...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...
...Articulate the patterns of how to operate well that will most strengthen and preserve the company over the long term – principles and practices – and consider this operating framework a shared backdrop that underlies the specifics of all the company’s briefs, and informs how owners work...
...Everyone experiences dips in their productivity. Everyone has off days. What separates top performers is their ability to prevent and quickly recover from these dips. Every setback can be used as an opportunity to improve yourself and your systems...
...But it turns out that uncountable words like trust, honesty, commitment, passion, connection and quality are a fine thing to focus on...
...Once you know which takes top place, consider taking it to an extreme, to its logical conclusion, and optimizing your entire life around that top priority, letting go of almost everything else...
...Not everything we do with the aim of making ourselves safer has that effect. Sometimes, knowing there are measures in place to protect us from harm can lead us to take greater risks and cancel out the benefits. This is known as risk compensation. Understanding how it affects our behavior can help us make the best possible decisions in an uncertain world...
...Personalize and send it to the right person...Emphasize how responding will benefit the reader...Make it short and clear...
...Trends don’t determine whether we’ll be able to accomplish something tomorrow. But seeing and then understanding the trends allows us to work with the wind at our backs, instead of fighting it...
...But when it comes to knowledge work, we act as if preventative maintenance isn’t required. We let our email inboxes pile sky-high, continue dumping hundreds of files into every corner of our computer, stick any random thing onto our calendar, and have to do’s scattered across any number of places...
...I was wiped out. But, it was only 11 a.m., and I had a long list of things to finish before the weekend...
...We make a map so we can leave things out...
...Relentlessly prioritize to avoid the wrong high-quality work... (Ed. note: we would recommend these recommendations to others, not just people in a startup)
...The Law of Triviality states that the amount of time spent discussing an issue in an organization is inversely correlated to its actual importance in the scheme of things...
...Holding back is selfish, because it deprives the group of your insight at the same time that it normalizes non-participation...
...It would do us well to give ourselves more credit—we’ve all survived occurrences that once seemed like the worst-case scenario, and we can survive many more...
...Ideas will be generated much faster than there's bandwidth to execute on them, so you're doing something right if your backlog is growing indefinitely...
...Perhaps there are many solutions that do not even occur to us, because they resemble passivity rather than action, and we are so deeply trained to hustle...
