I dislike this sort of word play because it doesn't communicate information to anybody except people who already have the experience to translate it in some way. Even then, it's so generic that there's a spectrum of possible interpretations.
It can be True and Trite at the same time. I've lived the startup CEO journey from 0 to successful exit, and "You have to care about everything more than anything" is almost poetic in terms of summarizing the constant chaos and battering you take mentally.
Now, would that have made sense or been useful to me during the early stages? Not at all. It has almost no educational value.
It reminds me of some famous quote that goes like "Life consists of learning profound lessons that appear trite from the outset... until you actually live and learn them."
There's certainly some kind of tendency among a certain swathe of startup founders and others in business, who somehow fancy themselves to be philosophers or gurus because they've gone through what's been construed as a "startup rite of passage" and have attained some kind of apotheosis. It's essentially a species of the American mythology of "success".
This applies to everybody and every job: It's just that with CEOs "everything" is the whole company, while for an individual contributor "everything" is just the scope of their work.
Once you look at this outside of work (the second line), it becomes even more clear: Everybody can do "anything" but not "everything", not just CEOs.
You can summarise this whole article with this: Balance.
> In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new: an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto, "Anyone can cook." But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau's, who is, in this critic's opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau's soon, hungry for more.
Writing on the internet, especially by folks in tech and business, has become 99.9% self serving. Zero value add. It's at the point where there is meaningful signal - if someone writes online, there is a very good chance they are untrustworthy and should be avoided.
Be sure to start with an even more meaningless, but somehow click-baity, intro line. Then do whatever it is that linkedin people do to get a see more breakpoint to hide the rest.
