Thoughtful disagreement is not a battle; its goal is not to convince the other party that he or she is wrong and you are right, but to find out what is true and what to do about it.
Meditate. I practice Transcendental Meditation and believe that it has enhanced my open-mindedness, higher-level perspective, equanimity, and creativity. It helps slow things down so that I can act calmly even in the face of chaos, just like a ninja in a street fight. I’m not saying that you have to meditate in order to develop this perspective; I’m just passing along that it has helped me and many other people and I recommend that you seriously consider exploring it.
My approach was to hire, train, test, and then fire or promote quickly, so that we could rapidly identify the excellent hires and get rid of the ordinary ones, repeating the process again and again until the percentage of those who were truly great was high enough to meet our needs.
The most important thing is that you develop your own principles and ideally write them down, especially if you are working with others.
What you will be will depend on the perspective you have.
Having nothing to hide relieves stress and builds trust.
I also feared boredom and mediocrity much more than I feared failure.
Choose your habits well. Habit is probably the most powerful tool in your brain’s toolbox.
Managers who do not understand people’s different thinking styles cannot understand how the people working for them will handle different situations.
Pay for the person, not the job. Look at what people in comparable jobs with comparable experience and credentials make, add some small premium over that, and build in bonuses or other incentives so they will be motivated to knock the cover off the ball. Never pay based on the job title alone.
In time, I realized that the satisfaction of success doesn’t come from achieving your goals, but from struggling well.
While I used to get angry and frustrated at people because of the choices they made, I came to realize that they weren’t intentionally acting in a way that seemed counterproductive; they were just living out things as they saw them, based on how their brains worked.
Great is better than terrible, and terrible is better than mediocre, because terrible at least gives life flavor.
I came to see that people’s greatest weaknesses are the flip sides of their greatest strengths.
Because most people are more emotional than logical, they tend to overreact to short-term results; they give up and sell low when times are bad and buy too high when times are good. I find this is just as true for relationships as it is for investments – wise people stick with sound fundamentals through the ups and downs, while flighty people react emotionally to how things feel, jumping into things when they’re hot and abandoning them when they’re not.
Never say anything about someone that you wouldn’t say to them directly and don’t try people without accusing them to their faces.
Imagine that in order to have a great life you have to cross a dangerous jungle. You can stay safe where you are and have an ordinary life, or you can risk crossing the jungle to have a terrific life. How would you approach that choice?
Heroes inevitably experience at least one very big failure that tests whether they have the resilience to come back and fight smarter and with more determination.
My painful mistakes shifted me from having a perspective of “I know I’m right” to having one of “How do I know I’m right?
Systemize your decision making.