Florence Doesn't Wait

A Ten-Year Note — Written on the Eve of Turning 22

Young people must go to Florence.

Not because Florence has something special — though it does. But because young people have an instinct: while there's still time, go be around the best. Five hundred years ago, Florence gathered Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Not because the city needed them, but because they needed a place where an ambitious young person could be seen.

I keep wondering: why did those particular people go to Florence, and not others? What were their peers doing? Probably accepting reasonable life arrangements — apprenticeships, the church, inheriting their father's business. None of those choices were wrong. They simply belonged to people willing to let probability decide their fate.

This essay isn't for everyone. It's for those who chose interesting when they could have chosen safe, and chose difficult when they could have chosen comfortable.

It all starts with resisting probability. You are not a lottery ticket.

At least you shouldn't be. Most people's life strategy is hedging — diversify, avoid failure, look like you're not making mistakes. The problem with this strategy isn't that it doesn't work. It's that it works too well: you can use it to get a perfectly normal life that no one will mock, and no one will remember.

The people who went to Florence made a different choice: they bet on one specific thing and threw themselves entirely into it. Not diversification — concentration. Not "probably won't be too bad," but "either the best, or nothing at all."

In the business world, this choice has a cold name: power law. The top company in a portfolio returns more than all others combined. The market leader captures 70% of the share. So the point isn't "doing okay" — it's being 10x better, so good that users feel the difference in three seconds. If you can't do 10x, you're doing incremental innovation. Incremental innovation dies.

But 10x isn't achieved through effort alone. It requires you to take risks that others won't.

Evolution made humans excessively risk-averse. At 22, this aversion is your greatest enemy.

The biggest risk isn't failure — failure is a choice from which you can extract information. The biggest risk is abandoning independent thinking. When you substitute someone else's judgment for your own, you hand your fate to a person you don't understand. Musk estimated SpaceX's probability of success at 10%, then used execution to make the risk asymmetric — once he proved rockets could be reused, competitors needed years to catch up.

Risk is a resource, just like capital, technology, and brand. The greatest asset young people possess is the right to take risks without being destroyed. This window won't stay open forever. Florence doesn't wait.

Taking risks alone isn't enough. You need to choose a path that compounds.

Most careers are linear — work twice the hours, get twice the output. But some paths compound — each year's output is a multiple of the previous year's, not an addition. For everything you do, ask yourself: will this add a zero in ten years, or look about the same as today? Don't be desperate. Stay patient and maintain your standards. The young person's choice isn't to grab the easiest opportunity in front of them, but to wait for the one worth going all in on.

And the prerequisite for compounding is owning assets. Your salary might grow 100x in a decade, but your time won't. To decouple wealth from time, the only way is to hold things that appreciate — equity, things you build, your brand. Don't sell your assets lightly. In ten years, you'll wish you'd never sold the things you believed in.

Then you need to move impossibly fast. From a ten-year perspective, most problems you face today are fundamentally problems of insufficient scale. Don't stop to solve problems that scale will solve. Speed is the only luxury young people can afford.

But speed requires confidence. Your standard for yourself should be: confident to the point of almost being arrogant, frequently crossing the line. This isn't advice on emotional management — it's a training method. Only by frequently crossing that line can you learn precisely where it is. Our genes make us overestimate our current level while vastly underestimating what we can achieve. The second error is far larger than the first.

And above all of this — above risk, compounding, speed, and confidence — one thing matters more.

Who you're with.

Doing hard things requires extraordinary people around you. Who you're with determines the ceiling of your taste. Jiro's sushi is the world's best not just because of his technique, but because his fish dealer supplies only the finest fish, and his rice merchant only works with people who understand rice. The excellence around you raises your own standards. The damage caused by mediocre people is invisible, continuous, and far beyond what you imagine.

Find the people you respect. Build relationships by genuinely helping them — not the business-card-exchange kind, but the kind where you spend your own time and judgment to create real progress for the other person.

So go to Florence.

Find those young people who are like you. The ones whose work is elegant, sincere, and full of taste. They'll spark something in each other over a single summer, then each walk their own path.

And the question deep inside you is always the same: what keeps you awake at 3 AM — not from anxiety, but because you can't stop thinking about what you're building? If you don't have this kind of passion growing from within, you won't finish anything worth a ten-year gaze.

Florence doesn't wait. Those who are going are already on their way.

I wrote the first version of this essay a few years ago. That version of me was more radical, more blunt, more certain I knew the answers. Now I know better what makes a good question.

I'll come back to this essay in ten years. I hope I'll still agree with most of it then, and smile at the naivety.