...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...
...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...
