Introduction
- Choose a set of principles to guide yourself in work and personal life. Everyone’s principles are different but those you surround yourself with will probably have similar ones
- Key to success is knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well. Experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game.
- Learn how to weigh people’s inputs so that you chose the best ones (believability weighting)
- Write down your decision making criteria (principles) and use this as a recipe for decision making. As you test your principles you can refine and evolve them.
Life Principles
Embrace Reality and Deal With It
- Being hyperrealistic will help you choose your dreams wisely and then achieve them
- Sometimes must choose between savoring life versus making an impact
- Most people fight seeing what’s true when it’s not what they want it to be. This is bad since it’s important to understand and deal with the bad stuff since the good stuff will take care of itself
- Radical open-mindedness and radical transparency are invaluable for rapid learning and effective change
- Don’t let fears of what other think of you stand in your way
- Nature as a whole is smarter than mankind. Let nature teach you how reality works
- Don’t get hung up on your views of how things “should” be because you will miss out on learning how they really are
- To be “good” something must operate consistently with the laws of reality and contribute to the evolution of the whole
- Adaptation through rapid trial and error is in valuable
- The need to have meaningful work is connected to man’s innate desire to improve
- People that overweigh the first-order consequences of their decisions and ignore the effects of second and subsequent order consequences rarely reach their goals
- Happiness will come from taking responsibility for making your decisions well instead of complaining about things beyond your control.
- Whatever your nature is there are many paths that will suit you, so don’t fixate on just one
Use the 5-Step Process to Get What You Want Out of Life
- Have Clear Goals
- Identify and don’t tolerate the problems that stand in the way of achieving those goals
- Accurately diagnose the problems to get at their root causes
- Design plans that will get you around them
- Do what’s necessary to push these designs through to results
- Face each of these steps one-at-a-time do not blur them together
- Don’t mistake the trappings of success for success itself
- 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
- When a problem stems from your won lack of talent or skill, most people feel shame. Get over it.
- Design a good plan – too many people make the mistake of spending virtually no time on designing because they are preoccupied with execution. Remember: Designing precedes doing!
- Have humility so you can get what you need from others
Be Radically Open Minded
- The two biggest barriers to good decision making are your ego and your blind spots
- To be effective you must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true
- If you can recognize that you have blind spots and open-mindedly consider the possibility that others might see something better than you- and that threats and opportunities they are trying to point out really exist- you are more likely to make good decisions
- Remember that you’re looking for the best answer, not simply the best answer that you can come up with yourself.
- If a number of different believable people say you are doing something wrong and you are the only one who doesn’t see it that way, assume you are probably biased
Understand that People are Wired Very Differently
- Relationships are the greatest reward obtained by mankind
- Collective interest is best for the individuals making up an organization even more so than self-interest
- Try to analyze subconscious thoughts to make the best decisions
- Try to categorize other people to examine how and why they are making certain decisions
Lean How to Make Decisions Effectively
- Decision making is a two-step process first learning and then deciding
- Be imprecise and don’t get caught up on details
- You get 80% of the value out of 20% of the information or effort
- Make your decisions as expected value calculations
Work Principles
- Tough love is effective for achieving both great work and great relationships
- A believability-weighted idea meritocracy is the best system for making effective decisions
Trust in Radical Truth and Radical Transparency
- Realize you have nothing to fear from knowing the truth
- Share the things that are hardest to share
Cultivate Meaningful Work and Meaningful Relationships
- Be loyal to the common mission and not to anyone who is not operating consistently with it
- Make sure people know the difference between fairness and generosity
- Remember that most people will pretend to operate in your interest while operating in their own
Create a Culture Which it Is Okay to Make Mistakes and Unacceptable Not to Learn from Them
- Recognize that mistakes are a natural part of the evolutionary process
- Don’t worry about looking good, worry about achieving your goals
- Remember to reflect when you experience pain
Get and Stay in Sync
- Conflicts are essential for great relationships
- Be open-minded and assertive at the same time
- Watch out for assertive “fast talkers”
Believability Weight Your Decision Making
- Recognize that having an effective idea meritocracy requires that you understand the merit of each person’s ideas
- Remember that everyone has opinions and they are often bad
- Find the most believable people possible who disagree with you and try to understand their reasoning
- Understand how people came by their opinions
- Pay more attention to whether the decision-making system is fair than to whether you get your way
Recognize How to Get Beyond Disagreements
- Make sure people don’t confuse the right to complain, give advice, and openly debate with the right to make decisions
- Once a decision is made, everyone should get behind it even though individuals may still disagree
- The ability to self-assess, including one’s own weaknesses, is the most influential factor in whether a person succeeds
Remember That the Who is More Important than the What
- The ultimate responsible party will be the person who bears the consequences of what is done
- Companies don’t make decisions – People do.
Hire Right, Because the Penalties for Hiring Wrong are Huge
- When hiring goal is to put the right people in the right design
- Both people expressing their own views and those considering others’ views need to take each other’s differences into account.
- Recognize that performance in school doesn’t tell you much about whether a person has the values and abilities you are looking for.
- Show candidates your warts
- Remember that in great partnerships, consideration and generosity are more important than money
Constantly Train, Test, Evaluate, and Sort People
- Understand that you and the people you manage will go through a process of personal evolution
- Experience creates internalized learning that book learning cant replace
Manage as Someone Operating a Machine to Achieve a Goal
- Constantly compare your outcomes to your goals
- For every case you deal with, your approach should have two purposes: 1) move you closer to your goals 2) train and test your machine
- Think like an owner and expect the people you work with to do the same
- Watch out for people who confuse goals and tasks, because if they can’t make that distinction, you can’t trust them with responsibilities
- Escalate when you can’t adequately handle your responsibilities
Perceive and Don’t Tolerate Problems
- To perceive problems, compare how the outcomes are lining up with your goals
- Be very specific about problems; don’t start with generalizations
Diagnose Problems to Get at Their Root Causes
- To diagnose ask the following: 1) Is the outcome good or bad 2) Who is responsible for the outcome 3) If the outcome is bad, is the responsible party incapable and/or is the design bad?
- Maintain an emerging synthesis by diagnosing continuously
Design Improvements to Your Machine to Get Around Your Problems
- Systemize your principles and how they will be implemented
- Build the organization around goals rather than tasks
- Use double-do rather than double-check to make sure mission-critical tasks are done correctly
- Keep your strategic vision the same while making appropriate tactical changes as circumstances dictate
- Have the clearest possible reporting lines and delineations of responsibilities
- Constantly think about how to produce leverage
Do What You Set Out to Do
- Work for goals that you and your organization are excited about
- Don’t get frustrated. If nothing bad is happening to you now, wait a bit and it will.
- Ring the bell – When you and your team have successfully pushed through to achieve your goals, celebrate!
Use Tools and Protocols to Shape How Work is Done
- Having systemized principles embedded in tools is especially valuable for an idea meritocracy
Don’t Overlook Governance
- All organizations must have checks and balances
- No governance system can substitute for a great partnership
We work with others to get three things:
- Leverage to accomplish our chosen missions in bigger and better ways than we could alone
- Quality relationships that together make for a great community
- Money that allows us to buy what we need and want for ourselves and others
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