movies this is sort of the secret truth of bad startups and i hate to say it but if you're in a situation like that you should leave if you're not learning you don't have a way to earn equity or even a good salary and especially if it's not fun or meaningful for you you gotta quit [Music] so what order do you do all these things in here's what i recommend learn first then earn that's the best strategy if you try and do it in reverse and you try to earn

first you'll probably still learn but maybe slowly and you don't know what you're going to give up it might come at a great cost and you also might get trapped in that hedonic treadmill always remember if you're not learning or earning you got to plot your exit to a place where you can just to close it out i like this snippet of tim cook talking about his journey from where he started to the ceo of apple for me the journey was not predictable

at all uh and the it goes sort of back to the lincoln quote is the only thing i believe you can do is prepare so that's it for this week if you want to learn about other startup topics like what to do after you raise money or how to do design if you've never done it before check out the latest videos on my channel where i dive into those topics and tons of other stuff new videos here every single week so don't miss them click subscribe and the bell icon right

now turn on notifications for youtube and you're gonna get a little notification every time i post thanks for watching and i will see you next week [Music] [Music]

you
