If you don’t prioritize, everything seems urgent and important.
If you define the single most important task for each day, almost nothing seems urgent or important.
Oftentimes, it’s just a matter of letting little bad things happen (return a phone call late and apologize, pay a small late fee, lose an unreasonable customer, etc.) to get the big important things done.
The answer to overwhelm is not spinning more plates—or doing more—it’s defining the few things that can really fundamentally change your business and life.
Choose to be happy. Happiness, the Stoics tell us, comes from within. It's a choice. As Seneca put it: "Everything hangs on one's thinking...A man is as unhappy as he has convinced himself he is."
Stop looking for the perfect business model.
A mediocre model with psychotic execution beats a perfect model with mediocre execution.
Every. Single. Time.
Once most people win, they start playing not to lose. But the irony is that you lose by playing not to lose. And the only way to keep winning is to play to win. Which may mean destroying the thing that helped you win last time to get to win next time.
People can help you in many ways throughout life, but there are two things nobody can give you: curiosity and drive. They must be self-supplied.
If you are not interested and curious, all the information in the world can be at your fingertips, but it will be relatively useless. If you are not motivated and driven, whatever connections or opportunities are available to you will be rendered inert.
Now, you won't feel curious and driven about every area of life, and that's fine. But it really pays to find something that lights you up. This is one of the primary quests of life: to find the thing that ignites your curiosity and drive.
There are many recipes for success. There is no single way to win. But nearly all recipes include two ingredients: curiosity and drive.
"The simplest way to clarify your thinking is to write a full page about whatever you are dealing with and then delete everything except the 1-2 sentences that explain it best."
-@JamesClear
Project success comes from having the right conversations. Asking tough questions. Managing expectations. Keeping every stakeholder on board. From saying no.
Fundamentals first.
Tactics last.
"It's more fun to be a fan than a critic. I'm not looking to spend my life tearing things down, when it can be so satisfying to build things up."
-@JamesClear
A lot of very smart people work in strange ways / with a lot of quirks (e.g. contemplating for hours and appearing to do nothing, while then suddenly having 100x output burst).
This usually makes them not a great fit for traditional corporate world, where you often have to fake being busy & work around fixed structures.
The great thing about small teams working in a flexible structure with high autonomy is that you get to witness these quirks manifest into greatness, time and time again.
Many genuinely productive people are misunderstood because their perceived methods many not ‘look’ like hard work from the outside.
Organizations that are able to attract these people at scale & are able to create a culture in which they can flourish, have immense potential for innovation / technological breakthroughs (think OpenAI, SpaceX, ...)