Long ago, during an evening stroll with a retired VC in New York (from Bessemer), I asked him, “What differentiated your best investments from the others? Could you have seen them coming?”
He said, “My best investments were the ones where some team members disagreed, while others agreed. When everyone agreed, we usually ended up overpaying. And when almost everyone disagreed, it was often a bad decision.”
This holds for our life as well.
Whether you are trying to do great writing, come up with a startup idea, or take investment decisions — compulsive consensus-seeking is counterproductive.
To share a personal experience, my friend Vinod Thomas and I have been making small investments over the last year or so. And our best investment so far has been the one with which some of our most respected friends disagreed.
If you want to do great work, step away from compulsive consensus-seeking. I am not saying don’t listen to people or deliberately go against what they say — but when you have conviction, stand your ground.
Consensus, by definition, is the average point of view. And average is not outstanding — if it was, we wouldn’t call it average, would we?
– Rajan