The summary below only records a fraction of its wisdom.
Fill Your 5 Buckets In Right Order
- What you know (knowledge)
- What you can do (skills)
- Who you know (network)
- What you have (resources)
- What the world think of you (reputation)
The first two buckets are your longevity, always keep acquiring the first two. Applied knowledge is a skill, and the more you can expand and apply your knowledge, the more value you’ll create in the world. The value will be repaid in a growing network, abundant resources, and a robust reputation.
To Master, Teach
Being able to simplify an idea and successfully share it with others is both the path to understanding it and the proof that you do. One of the ways we mask our lack of understanding of any idea is by using more words, bigger words, and less necessary words.
To:
- learn something, read
- understand something, write
- master something, teach
You don’t become a master because you’re able to retain knowledge. You become a master when you’re able to release it.
You Must Never Disagree
Healthy conflict strengthens relationships because those involved are working against a problem, unhealthy conflicts weaken a relationship because those involved are working against each other. If you want to keep someone’s brain lit up and receptive to your point of view, you must not start your response with a statement of disagreement.
The strength of any carefully reasoned, logical argument isn’t likely to be recognised when you open with disagreement - regardless of how much evidence you have or how objectively correct you are. Our words should be bridges to comprehension, not barriers to connection.
Disagree less, understand more.
You Must Piss People Off
Don’t be afraid of alienating people with emotional, bold, or even divisive marketing approaches - triggering an emotional response that engage 20% of your audience and enrage 80% can be more valuable than an approach to which 100% indifferent.
Some people will love you.
Some people will hate you.
Some simply won’t care.
You will only connect to the first two. But not the third
Indifference is the least profitable outcome.
Shoot Your Psychological Moonshot First
A psychological moonshot is a relatively small investment that drastically improves the perception of something.
Customer will judge their entire experience on just two moments - the best (or worst) part, and the end.
It’s been repeatedly proven that what motivates us most is how close we are to achieving a goal: we work faster the closer we are to success.
Do not wage a war on reality, invest in shaping perceptions. Our truth is not what we see. Our truth is the story we choose to believe.
Friction Can Create Value
Making things easier isn’t necessarily the path to a psychological moonshot. Sometimes you have to do the opposite: increase friction, wait times, and inconvenience to achieve the same increase in perceived value.
“Values” does not exists. It’s a perception we reach with expectations we meet.
You Must Sweat The Small Stuff
The kaizen philosophy vehemently rejects the notion that only a select few members of a company’s hierarchy are responsible for innovation: it insists that it has to be an everyday task and concern of all employees, at all levels.
If you don’t care about tiny details you’ll produce bad work because good work is the culmination of hundreds of tiny details.
You Must Out-Fail The Competition
If you want to increase your chances of success, you must increase your failure rate. Take risks, fail, push small changes very quickly, and use experiments to measure the impact.
Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment.
Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible (one way door) and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly with great deliberation and consultation.
But most decisions are changeable, reversible (two way doors). If you made these sub-optimal decisions, you can reopen the door and go back through. It should be made quickly by high-judgment individuals or small groups.
As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use heavyweight (one way door) decisions. The end result of this is slowness, in-thoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention.
- Remove bureaucracy
- Fix incentives
- Promote and fire
- Measure accurately
- Share the failure
Failure = Feedback, Feedback = Knowledge, Knowledge = Power. Failure gives you power.
Don’t be an Ostrich
Pain in every walk of life is unavoidable, but the pain that we create by trying to avoid pain is avoidable.
- Pause and acknowledge something is not right
- Review yourself in terms of feelings, behaviors, and emotions.
Speak your truth. - Share the findings of your inspection, without blame and with an emphasis on personal responsibility.
- Seek the truth humbly. This means to listen. But not just listening to hear, listening to understand.
If you want long-term success in business, relationships, and life, you have to get better at accepting uncomfortable truths as fast as possible. When you refuse to accept an uncomfortable truth, you’re choosing to accept an uncomfortable future.
The Power of Negative Manifestation
The pivotal question is “Why will this idea fail?”
The pre-mortem method is a secret weapon for avoiding failure.
- Set the stage: Gather relevant team members to identify potential risks and weaknesses, not to criticize the project or individuals.
- Fast-forward to failure: Ask your team to imagine that the project has failed and encourage them to visualize the scenario in vivid detail.
- Brainstorm reasons for failure: Instruct each team member to independently generate a list of reasons that could have led to the project’s failure, considering both internal and external factors. It’s important that this is done independently and on paper to avoid group-think.
- Share and discuss: Have each member share their reasons for failure, fostering an open and non- judgmental discussion to uncover potential risks and challenges.
- Develop contingency plans.
The Discipline Equation: Death, Time, and Discipline
Discipline is the ongoing commitment to pursuing a goal, independent of fluctuating motivation levels, by consistently exercising self-control, delay gratification and perseverance.
Discipline = (The Value of the Goal + The Reward of the Pursuit) - The Cost of the Pursuit
Being selective about how you spend your time, and who you spend your time with, is the greatest sign of self-respect.