Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 5-7 minutes
Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🏗️ The building that went up four and a half floors a week
In the late 1920s, a rich businessman named John J. Raskob decided to build the tallest building in the world, in New York City.
He had made his money running the finances at General Motors, the car company.
Now he wanted a tower with his name on it.
He hired Al Smith, who used to be the governor of New York, to be the face of the project and talk to the press.
Then a problem came up.
On the other side of town, another rich man, the carmaker Walter Chrysler, was finishing his own tower.
At the last minute, Chrysler had a tall metal spike added to the top of his building, so his would end up the tallest.
So Raskob changed his plan.
His building would be 1,250 feet tall, higher than anything Chrysler could reach.
That was the decision.
He made it before any building work had started.
After that, everything was about speed.
On March 17, 1930, workers put the first steel post of the Empire State Building into the ground on Fifth Avenue.
The construction company, run by two brothers named Starrett, had planned every single day of the job in advance.
They laid small train tracks on every floor, so carts could carry bricks and steel straight to wherever the workers needed them.
They opened restaurants on the upper floors, so nobody had to climb down for lunch.
The building rose at four and a half floors every week.
Turns out the fastest anyone had ever built a tower that tall was three and a half floors a week.
At the busiest point, in August 1930, there were 3,439 workers on the building in a single day.
The building was finished in April 1931.
It opened on May 1, 1931, just 410 days after that first steel post went in.
It was such a big event that the President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, opened it himself.
He did it by pressing a button from his office in Washington.
Get this - It was finished a month earlier than planned.
It also cost less than planned: they had set aside $60 million, and spent about $41 million.
How did they build it so fast?
Because they made every decision first, and only then started building.
Raskob had decided exactly how tall the building would be.
The builders had written down what would happen on every single day of the job.
Nobody stopped halfway to ask, "Should we make it taller?" or "Should we change the design?"
They had answered every one of those questions before the first day of building.
Once the deciding and the planning were done, all that was left was the doing, and they did it faster than anyone ever had.
⛳️ The problem
The Empire State Building went up four and a half floors a week because all the problems were anticipated, solutions were planned,
and all other decisions were made and recorded,
and only the building was left.
Over here, back in March we decided to start a newsletter.
We picked the name, the topic, and the day it would go out.
Then we started polishing the first issue, and we are still polishing it.
Every week we find one more thing to fix, because slow feels like careful.
So it is September now, the decision was right, and not one issue has gone out.
Raskob made his decision and then built the tallest building in the world in 410 days.
We made ours and have not built a single issue in six months.
There is a two-week path from decision to launch, and it does not mean rushing.
The most famous product of the decade went out that way, with one tweet, and you have probably used it, so stay with me.
💬 The chatbot that went out with a tweet
Sam Altman runs OpenAI, the company that made ChatGPT.
Before that, he started a phone app called Loopt, and sold it in 2012 for $43.4 million.
Then he ran Y Combinator, which invests money into brand-new startups and also mentors the founders.
In 2022, OpenAI was, in Sam's own words, "a quiet research lab."
Get this — the AI that powers ChatGPT was already finished, almost a year before ChatGPT came out.
OpenAI had finished building it long before, and had been renting it out to other companies to use in their own software.
Jan Leike, one of the researchers, put it plainly: the same thing had been available "for almost a year before ChatGPT came out."
OpenAI also had a website where programmers could test the AI for free, to see if it was worth paying for.
They called that website the playground.
You typed something in, and the AI wrote something back.
The team noticed something odd in the playground.
Programmers were not just testing it.
They were chatting with it, for fun, like it was a person.
So the idea was simple.
Take the AI that already existed, put a chat box in front of it, and let anyone in the world type to it.
The team took the idea to Sam, and Sam said yes.
He did not ask for a six-month plan or a big marketing campaign.
Two weeks later, ChatGPT went out to the world.
Everybody remembers ChatGPT as a huge launch, because the whole world was talking about it within days.
But OpenAI did not do any of that talking.
There was no press event, no ads, and no big announcement.
Inside the company, they called it a "research preview," a sneak peek rather than a finished product.
The day before, Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, told the staff not to expect much.
Maybe one post on Twitter, he said, that a few thousand people would like.
Late on the night of November 29, Sam was in the San Francisco office with the team, putting the finishing touches on it.
The next morning, November 30, Sam posted one message on Twitter saying ChatGPT was live.
Five days later, he posted again.
One million people had already used it.
Nobody at OpenAI had expected that.
Jan Leike, the researcher from earlier, admitted they were caught off guard.
"It's been overwhelming, honestly," he said.
"We've been surprised, and we've been trying to catch up."
The AI behind ChatGPT sat there for almost a year, and the world barely noticed.
The hard part was never building it.
The hard part was deciding to put it out there, and then shipping it in two weeks instead of polishing it for six months.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ Speed After the Decision
The Empire State Building went up in 410 days once the decision was made, a month early and under budget.
ChatGPT went out two weeks after Sam said yes, with one tweet, and had a million users five days later.
Starrett Brothers and Sam's team both used the same strategy, and it is called Speed After the Decision.
Sam put it this way in his essay How to Be Successful:
"Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly."
Neither the Starrett brothers nor Sam's team was rushing or cutting corners.
They both moved fast because every decision had already been made, and building was the only thing left to do.
So the day you decide to start the newsletter, you send the first issue that same week.
Not the perfect issue.
The first one.
The polishing happens on issue two, and issue three, while real readers are already reading.
Decide the height of the building, then put the first steel post in the ground this week.
That's it, my fellow outliers!
Yours 'helping you build profitable businesses 12x faster' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below takes the thing you already decided on and compresses the time between now and it existing.
Save this prompt as a Skill or add to Project in your favorite AI tool — build once, use often.
Run it as is. Your AI sidekick will use your own files if it can see them, and the example values if it cannot.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my drafts, my sent issues, or my subscriber dashboard, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If my Voice Profile exists, write in that voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If my ICP / Audience doc exists, target that reader. Otherwise assume safety officers on construction sites.
- Anything I leave as an example, treat as real. Anything I delete, fill in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption.
- Do not revisit whether this is the right thing to do. That decision is made. Every output is about compressing the time between now and it existing.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I already decided to do, and when I decided it:
{e.g. start a newsletter on running effective safety inspections, back in February}
What has actually happened since, and what I keep doing instead of the next step:
{e.g. an outline, two false starts on issue one and a lot of reading, and I keep researching how other people structure theirs}
What the next physical step actually is:
{e.g. writing issue one, about 1,500 words}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The elapsed cost — how long since the decision, and what has been produced in that time, stated plainly.
2. The critical path — the shortest chain of steps between now and the thing existing, with nothing optional on it.
3. What comes off — everything I have been doing that is not on that path, named.
4. The compressed schedule — those steps across the next fourteen days, with what happens on which day.
5. The quality floor — what "good enough to ship" means here, decided now so it cannot move later.
Then tell me which step I have been circling, and what the smallest version of it is.