Be More Vine
This year I decided to learn more about wine, so I took my Level 3 course with the WSET Wine School in London.
I learnt a lot - much of which, to be honest, I have now forgotten - but one of the most interesting things was the relationship between quality of wine and the 'toughness' of the life of the grapes that made it.
It might feel like it's a straightforwardly linear relationship: the higher the quality and quantity of nutrients in the soil, the more accommodating the environment, etc., the better the input (grape) and therefore finished product (wine). But it doesn't really work like that at all.
Instead, it's more of an inverted U-shape. Clearly there needs to be enough water, sunlight, nutrients, etc. for the vines to be able to survive - you won't find great wine coming out of the desert, nor the Arctic, for obvious reasons.
But too much of the things the vine needs to survive on actually leads to pretty underwhelming wine. One reason 'why' is that with an abundance of resource, the plant's energy and focus goes into things like growing thick leaves of the ancillary shrubbery, rather than producing sugars to deliver a high quality grape that has the best chances of propagating the species. In short, it focuses on growth for growth's sake, rather than getting the key bits right that determine long-run survival.
By contrast, when the vines have access to only very scarce resource, they hunker down and put all of their energy into producing good grapes. They fight harder and deeper to find the requisite nutrients and water and put 100% of that into the most important thing for long-term survival.
There is an obvious analogue there to start-up life, and life more broadly.