[Ed. note - bad language ahead]...Unethical assholes are assholes because they care about themselves more than others. They are narcissistic and see the world only in terms of what benefits themselves. Obviously, that’s bad. They are unethical because their cause is bad. Finding a good cause beyond one’s own interests is the first step to becoming an ethical asshole...
...Remember, no matter how fancy a con artist’s tricks or disguises may be, they ALL rely on the same tactics...
...The planning fallacy is the tendency to seize upon the most optimistic timetable for completing a project and ignore inconvenient information that might make you revise that prediction...
...There are two things you can do before the crisis hits...
...These benefits include developing a richer understanding of a topic, increasing your ability to pay attention itself, and enhanced creative thinking...
...While two-way-door decisions can seem life-and-death, especially before you make them, with a little time and effort, they can be tweaked or modified or even reversed...
...Does the outcome of the project–for those you serve and for you–justify what it will take to get it there?...
...Good thinkers understand a simple truth: you can’t make good decisions without good thinking and good thinking requires time. If you want to think better, schedule time to think and hone your understanding of the problem. Good thinking is expensive but poor thinking costs a fortune...
...It suggests that the person we choose is not nearly as important as the relationship we build...
...That means that moving quickly is an advantage that compounds. Being twice as fast doesn’t just double your output; it doubles the growth rate of your output. Over time, that makes an enormous difference...
...That’s why tests aren’t nearly as useful as projects. Just about anything worth learning is worth learning the hard way...
...any company that can enable their people to be fully effective in a distributed fashion, can and should do it far beyond after this current crisis has passed...
...by attacking only the most important and most difficult problems an experienced researcher (a) takes themselves out of circulation, (b) stops making ongoing contributions, (c) loses the habit of success, and (d) risks losing morale, which is so important to research success. I think the solution is to balance one’s work on the more and less important problems: you need to schedule time to do the more important stuff, but should also make sure that you spend some time on less high-risk activities...
...When you’re under extreme stress, it’s not always easy to be patient and understanding with your coworkers. But judging them doesn’t help either. So how do you find and show empathy for your colleagues when your cognitive resources are depleted?...
...The very nature of ‘urgent’ means that it can’t and won’t persist...Important, on the other hand, might hang around for a long time...
...Stay away from people who are world-weary and belittle your ambitions. Unfortunately, this is most of the world. But they hold on to the past, and you want to live in the future...
...When something goes wrong, we often strive to be better prepared if the same thing happens again. But the same disasters tend not to happen twice in a row. A more effective approach is simply to prepare to be surprised by life, instead of expecting the past to repeat itself...
...Sometimes the solution to a problem is worse than the problem itself. It's the Law of Unintended Consequences—and it's more common than you think...
...Our best work involves sorting the important from the rest, along with bringing a point of view and experience to complicated problems. Problems that are interesting because there isn’t a proven, correct answer...
...Which is why I think one of the most valuable lessons Nike offers every employee from the get-go, are clear guidelines on how to be most effective, get the best work done, to continuously and collectively focus on the same goal the Nike way...
