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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.
Show Notes
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.
Featuring: Sam Altman, George Custer, Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott, Brian Hunter, Shaan Puri
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Chapters:
(00:00) George Custer refuses the Gatling guns
(00:47) A poker app grades players on an aggression scale
(01:21) Sizing courage challenges to a daily floor
(01:38) Sam Altman on extreme people and extreme results
(01:55) Why nobody wants to be the mouse
(02:23) When to push the pace and when to hold a baseline
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Creators and Guests
SP
Guest
Shaan Puri
Featured in Dru's Notes: What a Poker Table Taught Me About Daily Habits.
What is Dru's Notes?
One mental model each day in a few minutes. Habits, business, building products and thinking clearly. From Dru Riley, founder of Trends.vc.
"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?
Three alternative opening scenes demonstrating the extreme aggression / maniac overreach trap:
In November 1911, Robert Falcon Scott set out for the South Pole. He refused to rely on sled dogs, declining the survival margins Roald Amundsen built into his parallel route with extra supply depots. Scott pushed his men to man-haul their sledges across 800 miles of ice to maximize personal grit and speed. They reached the pole 34 days after Amundsen. On the return march, running on half-rations with no backup margins, Scott and all four companions froze to death in their tent eleven miles from the nearest depot.
In 1981, John DeLorean launched production of his stainless-steel sports car in Northern Ireland. Before proving consumer demand or fixing early factory defects, he doubled the assembly line to 80 cars a day to force volume. The cars piled up unsold in American ports, burning through $175 million in financing in under a year. To keep the factory afloat, DeLorean resorted to a desperate $24 million cocaine smuggling deal, ending in an FBI sting and total company liquidation.
In the spring of 2006, energy trader Brian Hunter held massive natural gas positions for Amaranth Advisors. When early trades paid off, he leveraged his bets further, eventually holding more than half of the entire natural gas futures market on the NYMEX. When market weather forecasts shifted in September, liquidity vanished. In seven days, his hyper-aggressive position lost $6 billion, instantly destroying the hedge fund.
Built 2026-08-18. Queries: "showing up is", "extreme people get extreme results", "extreme results", "aggressive vs passive", "mouse to maniac".
- @SahilBloom (bk2058, f10925, 407K views): https://x.com/SahilBloom/status/1940391950043230466
The older I get, the more I realize that showing up is the key to life. Show up when it’s hard. Show up when no one’s watching. Show up when you don't feel like it. Show up when the rewards are uncertain. Show up. You can never bet against the person who just keeps showing up.
- @ShaanVP (bk333, f483, 129K views): https://x.com/ShaanVP/status/1734084508570575305
Sam Altman said: "extreme people get extreme results"
Do ordinary people get extreme results? ... It also works in the negative ...
Next time I want something, my first question will be: what would an extreme person do here?
- @bluewmist (bk6444, f26326, 499K views): https://x.com/bluewmist/status/1970854343059677579
extreme results come from extreme preparation. years of reading hard books shows in your conversations. years of a strict diet shows in your energy. years of consistency shows in your confidence. years of focus shows in your results.
- @SanSuperSya (bk648, f9252, 1.83M views): https://x.com/SanSuperSya/status/1949803683526357444
I don’t think people understand how important showing up is.
1. "Showing up is always one step ahead of not showing up at all." Confirmed by 8 winners (bk73–bk2058). The mouse-beats-zero note aligns with the highest-engagement cluster.
2. Extreme results cut both ways. Shaan Puri's winner breaks down how the Altman quote applies equally to disaster as to success.
3. Measured Form Profile: median length 185 chars, 60% first-person, 0% carry links.
- haslink: pruned 0.629 vs survived 0.425 → links correlate with deletion.
- lengthchars: pruned median 216.5 vs survived median 124.5 → tighter copy survives.
- Confirm courage challenge numbers (5 floor, 13 aggressive stretch).
- Review alternative opening stories (Scott, DeLorean, Amaranth) vs. Custer.