highlights
20 highlights saved, filed under business.
- 01
“I wasn’t paying them enough money to put up with my crap.”
- 02
To me, the greatest success you can have as the person in charge is to orchestrate others to do things well without you.
- 03
Making 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.
- 04
It 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.
- 05
I 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.
- 06
Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.
- 07
1. 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.
- 08
Typically, by doing what comes naturally to us, we fail to account for our weaknesses, which leads us to crash.
- 09
My 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.
- 10
“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.”
- 11
The 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.
- 12
Time 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.
- 13
Meditation has benefited me hugely throughout my life because it produces a calm open-mindedness that allows me to think more clearly and creatively.
- 14
Principles 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.
- 15
To be principled means to consistently operate with principles that can be clearly explained.
- 16
If 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.
- 17
• 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.
- 18
I 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.
- 19
Experience 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.
- 20
The most important thing is that you develop your own principles and ideally write them down, especially if you are working with others.