Go to Where the Heat Is

Every now and then, students ask me for advice...

Mar 6, 2026

Every now and then, students ask me for advice. They want to be excellent, build durable skills, and are scared of the permanent underclass.

I make an effort not to be too prescriptive, especially when the world is changing so quickly and I’m a young person still trying to figure things out myself. But if I had to give one piece of advice based on what I’ve found to be salient amongst the people I admire most, it would be this: go to where the heat is.

You want to be someone who, when brushing up against the mass of an unknown, leans into the friction rather than pulling away—someone who seeks the heat. The contact could come from anywhere: your smart friend mentioning he thinks this alternative energy source is the next big thing, a geopolitical conflict that makes waves in the news, an interesting research paper you stumble across in a tangential field. The easiest thing to do is to take a glance or nod along, then forget about it as you focus on getting good at what’s familiar. Leaning in is hard. Wrestling with the unknown means enduring growing discomfort. Sparks fly and the contact point gets hotter and hotter, you won’t know how big the thing really is or how long the discomfort will last, just that the friction will sharpen you in a way that makes you better.

It’s easy to be flat and pointy—to live life like you’re speeding down a downhill obstacle course, dodging the looming unknowns that enter your line of sight, staying in your lane of competence. It’s also easy to pretend like you spent time leaning in, skimming the surface just enough to sound informed. Elite colleges tend to breed this behavior: students learn to “win” by collecting gold stars with the minimal amount of work required. But in the real world, shallowness becomes evident in due time. If you always optimize for comfort, straight velocity, and flashiness, you end up missing out on the opportunity to be truly great.

The people I admire most in this industry—the ones with the deepest respect and enduring success—are heat-seeking individuals. They’re carved all over with bevels and grooves from pressing into hard things, with a seemingly infinite genuine appetite to continue to shape themselves. The best founders I know are fast-twitch and relentlessly curious. Whether it’s figuring out how to scale a GTM organization, understanding a new research paradigm, or learning how to be a great manager, they run towards the thing they don’t yet understand that is highest priority for the company. They take inspiration from history and experts from other disciplines. The best investors I know are also hyper-learning machines. They move fluently across domains from psychology to economics to biology, chase rabbit holes down to the bottom, and stitch together frameworks to reason through decisions about totally novel things with clarity.

The discomfort of not knowing should feel more painful than the act of leaning in. We’re lucky to live in an era where knowledge is super accessible: a prompt can take you straight to the frontier of almost any field. But the onus is on you to lean into the friction. That’s a muscle you have to actively build, and one that will continue to compound returns over a lifetime of learning—no matter what field you go into or how good AI gets. If anything, as we reach a future where humans are no longer the most intelligent entities on Earth, it feels like even more value will accrue to the people who aren’t so mono-threaded.

So if you want to become excellent, keep going to where the heat is. Dig into the interesting unknowns. Embrace the discomfort. The rest will follow.