"There's nothing worse than a motivated idiot." - German saying

I think you are deliberately misrepresenting his post. Is there a particular sentence he actually wrote that you believe is false?

Where have I misrepresented him? He's used a frame that i think is not useful at all. It's not false -- but then again, which of his sentences are actually facts?

For example: "I don’t think there is anything particularly new here. PG says that the definitive description of good founders is “relentlessly resourceful.” I’m pretty sure that “toughness” is a big part of that. Can you take care of yourself and get (sh)it done, or are you a wimp?"

I'm pretty sure that "relentlessly resourceful" and "tough" are largely disjoint. Likewise, taking care of yourself & getting shit done, and folding in the face of adversity, are not as related. Why did he choose those things as either/or? It's a strange choice. So it's not wrong, really, but it's not really right, either.

Being "tough" can help founders be successful, but i don't think it's causal, just highly correlated with what are actually the good predictors. So the author banging his chest and talking about how he can just hear you describing his company as so damn tough is -- while not false -- not very useful.

or how about this: "Tough people choose decisiveness over diligence." That's just terrifying that he would present this as a choice, and i would run away from having him as an operator. First, it's a false dichotomy, but more problematic is that it doesn't matter how decisively tough you are -- if you're shooting from the hip, you'll miss. Is he trying to address analysis paralysis? Because if so, that's a very strange choice in language he's used.

Put another way: In the post above by jiu-jitsu practitioner where he is describing grit, i think he's absolutely right to say that grit is something incredibly useful in non-physical arenas. As a boxer, i've watched a lot of people get through some really brutal places. However, that 'grit' emerges from some very different internal motivations, such as a) raw ambition to be the best, b) a deep fear of the shame of failure, c) for the sheer hell of it, d) because a girl is watching, and even it looked like e) from a sublime appreciation of the present moment. (Zen boxer, totally weird) -- but they all were able to push through places where I watch a lot of people quit, stop working, stop pushing themselves, etc.

When Mr. Godin is talking about the importance of actually shipping software, and the difference between people who ship, and people who don't -- he's not framing that in terms of tough vs. wimp. Those words are pretty loaded with anthropological baggage.

Actually, i'm finding myself repeating what api is saying upthread, so i'll join in up there :) My real contribution is that if 'grit' is the observed behavior, i think 'toughness' is the wrong trait to look for that produces it.

See how useful it was to get specific? Now that you have to make specific claims

    I'm pretty sure that "relentlessly resourceful" and
    "tough" are largely disjoint. 

we can see they're false. Toughness and relentless resourcefulness are certainly not disjoint. Toughness is most of relentlessness. People who aren't tough relent, because they get discouraged when things don't go their way.

No, they're not false at all. I'm looking at your definition of Relentlessly Resourceful (RR), as understood from the essay, and his definition of tough. Those two seem to be vastly different.

As I went on to say, where they're not disjoint, they're probably correlated, not causal, and i cite some examples where people i know exhibited Relentless Resourcefulness WITHOUT demonstrating the OP's definition of toughness. (Although, perhaps they meet your definition of tough, which is why you're quickly judging my claim as false, and we're having a miscommunication on terminology).

I can't use your definition of tough, so i responded to his. Look at his third sentence:

  "These guys (and gals) were not the young, sheepish,
   technical founders you’d expect. These guys are 
   operators – savvy, confident, operators."

Furthermore, if someone sets out to find RR but looks instead for tough, you'll miss the set of people who are relentlessly resourceful -- but who are still "young, sheepish technical founders." Not all rectangles are squares, etc.

Is that definitive? Is it always true? No, of course not -- we're talking about human properties that vary as much as humans. But I wouldn't want to look for relentless resourcefulness by looking for toughness.

He's looking at confidence & poise as indicators of toughness. He saw the demo day, and he's dividing people into operators and sheepish 'technical founders'.

You may say tough as a shorthand for relentless resourcefulness. He's saying tough to mean the opposite of geek.

So the question, i suppose, is how do you, pg, evaluate people for toughness? The OP seems to be using a mix of posture & anthropology combined with business benchmarks.

  "Wimps don’t really get anything done – they don’t release
  a product, they don’t make sales, they don’t raise money,
  hey balk at big problems, they quit before they should."

His definition of "wimp" seems totally irrelevant to actual performance under pressure, and would be a terrible litmus test. Can you ship without ever pushing through low points? Yes, you can ship crap. Can you make sales & raise money without being RR? Yes, you can be lucky. Is it evident, or can you see -- from a demonstration day! -- when people have balked at big problems or quit before they should? Probably not!

Finally, his definition of wimp/tough might be "true" -- whatever the hell that means -- but i find it useless, and maybe worse than useless if it leads you disqualify many people who are RR. True/False is easy, but useful/useless is much harder to evaluate.

A useful statement about the mental traits of founders would be nice to have. A useful test would be even better. That's what i'm trying to get at.

You often say this "point out a sentence that is false", but it's not that simple. Even though no sentence is mathematically false taken on its own, the combination can be or strongly imply complete and utter bullshit. (I'm not saying that that's the case here)

Can you give me an example of any existing blog post or essay where every sentence is true, but they somehow imply something that isn't?

I believe in theory this might be possible, but it seems like it would be vanishingly rare. And if so, then anyone who disagrees with something ought to be able to find some sentence in it where the writer goes wrong.

Oh, if every sentence is true then the combination is true. But true or false is not an exact property of a sentence, it's a fuzzy property of a sentence in a particular context. For example the meaning of "good founders are tough" depends on what's good and what's tough. The meaning of tough could be "doesn't give up quickly", but could also be "doesn't cry when he gets hit in the face" or many other things.

So take this blog post. The entire meaning of it hinges on the meaning of "wimp" and "though". And while the reader could fill in a meaning of these two words that makes the blog post make sense, many readers here seem to have interpreted it with a different meaning than was probably intended by the author. For these readers the blog post reads like bullshit.

A sentence in a text can influence the meaning of another sentence. For example:

"I don’t think there is anything particularly new here. PG says that the definitive description of good founders is “relentlessly resourceful.” I’m pretty sure that “toughness” is a big part of that. Can you take care of yourself and get (sh)it done, or are you a wimp?"

This partially establishes what the author means by "tough" and "wimp". But in my opinion it's not clear enough what he means by "though" and "wimp" to conclusively say that the blog post is correct or to say that the blog post is incorrect. It depends on the preconceived notions of the reader.

p.s. so a simple example would be:

"Tough people don't cry"

"Good founders are tough"

Even though both are not false in isolation (but not true either!), the combination is false.

Yes: A post where every sentence is an observation of a fact, but the implicit generalization of those facts is false.

I.e., a successive series of observations of white swans, written with a strong narrative, to strongly imply that all swans are white.