Welcome to the Action Digest, where the weather forecast is always: forward momentum throughout the day, with a light mist of self satisfaction by evening.

P.s. More action awaits you in our archives, including how Steve Jobs cultivated great taste, the personality trait shared by 1381 millionaires, and the study that revealed what successful founders, scientists, and terrorists, have in common.

Choose Audaciously

Nowadays, startup founders leave investor meetings with term sheets and swag.

But in 1993, Jensen Huang left with a death threat.

"If you lose my money, I'll kill you," the investor warned him, as he handed over NVIDIA’s first investor check. Sufficiently motivated, Huang got to work finding their first big customer. The games company SEGA was the first client he signed, who agreed to pay NVIDIA a "significant amount of money" to build the graphics chip for their upcoming games console.

But two years later, after burning through millions of dollars, Huang had a stomach-churning realization. The chip they’d built for SEGA didn't just suck, it was built "exactly backwards.” When Huang looked at his competitors, he realized NVIDIA was "dead last" due to approaching the tech in the exact opposite way that everyone else had.

But it got worse.

Even if SEGA gave Huang more money, NVIDIA still couldn't fix the chip. They didn't know how to build the right version yet, and they certainly couldn't learn fast enough to meet SEGA’s launch deadline. Huang saw two realistic paths forward, both fatal…

Option 1: Finish the crappy chip. NVIDIA could keep their mouth shut, build the flawed chip, and collect the final $5 million payment from SEGA to stay in business. But while NVIDIA would be wasting another 6 months finishing a useless chip for SEGA, 30 other competitors would continue racing to capture the PC market. They would emerge 6 months later with $5 million in the bank, but years behind the competition. Suicide.

Option 2: Quit the contract. They could abandon SEGA, lose the $5 million, and try to pivot to a new chip design immediately. But without the $5 million cash infusion, NVIDIA wouldn't be able to pay its engineers or the manufacturing costs to design a new chip! They had the will to fight, but without the $5 million, they couldn't buy the ammo. Also suicide.

Then, Huang spotted a third option.

It shouldn't really have been an option because it was so insulting.

He flew to Japan to meet SEGA CEO Shoichiro Irimajiri, and said, “Listen, I’ve got some bad news for you. First, the technology that we promised you doesn’t work. And second, we shouldn’t finish your contract because we’d waste all your money and you would have something that doesn’t work.”

And then, he made the audacious ask.

“Even though I’m asking you to let me out of the contract, I still need the [$5 million]. Because if you don’t give me the money, we’ll vaporize overnight.” 

In other words: I know we set you back two years, have nothing to show for it, and no way of fixing it, but can we still have that $5 million… please?

It was a request that most would never dream of making. He was asking SEGA to invest in a company in last place, with the wrong technology, and a CEO who had just screwed up.

"If I were sitting there," Huang confessed, "I wouldn't have done it." But after a few days of thought, "we'll do it," Irimajiri agreed. He didn't do it because it was a prudent business decision, he did it because he liked Huang. But that $5 million would keep the lights on just long enough for NVIDIA to pivot, revolutionize the industry, and hand back $15 million to SEGA four years later.

When you’re weighing up your options, choose audaciously.

Even A Little Goes A Long Way

In early 2023, writer and brand strategist Phoebe Dodds spotted a profile on LinkedIn.

The stranger lived in the same city as Dodds and had a career she admired. Dodds wanted to connect, but she found the idea of sending a cold message "pretty uncomfortable." On that morning, however, Dodds woke up and chose audacity.

“I love money more than I hate cold messaging,” Dodds said. “Plus, what’s the worst that can happen? They don’t reply, but I have ADHD anyway so I’ll probably forget I ever sent the message in the first place.”

She sent the note. They met for coffee. They clicked. For the next year and a half, they stayed in touch. When the stranger needed help, Dodds pitched in without expecting a return. Then, eighteen months after that small act of audacity, the phone rang.

The stranger was working on a new project and wanted Dodds involved. That single cold message would result in $100,000 of work for Dodds, and nearly $500,000 of work for the friends and collaborators she brought onto the project.

We often think audacity means betting the entire company. Sometimes, it just requires hitting "send."

But if audacity is so valuable, why are so many of us reluctant to harness it?

A Bit Of A Nuisance

Google offers two definitions for audacity that reveal why it can make us uncomfortable.

1. A willingness to take surprisingly bold risks

2. An impudent lack of respect

By definition, audacity is a fine line between being bold and being rude—and in many cases an audacious act is both at once. But what if the willingness to risk coming across as rude or annoying is the price of admission for achieving your goals? That’s what podcaster Jordan Harbinger, after interviewing hundreds of high-profile guests including “spies, CEOs, athletes, and authors,” has concluded:

“Any well-adjusted person worries about what other people think about them, whether they’re taking more than they’re giving. As they should. But that impulse can also be a major obstacle in life. It took me a while to realize: if you want to achieve anything in life, you’re gonna have to be a little annoying. You’re gonna have to ask people for things they don’t want to give you. You’re gonna have to advocate for ideas they don’t believe in yet. You’re gonna have to stand up to them when you disagree. Anything worth achieving in life will require you to fight for resources—time, energy, attention, money, influence, trust—that are finite and precious. If you want these things, you’re gonna have to do something most people will go to great lengths to avoid.​ Look at entrepreneurs who build successful companies. I promise you: their competitors, their vendors, even their own employees—they all find them annoying sometimes. Look at politicians who take up big causes. Their opponents and detractors obviously find them annoying. But even their own constituents and colleagues do too sometimes! Look at public figures. You wanna make movies, be a talking head, build a lifestyle brand, yuck it up on late-night shows? You guessed it. Annoying a lot of the time. Everyone who fights for a cause—big or small, practical or ideological, selfish or altruistic—they’re all, at some point, a bit of a nuisance. Being a nuisance isn’t just a byproduct of going after what you want. It is going after what you want. So if you want to start achieving at a higher level, you’re going to have to get comfortable with this idea. You’re going to have to learn to tolerate the feeling of asking for a little more than what people naturally want to give you. You’re going to have to quiet the part of your brain that’s obsessed with making sure everybody likes you all the time.”

Powerful stuff! But if the prospect of seeming like a nuisance still makes you feel like melting into the ground, new psychological research may offer some comfort…

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The Inconvenience Illusion

In 2022, award-winning behavioral science professors Xuan Zhao (Stanford) and Nicholas Epley (University of Chicago) set out to measure the gap between how annoying we think we are when asking for help, and how annoying we actually are.

They conducted multiple experiments where participants were instructed to perform and imagine a series of socially awkward requests like asking to borrow a phone, take a photo, or request spare change. But before making the ask, the "requesters" had to predict two things: how willing the stranger would be to help, and how the stranger would feel afterward.

The requesters predicted that the people they were asking for help from would feel inconvenienced, annoyed, and unlikely to say yes. They viewed their own audacity as a social tax. But the results showed the exact opposite.

First, people are shockingly willing to help. One observational study cited by the professors found that in real-world scenarios, 88% of naturally occurring requests were fulfilled! But the more fascinating finding was about mood. Not only did requesters consistently underestimate how willing people were to help, they also severely underestimated how good the helper felt after doing it.

While the requesters were worrying about being a burden, the helpers were actually experiencing a "warm glow" from being prosocial.

This disconnect happens because the two parties are focusing on completely different things. When we are the ones asking, we focus on the cost: the time, the effort, and the potential imposition we are placing on the other person. But when people are asked to help, they often focus on the connection: the ability to be helpful, the social interaction, and the affirmation of being a "good person," valuable, and competent.

The researchers concluded that "people do not simply misunderstand the likelihood that others will agree... they misunderstand the psychological experience of those asked."

This effect extends to other aspects of social connection too. Studies find that most of us underestimate how willing strangers are to talk to us, engage in deep conversations, and receive complements.

Phoebe Dodds and Jensen Huang didn't just get lucky. They benefited from a social reality that most of us ignore: audacity is rarely as annoying as we think it is.

And if you’re inspired to put these principles into practice then there’s good news…

Audacity = Skill Issue

At 30 years old, Jia Jiang was a marketing manager at a Fortune 500 company who felt his life was "stagnant." He had once promised his family he would build the biggest company in the world, but he hadn't even started. When he looked for the root cause of his inaction, he realized it wasn't a lack of ideas or talent, it was a "constant battle" between the dreamer he wanted to be and the fear of hearing "no."

To break the cycle, Jiang discovered a game called "Rejection Therapy," where the goal is to intentionally seek out rejection for 100 days to "desensitize yourself from the pain."

On Day 1, he approached a security guard and asked to borrow $100. When the guard asked "Why?", Jiang panicked, mumbled an apology, and fled. "I felt, wow, this is like the microcosm of my life," Jiang said. "Every time I feel the slightest rejection, I would just run as fast as I could."

On Day 2, he went to a burger joint and asked for a "burger refill." The cashier was confused and said no. But this time, Jiang didn't run. "I could have run, but I stayed," Jiang said. Instead of fleeing, he explained: "I love your burger, I love your joint, and if you guys do a burger refill, I will love you guys more." He still didn't get the refill, but he realized the "life and death feeling" he felt on Day 1 was gone simply because he stayed engaged.

On Day 3, he walked into a Krispy Kreme and asked for a custom order: five donuts, interlinked and colored to look like the Olympic rings. "I mean, there's no way they could say yes, right?" Jiang said. But the employee, Jackie, took him seriously. She sketched out the colors and rings, and fifteen minutes later, she handed him a box of custom Olympic donuts.

Remember that the whole point of this challenge was to be rejected. But here Jiang had gone out specifically looking for a "no," and the world gave him a "yes." He spent the next 97 days turning the experiment into a playground, eventually gaining enough confidence to ask to teach a university class without a PhD—and getting accepted.

Jiang realized that the fear of rejection is a skill gap, not a personality defect. By practicing the skill of asking, he found that the thing he feared was rarely as scary as he imagined—and often, it didn't happen at all.

"Rejection was my curse, was my boogeyman," Jiang said. "I turned that into the biggest gift in my life." He ended up buying the company that invented the Rejection Therapy game, turned the experience into a bestselling book, and delivered a TED Talk about his story that racked up 11 million views.

Audacity is a skill to be practiced like any other.

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