But this approach fails in cases where the future is different from the past and you don’t know the cause-effect relationships well enough to recognize them all. Understanding these relationships as I do has saved me from making mistakes when others did, most obviously in the 2008 financial crisis. Nearly everyone else assumed that the future would be similar to the past. Focusing strictly on the logical cause-effect relationships was what allowed us to see what was really going on.
Understanding what is true is essential for success, and being radically transparent about everything, including mistakes and weaknesses, helps create the understanding that leads to improvements.
Distinguish big problems from small ones. You only have so much time and energy; make sure you are investing them in exploring the problems that, if fixed, will yield you the biggest returns. But at the same time, make sure you spend enough time with the small problems to make sure they’re not symptoms of larger ones.
Knowing that I could be painfully wrong and curiosity about why other smart people saw things differently prompted me to look at things through the eyes of others as well as my own. This allowed me to see many more dimensions than if I saw things just through my own eyes.
Specifying our investment decision-making criteria in algorithms and running historical data through them, or specifying our work principles in algorithms and using them to aid in management decision making, are just bigger and more complicated versions of that smart thermostat.
I attribute as much of my success to what I’ve learned about the brain as I do to my understanding of economics and investing.
Idealists who are not well grounded in reality create problems, not progress.
It is a fundamental law of nature that you get stronger only by doing difficult things.
Go to the pain rather than avoid it.
As Freud put it, “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
The main test of a great partnership is not whether the partners ever disagree – people in all healthy relationships disagree – but whether they can bring their disagreements to the surface and get through them well.
Once you identify a problem, don’t tolerate it. Tolerating a problem has the same consequences as failing to identify it. Whether you tolerate it because you believe it cannot be solved, because you don’t care enough to solve it, or because you can’t muster enough of whatever it takes to solve it, if you don’t have the will to succeed, then your situation is hopeless. You need to develop a fierce intolerance of badness of any kind, regardless of its severity.
There is no worse course in leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away.
It’s hard to get everyone to even try to look at the whole picture objectively, let alone to operate in the interests of the whole.
Imagine a world in which you can use technology to connect to a system in which you can input the issue you’re dealing with and have exchanges about what you should do and why with the highest-rated thinkers in the world.
Everyone has at least one big thing that stands in the way of their success; find yours and deal with it.
Moreover, I recognized that managers who do not understand people’s different thinking styles cannot understand how the people working for them will handle different situations, which is like a foreman not understanding how his equipment will behave. That insight led us to explore psychometric testing as a way of learning how people think differently.
Remember that great expectations create great capabilities. If you limit your goals to what you know you can achieve, you are setting the bar way too low.
If conflicts got resolved before they became acute, there wouldn’t be any heroes.
Humility is as important, or even more important, as having the strengths yourself.