Pillar I: The Self
Fill your five buckets in the right order
- What you know - knowledge
- What you can do - skills
- Who you know - network
- What you have - resources
- What the world thinks of you - reputation
A job that gives more cash (resources), but gives less knowledge and few skills is a low-paying job.
Those who hoard gold have riches for a moment. Those who hoard knowledge and skills have riches for a lifetime.
If you want to master something, teach it. Being able to understand and teach an idea is a path to understanding it.
The person who learns the most in the class is the teacher.
You become a master when you are able to release knowledge, not when you retain it.
Do not start a conversation with disagreement, start with what you share in common, what you agree on, and the parts of argument you can understand.
Make the other person feel heard and reply in a manner that they feel understood.
The key to changing someone’s mind is find to a shared belief that will keep their brain open to your point of view.
Do the thing you fear, and keep doing it. This is the quickest and surest way ever to conquer fear.
Stop telling yourself you are not qualified. Growth happens when you start doing things you are not qualified to do.
Change is only going to get faster - so expect your feelings of something that doesn’t make sense and conflicts with what you already know to increase.
Takings no risks will be your biggest risk. If you live avoiding risk, you risk missing out on life.
You can’t quit when nobody’s watching. You are what you do when no one is watching.
The most convincing sign that someone will achieve new results in the future is their current behaviour.
Your sleep will be the foundation of your success.
You have limited willpower. It is a muscle and like any other muscle, it will diminish the more you use it.
Your habits must be small, achievable and realistic if you wish to achieve them.
To build a new habit, give yourself healthier and less addictive rewards when you complete the routines triggered by the cue.
There is no greater form of gratitude than taking care of yourself.
Those who have no time for exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness.
Pillar II: The Story
People who are busy are happier than people who are idle.
What motivates us most is how close we are to achieving a goal: we work faster the closer we are to success.
Your truth is not what you see. Your truth is the story you choose to believe.
Pillar III: The Philosophy
When things are easy to do, the outcome of doing or not doing them is invisible in the short-term.
True innovation is almost always born from the sweat and determination of persistent individuals and great teams bound together by the right culture and philosophy.
If you don’t care about tiny details, you’ll produce bad work because good work is the culmination of hundreds of tiny details.
The pursuit of perfection is a matter of discpline, not heroism.
Schedule weekly check-ins for everything in your life. The smallest seeds of today’s negligence will bloom into tomorrow’s biggest regrets.
To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it is not going to work, it is not an experiment.
Decisions should and can be made by high judgement individuals or small groups. Get to 51% certaininity, and make the decision.
Systems like bureaucracy are a tax on human ingenuity, energy and entrepreneurism. With things around the world changing so fast, doing anything to slow down your company’s rate of experimentation at this point in history is a death wish.
Companies don’t have one company culture; every manager in an organization creates a sub-culture underneath them.
Influence trickles down: you need the people at the highest point in the company to be the most avid disciples of your cultural values.
One bad manager can destroy the morale, motivation and optimism of a great team of perfectly capable employees.
You cannot improve what you don’t measure.
The first step before anybody else in the world believes it is you have to believe it.
Failure = Feedback, Feedback = Knowledge, Knowledge = Power. Failure gives power.
Mistakes usually stem from not taking action rather than taking an incorrect decision.
Pain in every walk of like is unavoidable, but the pain that we create by trying to avoid pain is avoidable.
You cannot reach your highest potential without a better relationship with discomfort, bad news and inconvenient truths.
Steps to not being an ostrich:-
- Pause and Acknowledge
- Review Yourself
- Speak Your Truth
- Seek the Truth - Listen to understand, rather than listening to hear. Listen from the perspective of a partner, intent on overcoming an adversary, rather than the perspective of an adversary that’s looking for victory.
You have to get better at accepting uncomfortable truths as fast as possible. When you refuse to accept an uncomfortable truth, you’re choosing to accept an uncomfortable future.
Pressure is a privilege - it only comes to those who earn it.
Stress is an internal psychological response whereas pressure is an external environmental force.
A life without pressure is a life without purpose. Don’t try to get rid of pressure, try and change your relationship with it altogether.
Adopt a ‘stress is enhancing’ mindset. Hard is the price you pay for an easy tomorrow.
You can determine how successful one will be by looking at how they deal with uncomfortable conversations.
The value of any skill is determined by the context in which it is required.
The perception of a skill’s rarity influences how much people value it.
To be considered the best in your industry, you don’t need to be the best at any one thing. You need to be good at a variety of complementary and rare skills that your industry values and your competitors lack.
The allocation of your time will determine will determine if you succeed or fail in your life’s work. How you allocate your time is the centre point of your influence.
Discpline is defined as the ongoing commitment to a goal, independent of fluctuating motivation levels by consistently exercising self control, delayed self-gratification and perserverance.
If you want to make long term discpline sustainable, you must do everything you can to limit the psychological friction and material hurdles that are associated with the pursuit of your goal.
Discpline = value of goal + reward of pursuit - cost of pursuit
Being selective with how and who you spend your time with is greatest form of self respect.
Pillar IV: The Team
Every CEO and founder will be judged simply on their ability to
- Hire the best individuals
- Bind them with a culture that gets the best out of them
The most important decision you will make when building a company is hiring the first 10 people.
Your company’s destination will be defined by the sum total of the ingenuity, ideas and execution of the group of people that you assemble. Every great idea, every product you create will come from the minds of the people you hire.
Your ego will insist that you do. Your potential will insist that you delegate.
You do not want employees incapable of independent thought. Everyone at your company should be different in the same way.
The hardest thing to do in a company is to fire people, but it has to be done to protect the culture. The cost of one bad apple can be the loss of many good ones.
Every new hire in your team must raise the culture of your team.
The sole reason why people procrastinate is becuase they’re trying to avoid some kind of psychological discomfort in their life.
The key to overcoming the discomfort is to smallify the task into achievable micro-goals.
Employees are most motivated on their job when they are provided with opportunities for achievement.
How to create a perspective of progress?
- Creating Meaning
- Setting Clear and Actionable Goals
- Providing Autonomy
- Removing Friction
- Broadcasting Progress
The most professionally rewarding feeling in the world is sense of forward motion.
You must treat different players differently to get the best out of them.
Great leaders are fluid, flexible, and full of fluctuation. They are whatever shape they need to be, to complete your motivation.