The Bigger Picture
Best lines of 2025 (Part 3 of 3)
đ Happy holidays! Consider gifting Tao of Founders to an entrepreneur you love â¤ď¸
On Vision & Execution
âDonât undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.â â Edwin Land, Founder of Polaroid
Land possessed an extraordinary capacity for mental visualizationâan ability to see entire complex systems in his mind before building them. With over 500 patents to his name, he embodied a rare fusion of scientific genius, artistic sensitivity, and philosophical depth.
A fearless mind free from expecting results is a powerful combination: this is the mindset of someone with nothing to lose. What would you keep doing even if failure was assured?
Outstanding founders believe their success is inevitable, while expectingâeven relishingâfailures and adversity along the way. If you can find true inner motivation regardless of success or failure, then nothing can stand in your way.
âYou always start with a fantasy. Part of the fantasy technique is to visualize something as perfect. Then with the experiments you work back from the fantasy to reality, hacking away at the components.â â Edwin Land
This âwork backwardsâ approachâstarting with the ideal end stateâlets you clearly visualize what you want and track whether youâre moving closer to your goal. Jeff Bezos likely took a page from Landâs book.
âMy whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didnât know they had.â â Edwin Land
During critical development phases, colleagues reported Land would work for 72 hours straight while maintaining peak cognitive function. More importantly, he modeled a behavior that led his employees to also behave with extreme focus.
On Design & Taste
Beauty coordinates human cognition and social organization. It reduces physiological stress, freeing mental resources for complex tasks. It restores attention that demanding work depletes. Andâmost importantlyâit synchronizes emotional states across groups, enabling collective action.
When we remove roads, society visibly breaks down. When we remove aesthetic infrastructure, society breaks down in diffuse ways weâve learned to ignore.
The most common founding motivation isnât âI spotted a market inefficiency.â Itâs âI experienced something ugly and felt compelled to replace it with something beautiful.â
Jobs was offended by ugly computers. Dyson was aesthetically bothered by inelegant solutions. Chesky wanted travel to feel humane. The aesthetic violation came first; the business case came later. This is founding as aesthetic protest.
Bureaucratic, extractive, inhuman systems donât emerge because evil people design themâmostly. Most emerge because no one insisted on a ânot-shitty-experienceâ. Itâs our role as entrepreneurs to revolt aesthetically against ugly products, services and systems.
Only entrepreneurs have the freedom and incentives to ask: âBut is it beautiful? Is it humane? Is this how things should work?â If founders donât insist on good taste, who will?
On Curiosity
âThe noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.â â Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardoâs driving force was an insatiable curiosityâa need to understand everything about the world around him. He didnât fight his curiosityâhe weaponized it.
âHe saw beauty in both art and engineering, and his ability to combine them was what made him a genius.â â Steve Jobs, on Leonardo da Vinci
Itâs very powerful for creatives to master art and science. Having range produces more and better ideas.
The best things have no exit plans. They just keep becoming. Your startup will end. Your product will be replaced. Your technology will be obsolete. But the questions you ask, the connections you make, the possibilities you openâthese can echo through centuries.
Leonardoâs legacy may not be in what he finished, but in what he began. His âfailedâ flying machines laid groundwork for aviation. His âabandonedâ engineering projects presaged modern hydraulics, optics, and robotics. Perhaps his biggest contribution was finding and asking questions worth asking for many generations.