Doing hard things is often not proportionally harder than easy things but can yield 100x or 1000x better payoffs, making them superior strategic choices
Adcock argues that pursuing hard problems is strategically superior because they attract less competition, better talent, and investors seeking binary payoffs. He illustrates this with humanoid robots vs. robot dogs — humanoids may be only 3-4x harder but could yield a million times higher ROI. ✦ AI generated
Brett Adcock · My First Million · 2026-08-14 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 48:32
“You said, 'I believe that doing hard things is easier in many ways than doing easier things.' Could you explain?”
everybody's trying to do easy things. When you work on harder things, you have like less generally like overall probably there's like first order like less competition. You have probably like a hard thing probably means like it could be a potential like really big TAM, really big exit if it works. ... I think there's like a nonlinear curve to scaling like here the difficulty here meaning like I think a lot of the hard things are not like 10 or 100 times harder I think the hard things sometimes are like two or three or four times harder maybe five times harder but they're not 100 times harder so you might have a hundred times better payoff but it might be like three or four times harder. I'll give you an example in robotics I think like largely building like quadriped robots like four-legged dog robots versus humanoids. Like probably humanoids are probably like three times harder than that. Maybe four. That's it. But like there's really no I don't think there's like really a real market for for humanoid like like those dogs, right? ... So like you do humanoids, it's like okay, three times harder, but it's probably like a million times higher payoff.
verbatim transcript · starts at 48:32
48:32you have like less generally like overall probably there's like first order like less competition. You have probably like a hard thing probably means like it could be a potential like really big TAM, really big exit if it works. You have this like you know riskreward trade. You have folks that probably want to work on hard things probably like the best overachievers in the world that kind of want wants to
48:51work there. Generally like you know hard things have this like binary payoff for investments. they like really want to fund those things because we could have like a 100x return for the portfolio and I think there's like a nonlinear curve to scaling like here the difficulty here meaning like I think a lot of the hard things are not like 10 or 100 times harder I think the hard things sometimes
49:09are like two or three or four times harder maybe five times harder but they're not 100 times harder so you might have a hundred times better payoff but it might be like three or four times harder I'll give you an example in robotics I think like largely building like quadriped robots like four-legged dog robots versus humanoids. Like probably humanoids are probably like three times harder than that. Maybe
49:29four. That's it. But like there's really no I don't think there's like really a real market for for humanoid like like those dogs, right? I think it's just like a niche thing. I don't think there's a real business for it. And I don't know anybody really at this point in like really wants to spend a lot of time on that. So like you do humanoids, it's like okay, three times harder, but
49:44it's probably like a million times higher payoff. Probably like a million x or a billionx higher ROI for that. You know what I mean? for investors, for humans that want to work there and get stock and participate in upside and for everything else. Like what why would you ever like want to work on like like four-legged dogs? Well, what economic value can a robot dog bring at scale?
50:04Like if you really understand it, like I think there's everybody's trying to do the easy work and it just becomes really difficult, you know, look at look at all the AI slop like open claw harnesses out there today. It's all crap. It's all not good. They're all going to go I don't think any of them will make it long term. You might have some consolidation here and there for aqua hires and stuff,
- ·Hard things aren't proportionally harder — often just 3-4x more difficult
- ·Easy things attract the most competition
- ·Hard things have nonlinear payoff curves
- ·Less competition = better talent & investor interest
- ·Hard problems: bigger TAM, bigger exit potential
- ·Investors seek binary payoffs — hard problems deliver
- ·The difficulty gap is much smaller than the payoff gap
- ·Example: humanoid robots are 3x harder but 1Mx payoff