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“Extreme people get extreme results.”
Sam Altman
He turned down the extra guns and rode in anyway.
In the summer of 1876, George Custer was offered Gatling guns before marching to the Little Bighorn. He said no.
Captain Edward Godfrey remembered the reasoning. They might hamper the movement at a critical moment.
He was also offered two more cavalry companies. Taking them would have roughly tripled his force to around 2,500.
He declined those too.
At the river he split his command four ways. Reno and Benteen took three companies each, about 120 apiece.
Custer rode north with the rest. Each of the 210 men who followed him died. So did he.
Protecting his speed by refusing artillery and extra troops turned an aggressive move into a reckless one. It wiped out his entire command.
I got back into poker recently and the app I use grades aggression on a scale.
It tracks pre-flop raises, steal attempts and re-raises. Then it slots players into five bands: mouse, passive, balanced, aggressive and maniac.
A mouse checks and calls instead of raising. A maniac bets and raises with almost anything.
The scale struck me because it names a spectrum that applies outside the game.
I started slotting my habits onto it. At this floor, am I a mouse, passive, balanced, aggressive or a maniac?
Courage challenges are the clearest case. My floor is 5 a day. That sits between balanced and aggressive.
Pushing that floor to 13 a day would push me into maniac territory. I would be taking reckless risks just to feed the count.
Sam Altman wrote in 2019 that extreme people get extreme results.
He said nothing about those results being good.
Custer was extreme and got an extreme result. The maniac at a poker table gets an extreme result: they either stack everyone or go broke before the night ends.
The far end of any scale is where the largest outcomes live, in both directions.
My first reaction to the scale was that I didn’t want to be a mouse. Nobody does. It sounds like the worst position on the chart.
The worst position sits off the chart entirely.
A mouse who checks and calls still has a seat, a stack of chips and a shot at the pot. Someone who never sat down holds none of those.
Playing timidly still beats not showing up.
In areas that carry your highest ambitions, a passive setting bleeds opportunity. You have to push the pace.
Where you just need to cover a base or maintain a baseline, a mouse setting does the job. Sizing the habit to the bare minimum keeps the system moving without draining energy from what matters most.
Aggression decides how much you win. Presence makes winning possible at all.
🎛️
What habit are you running on the wrong setting right now?
