Principles
Ray's truths fixed my decision chaos. Open mind plus courage equals wins.
business“I wasn’t paying them enough money to put up with my crap.”
AQ's take: Laughed. My ego tantrums cost talent. Pay more, crap less.
Mar 5, 2025To me, the greatest success you can have as the person in charge is to orchestrate others to do things well without you.
AQ's take: True power. Orchestrated teams to win without my daily babysitting.
Mar 5, 2025Making a handful of good uncorrelated bets that are balanced and leveraged well is the surest way of having a lot of upside without being exposed to unacceptable downside.
AQ's take: My investing fail. Balanced bets beat all-in gambles.
Feb 21, 2025It was a terrible and costly error, and I could’ve done something dramatic like fire Ross to set a tone that mistakes would not be tolerated. But since mistakes happen all the time, that would have only encouraged other people to hide theirs, which would have led to even bigger and more costly errors. I believed strongly that we should bring problems and disagreements to the surface to learn what should be done to make things better.
AQ's take: Smart. Punish mistakes? Hides worse ones. I learned that raw.
Feb 21, 2025I believe that all organizations basically have two types of people: those who work to be part of a mission, and those who work for a paycheck.
AQ's take: Hits home. Paycheck zombies kill my mission-driven teams.
Feb 13, 2025Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.
AQ's take: Maturity check. I chase shiny goods, miss great paths.
Jan 28, 20251. Seek out the smartest people who disagreed with me so I could try to understand their reasoning. 2. Know when not to have an opinion. 3. Develop, test, and systemize timeless and universal principles. 4. Balance risks in ways that keep the big upside while reducing the downside.
AQ's take: My playbook. Disagreed with smart folks, built better systems.
Jan 16, 2025Typically, by doing what comes naturally to us, we fail to account for our weaknesses, which leads us to crash.
AQ's take: Crashed naturally too often. Ignored weaknesses, repeated wipeouts.
Jan 16, 2025My failure to anticipate this, I realized, was due to my being surprised by something that hadn’t happened in my lifetime, though it had happened many times before.
AQ's take: Burned me. Lifetime blind spots ignore history's repeats.
Jan 15, 2025“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.”
AQ's take: Shook me. Ignoring past crashes? That's my startup graveyard reason.
Jan 15, 2025The lesson? When everybody thinks the same thing—such as what a sure bet the Nifty 50 is—it is almost certainly reflected in the price, and betting on it is probably going to be a mistake.
AQ's take: Market truth hurts. I chased 'sure bets,' lost shirts.
Jan 15, 2025Time is like a river that carries us forward into encounters with reality that require us to make decisions. We can’t stop our movement down this river and we can’t avoid those encounters. We can only approach them in the best possible way.
AQ's take: True. Life's river drowned me till I learned decision paddles.
Jan 14, 2025Meditation has benefited me hugely throughout my life because it produces a calm open-mindedness that allows me to think more clearly and creatively.
AQ's take: Meditation saved my fried ADHD wiring. Clear head, killer ideas.
Jan 14, 2025Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals.
AQ's take: Nailed my chaos. Without principles, I repeat dumb mistakes forever.
Jan 10, 2025To be principled means to consistently operate with principles that can be clearly explained.
AQ's take: This exposes me. I act on whims, can't explain my 'genius' decisions.
Jan 10, 2025If you can think for yourself while being open-minded in a clearheaded way to find out what is best for you to do, and if you can summon up the courage to do it, you will make the most of your life.
AQ's take: Freed my brain. ADHD me needs open-minded courage to not self-sabotage.
Jan 10, 2025• Think for yourself to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true, and 3) what you should do to achieve #1 in light of #2 . . . . . . and do that with humility and open-mindedness so that you consider the best thinking available to you.
AQ's take: Spot on. I chase wants blindly, ignore truths, crash spectacularly.
Jan 10, 2025I believe that the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well. By failing well, I mean being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game.
AQ's take: Ouch. My epic fails taught me: learn big without dying broke.
Jan 10, 2025Experience taught me how invaluable it is to reflect on and write down my decision-making criteria whenever I made a decision, so I got in the habit of doing that.
AQ's take: Guilty. I decide, regret, repeat. Writing fixes my forgetful brain.
Jan 10, 2025The most important thing is that you develop your own principles and ideally write them down, especially if you are working with others.
AQ's take: Yes. My teams thrive on my written rules, not vague vibes.
Jan 10, 2025