Ben Horowitz: “Do not expect life to be fair. It will only defeat you.”
The Andreessen Horowitz co-founder is asked for advice that he has found useful in his own life. Ben responds:
“The thing that I would say has had the biggest effect on me is something my father said to me years ago: ‘Life isn’t fair.’ That advice seems really simple, but the thing I’ve seen that defeats people more than any other thing in life is the expectation of some fairness.”
He continues:
“There are all kinds of things that are going to happen to you that don’t happen to other people and are completely unfair. But it doesn’t matter because that’s the way it is. And as soon as you can get that idea out of your mind [that life should be fair], you can just deal with it… ‘What should I do now?’ is the real question — not ‘How do I go back and get people to be fair?’… Life’s not fair. That’s the nature of it. If you think about it more than five seconds, you’ll realize that… As an individual, do not expect anything to be fair. It will only defeat you.”
Source: @lennysan (Sep 2025)
X used to be the place you’d get breaking news and both sides of a view to get an informed opinion.
Increasingly now I get one point of view here and to get another one I have to go use another platform.
It’s quite sad that algos prefer skew towards extremes
@brivael Great read, but I’m wondering how do space programs that work through government fit into this, they were being efficient and they were able to mobilize as well.
The internet itself was a government project.
@ku1deep@ponnappa@shantanugoel Fascinating how first they read your face with Ghibli. Now your finger prints with this upload. Data mining keeps happening under all these guises to build datasets.
@ErikSombroek This is incredible! So happy to see Warcraft 3 stuff. The @W3ChampionsTeam is always looking for people that are passionate about Warcraft and have built a community platform to continue playing this game. Would be awesome to have you on board
@karrisaarinen@bryce It’s fascinating to me how all traits seem transferable or even bettered on (athleticism) but there doesn’t seem to be a gene or a tractability for what Steve had and built on.