Principles for Life (2/n)
A collection of assorted rules of thumb, musings, and mental frameworks that have helped me in life and business.
Make the implicit explicit; speak the unspoken. Make your Self known. Ask. People are not mind readers, and hoping things will fall your way is a terrible expectation to carry. The world owes you nothing, people rarely go out of their way because they’re so often in their own heads and narratives, and genius is only valuable if it’s shared.
Everyone is operating in their own model of reality as it makes sense to THEM, not to you. If it doesn’t make sense to you, it’s because it makes sense to them.
Honesty is a better, cheaper, faster long-term strategy than cheating.
Reputation takes the stairs up and the window down. Before you make a questionable decision, ask yourself: “How would I feel about this if it were the headline in the New York Times tomorrow?”
You must first lead yourself before you can lead others. Part of that entails individual excellence - get proficient at finishing ahead of schedule so you have spare time to take care of your people.
Wherever you go, there you are. How you do one thing is how you do everything.
It is much easier to spend a dollar than it is to make a dollar. Similarly, it’s much easier to make money when you have money, and harder to make money when you have no money. The best kind of money spent is money that makes more money.
Build relationships before you need them. Give before you receive, and use the law of reciprocity to your advantage. (Keith Ferrazzi’s book Never Eat Alone is my tactical Bible for this topic)
Tactical emotional intelligence is a skill that often is far more valuable than bona fides, authority, and raw resources. (Chris Voss’ Never Split the Difference is my go-to resource on this subject)
Understand what game you’re playing. Rational problems can be solved via rational approaches, but emotional problems are rarely solved via rational approaches. Likewise, understand where you stand in “Rich vs. King” of company-building.
The “Do Something” Principle: Action alleviates anxiety and reveals answers. Very few life-changing decisions are truly irreversible. Failure is rarely fatal (but avoid financial ruin - it’s harder to recover from). Don’t waste precious time and energy obsessing over “perfect” outcomes.
Work will take up a large portion of your life, so you might as well dream big. The difference between x units of work input leading to y units of output versus 10y units of output often comes down to imagination, ambition, and self-belief. Dreaming big also gives others a bigger pie to join in on when they consider joining you. Lack of ambition and imagination is itself a risk.
Lift others up; it’s easy to stand out when the bar is usually set so low. One specifically-targeted remark about one’s effort is far more memorable than a dozen feel-good (but ultimately glib) platitudes.
Slow is smooth; smooth is fast. Build momentum and protect it with your life - momentum is an expensive thing to lose.
Decide what problems you want to spend your time solving, and outsource the rest. You get to decide your headaches in entrepreneurship.
Fear is your friend if you allow it to be. Emotional mastery is self-mastery.
Use philosophical razors and cognitive principles to your advantage and conserve emotional energy.
Fundamental Attribution Error: An individual's tendency to attribute another's actions to their character or personality, while attributing their behavior to external situational factors outside of their control. (credit: Harvard Business School)
Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Hitchens’ Razor: That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Occam’s Razor: Explanations which require fewer unjustified assumptions are more likely to be correct; avoid unnecessary or improbable assumptions.
Primacy/Recency: People are wired to be more inclined to remember the first and last thing you said. (Useful for pitching)
Embodied Cognition: Tendency to have selectivity in perception, attention, decision making, and motivation based on the biological state of the body. (translation: Take care of your physiology and it will take care of you)
Confirmation Bias: The tendency to search for information that confirms our preconceived notions. (Has a pesky habit of showing up during customer discovery and market research, but can be used to appeal to people’s biases)
Correlation does not imply causation: Umbrellas do not cause rain.
Always question the source of feedback, and question if they’ve earned the right to make their determinations through experience or specific knowledge. People who tear others down often secretly hope you won’t discover they’ve never built anything themselves; the simplest and most directionally accurate advice often comes from people who’ve actually done the work.
BLUF: Communicate the Bottom Line Up Front when making an ask to someone else, instead of the waiting until the end.
Strategize probabilistically but understand you often only need to be right once. (I view most things in life as an Expected Value x Probability calculation)
This is SO GOOD! Most entrepreneur-blogging is full of empty platitudes, but every item on this list is not only actionable but relatable as well. Especially the subtle things like emotional intelligence. That's so often missing from those vapid "work hard play hard" style posts. I love it. Bookmarked.