Remember that the quality of the life you get will depend largely on the quality of the decisions that you make as you pursue your goals.
Typically, people’s conflicting beliefs or conflicting interests make them unable to see things through another’s eyes. That’s not good and it doesn’t make sense.
Tough love is effective for achieving both great work and great relationships.
But a note of caution is in order too: When thoughts and instructions come to me from my subconscious, rather than acting on them immediately, I have gotten into the habit of examining them with my conscious, logical mind.
For most people, being part of a great community on a shared mission is even more rewarding than money. Numerous studies have shown there is little to no correlation between one’s happiness and the amount of money one accumulates, yet there is a strong correlation between one’s happiness and the quality of one’s relationships.
An organization is a community with a set of shared values and goals. Its morale and smooth functioning should always take precedence over your need to be right – and besides, you could be wrong.
You better make sense of what happened to other people in other times and other places because if you don’t you won’t know if these things can happen to you and, if they do, you won’t know how to deal with them.
To be a successful entrepreneur, the same is true: One also has to be an independent thinker who correctly bets against the consensus, which means being painfully wrong a fair amount. Since I was both an investor and an entrepreneur, I developed a healthy fear of being wrong and figured out an approach to decision making that would maximize my odds of being right.
People with proven track records in a certain area would get more believability, or decision-making weight, within that area. By recording these qualities in people’s Baseball Cards, others who’d never worked with them before could know what to expect from them.
From very early on, whenever I took a position in the markets, I wrote down the criteria I used to make my decision. Then, when I closed out a trade, I could reflect on how well these criteria had worked.
Mistakes will cause you pain, but you shouldn’t try to shield yourself or others from it. Pain is a message that something is wrong and it’s an effective teacher that one shouldn’t do that wrong thing again.
The key is to fail, learn, and improve quickly.
Remember that when it comes to assessing people, the two biggest mistakes you can make are being overconfident in your assessment and failing to get in sync on it.
However, rather than blindly following the computer’s recommendations, I would have the computer work in parallel with my own analysis and then compare the two. When the computer’s decision was different from mine, I would examine why. Most of the time, it was because I had overlooked something. In those cases, the computer taught me. But sometimes I would think about some new criteria my system would’ve missed, so I would then teach the computer. We helped each other.
Encounters like these have taught me that human greatness and terribleness are not correlated with wealth or other conventional measures of success. I’ve also learned that judging people before really seeing things through their eyes stands in the way of understanding their circumstances – and that isn’t smart.
People who do this fail because they are stubbornly stuck in their own heads.
I’ve also learned that judging people before really seeing things through their eyes stands in the way of understanding their circumstances – and that isn’t smart.
Learn about your people and have them learn about you through frank conversations about mistakes and their root causes.
My family, my extended family of co-workers, and my work have all been extremely important to me.
We diagnosed why in the same way an engineer would diagnose why a machine is operating suboptimally so it could be reengineered to perform better.