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1/ Want to be unhappy? Just spend most of your time guessing at what others are thinking about you.
2/ Communication is 9/10 of most things.
3/ Many problems can be solved by taking a day off.
4/ Set personal rules for yourself aligned with your ideals and follow them religiously.
5/ Generosity breeds abundance.
6/ Things can either be learned through years of frustration and failure or through a moment of surrender. Patience, for example.
7/ The older you get, the more critical it is to actively consider changing your mind.
8/ The most difficult thing in business is to refine the thing down to the simplest, most essential, most valuable part and keep it that way.
9/ Do nothing else but decrease the % of your time that is spent on rumination and everything will improve.
10/ The most evolved version of work is fun. Most of us are not there yet.
11/ Creating space between stimulus and response continues to be the most important lever to pull for almost everything — business, health, relationships. I’m having trouble finding a counter-example here.
12/ The less you pay attention, the faster it all goes.
13/ Just like you are the binding constraint in your life. Your team is the binding constraint in your business.
14/ Your results are often just the outcome of the identities you have adopted.
15/ Two things are important in real productivity: 1) making a todo list and 2) putting the right things on the todo list.
16/ In nascent industries and problem spaces, there are still silver bullets to be found.
17/ It's very difficult to find success in business if you're unwilling to quickly take calculated but uncomfortable risks.
18/ Become known for making people feel happy and just watch what happens.
19/ People assume things that have been around forever are the simplest and easiest things. The opposite is true. Take relationships, psychology, parenting, or recruiting, for example.
20/ Business strategy is mostly about ignoring the right things.
21/ Recruiting is the oldest, most critical function in building a business.
22/ Most work product is exceptionally generic. Cut against this grain and you will stand out.
23/ Plants need things - they can get them from nature or, less ideal, from artificial sources, or they suffer. It's a law and there's no way going around it. You are the same.
24/ You do not need 99.9% of things that exist to survive or to be happy. See 99.9% of things from this perspective.
25/ Every moment of every day is an opportunity to shift the course of history for you and those around you.
26/ Surprisingly, changing the outcome of a thing has a lot to do with changing your thinking and feelings about the thing.
27/ The best leaders do everything we think everyone should do, just more intensely: they are intensely honest, they're intensely present, they intensely believe, and they intensely take ownership.
28/ It's rare to find success without doing the daily admin well. You either have to get good at it, or pay someone else to do it for you.
29/ 99.9% of tasks that feel overwhelming and on which you've been procrastinating for weeks will be solved by beginning to work on the task for 2 min.
30/ If you always think in binaries or are very committed to one philosophy/camp, you're going to be wrong A LOT of the time.
31/ What's the worst thing that's going to happen if you just choose to have fun?
32/ Everyone is looking for something and it's never actually money or power or anything like that. It's always something like security or significance or love. This is true in everything human, so it’s true in work and business too.
33/ Businesses, organizations, and teams are gifts that allow us to exercise meaning and create futures other people will live in. See them as such and you will enjoy your work.
34/ The main value most startups will produce is not the functionality of the product but the learning and culture the team members acquire.
35/ The longer it takes you to slow down, the shorter life will be.
36/ Less hot takes, more hard-learned lessons.