When everything constantly needs approval, you create a culture of nonthinkers.
What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.
When you don’t know what you believe, everything becomes an argument. Everything is debatable. But when you stand for something, decisions are obvious.
Plus, if you’re a copycat, you can never keep up. You’re always in a passive position. You never lead; you always follow. You give birth to something that’s already behind the times – just a knockoff, an inferior version of the original. That’s no way to live.
Workaholics aren’t heroes. They don’t save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is home because she figured out a faster way.
If circumstances change, your decisions can change. Decisions are temporary.
Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier.
Find a judo solution, one that delivers maximum efficiency with minimum effort. When good enough gets the job done, go for it.
If you build software, every error message is marketing.
It’s better to have people be happy using someone else’s product than disgruntled using yours.
Small is not just a stepping-stone. Small is a great destination itself.
It’s like when you’re on hold and a recorded voice comes on telling you how much the company values you as a customer. Really? Then maybe you should hire some more support people so I don’t have to wait thirty minutes to get help.
Failure is not a pre-requisite for success. Already successful entrepreneurs are far more likely to succeed again than who failed.
No time is no excuse.
Easy is a word that’s used to describe other people’s jobs. “That should be easy for you to do, right?” But notice how rarely people describe their own tasks as easy. For you, it’s “Let me look into it” – but for others, it’s “Get it done.
What do you gain if you ban employees from, say, visiting a social-networking site or watching YouTube while at work? You gain nothing. That time doesn’t magically convert to work. They’ll just find some other diversion.
People will respect you more if you are open, honest, public, and responsive during a crisis. Don’t hide behind spin or try to keep your bad news on the down low. You.
As Sir Richard Branson commented in his ode to working remotely: “To successfully work with other people, you have to trust each other. A big part of this is trusting people to get their work done wherever they are, without supervision.”fn3.
Release yourself from the 9am-to-5pm mentality. It might take a bit of time and practice to get the hang of working asynchronously with your team, but soon you’ll see that it’s the work – not the clock – that matters.
Unless you are a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy.