No matter what work you do, at a high level you are simply setting goals and building machines to help you achieve them.
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.
Anyone you see succeeding is only succeeding at the things you’re paying attention to – I guarantee they are also failing at lots of other things.
Humility is as important, or even more important, as having the strengths yourself.
The two biggest barriers to good decision making are your ego and your blind spots.
My fear of being wrong pushed me to seek out other smart folks to poke holes in my view.
It is more inconsiderate to prevent people from exercising their rights because you are offended by them than it is for them to do whatever it is that offends you.
I began to experience painful moments in a radically different way. Instead of feeling frustrated or overwhelmed, I saw pain as nature’s reminder that there is something important for me to learn.
Don’t pay as much attention to people’s conclusions as to the reasoning that led them to their conclusions. It is common for conversations to consist of people sharing their conclusions rather than exploring the reasoning that led to those conclusions. As a result, there is an overabundance of confidently expressed bad opinions.
I also feared boredom and mediocrity much more than I feared failure. For me, great is better than terrible, and terrible is better than mediocre, because terrible at least gives life flavor.