Asking others who are strong in areas where you are weak to help you is a great skill that you should develop no matter what, as it will help you develop guardrails that will prevent you from doing what you shouldn’t be doing. All successful people are good at this.
Know that nobody can see themselves objectively. While we should all strive to see ourselves objectively, we shouldn’t expect everyone to be able to do that well. We all have blind spots; people are by definition subjective. For this reason, it is everyone’s responsibility to help others learn what is true about themselves by giving them honest feedback, holding them accountable, and working through disagreements in an open-minded way.
It is the rare bird who has the right mix of common sense, creativity, and character to shape change.
It is now generically called “risk parity” investing.
Don’t be afraid to fix the difficult things.
Slow down your thinking so you can note the criteria you are using to make your decision.
Diagnose Problems to Get at Their Root Causes.
Teach and reinforce the merits of mistake-based learning. To encourage people to bring their mistakes into the open and analyze them objectively, managers need to foster a culture that makes this normal and that penalizes suppressing or covering up mistakes.
They move on to fix problems without getting at their root causes, which is a recipe for continued failure.
Be evidence- based and encourage others to be the same.
Encounters like these have taught me that human greatness and terribleness are not correlated with wealth or other conventional measures of success.
Most people who haven’t had direct contact with the leadership of their own and other countries form their views based on what they learn in the media, and become quite naive and inappropriately opinionated as a result.
As a result, I tended to hire people who were the same way – who would dive right into challenges, figure out what to do about them, and then do it. I figured that if they had great character, common sense, and creativity, and were driven to achieve our shared mission, they would discover what it took to be successful if I gave them the freedom to figure out how to make the right decisions.
My ultimate goal is to create a machine that works so well that I can just sit back and watch beauty happen.
I recommend Richard Dawkins’s and E. O. Wilson’s books on evolution. If I had to pick just one, it would be Dawkins’s River Out of Eden.
But while almost all of us quickly agreed on the principles intellectually, many still struggled to convert what they had agreed to intellectually into effective action. This was because their habits and emotional barriers remained stronger than their reasoning.
Be willing to “shoot the people you love.” It is very difficult to fire people you care about.
Great cultures bring problems and disagreements to the surface and solve them well, and they love imagining and building great things that haven’t been built before.
He who lives by the crystal ball is destined to eat ground glass.
Liberal” had ceased to mean being in favor of progress and had come to mean “paying people not to work.