If you do everything, you’ll win.

This from Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast/blog post: Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro

It describes a harrowing, gut twisting, loss-of-innocence-preview of how power really works via Patel’s journey reading Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson biographies.

Patel summarizes three types of extraordinary attempts one can attempt:

1. In the first, a person perfectly executes on the 20% of things which will produce 80% of results. 

2. In the second, a person extends that same care and diligence to the remaining 80% of tasks, because every marginal drop of result, no matter how diminishing, is worth the squeeze. 

3. And the third is exemplified by Lyndon Johnson, where a person not only does every single thing that might reasonably help his odds, but even the unreasonable – he accepts the assignment which has only the remotest possibility to make the difference, and he completes it with the same intensity and attention as the task which will make all the difference. If you do everything, you’ll win.3

– Dwarkesh Patel

There’s much to despise about Johnson, but also something to admire: work ethic. How often do we take the first no, and give up?

Cheating. Bribing. Threatening. Leave those on the back doormat. Do not take the first no and cower. Do ask yourself, am I doing everything I can? Answer honestly.

Do persist.

Lastly a cool substack feature for capturing a quote: