Review

This book covers a lot of ground, for an inexperienced entrepreneur about to build a company it would be life changing. It’s a book of common sense, and there’s an incredible amount of wisdom in here. That said, if you’ve been around the block a few times there isn’t much ground breaking or new insight in here.

A must read for entrepreneurs - pair with the Y-Combinator video series ‘How to Start a Startup’ and you’d have a great overview of the problems you’re likely to face and how to navigate them.

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Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• The Messy Middle often isn’t chronicled, because its unappealing and too revealing. Nothing headline worthy yet everything important.
• How do you survive long enough in an industry you know nothing about until you become an expert?
• You need to develop a source of renewable energy → Without any customers or evidence of progress, without a steady stream of rewards, you will feel empty. You have to manufacture optimism

Endure

• You can get the important stuff right and still lose by not enduring enough
• Change your path but not the destination
• Leave conversations with energy (especially when answers are not clear). Be an energy giver not a taker, leave people with more energy than when they start.
• Self-awareness starts with the realisation that when you're at a peak or valley, you're not your greatest self.
• You are many decisions away from success, but always one away from failure.
• Your weird is the source of your power. Don't try to fit in, with what is common and familiar.
• Don't do insecurity work (no intention, doesn't move things forward, so quick you can do it a few times a day)
• 6 phases of leading a reset: feeling anger, removing yourself, dissecting the situation, acknowledging your role, drafting your narrative, and then getting back into the game.
• Few people can stay loyal enough to strategy to have their vision realised. That's the hardest part
• Bezos focused on the longterm. If we have a good quarter, it's because of what we did 3-5 years ago. There's a massive lag between innovations and results
• The easy path will only take you to a crowded place. There's often an easy option and a best option. Your competitors can follow the easy option.
• Break longterm goals down into chapters.Chapters are clear goals - underscored by why they’re important - teams do tactics
• To disrupt and industry be a thesis driven outsider → and stay alive long enough to become an expert
• The best way to complain is to make things. If you’re actually willing to do the work, you’ll have more influence than those who simply do their jobs.

Optimise

• Why did that work? How do you do it again? Optimise the hell out of everything that gets traction
• Optimisation stems from a conviction that you can do better.
• On building teams…
• Resources become depleted, resource-fullness doesn’t.
• Refactor, Refactor, then hire. Initiative > experience. Diversity drives differentiation
• Sometimes you’ll need to suppress the team’s immune system to get change through.
• Foster Psychological Safety - build risk taking into the system. Top teams report more mistakes. Free to share things without recriminations
• Foster apprenticeship - find a way for the new to work with the experienced.
• Shed the bad to keep the good - balance the needs of individuals with that of the team and the mission. People need to admire their team members and see their commitment.
• Culture is created through stories - the early ones are very important (Jeff Bezos desk doors). Helps team members work out if something is uniquely x, or not... and right from wrong
• We make stuff often, and therefore fail often.
• Be frugal with everything except your bed, your chair, your space and your team
• We vastly underestimate how much the products we use impact the products we create.
• The person who did the work should present the work. Be wary of false attribution
• Never outsource your competitive advantage
• Install process for your team, to solve their problems, not to quell your anxiety.
• Give them problems, let them choose how to work through them. Respect people’s work styles
• Done walls - decorated with completed project plans and checklists
• Present your ideas don’t promote them
• Delegate - entrust - debrief - repeat
• make sure everyone knows what they’re doing and how it contributes to the mission / vision
• Post-Mortem everything
• Be explicit when you are asking for something - you’re more likely to get what you want
• There is power in brevity
• Leaders who can’t make decisions accrue organisational debt.
• Our desire to make progress means we don’t tackle the bigger more important problems
• Observe and learn, don’t emulate.Be your greatest competitor
• The greatest thinkers anchor their ideas around a central truth, one that they believe is unique and unrealised by others.
• The greatest risk is taking a shortcut in the one area that distinguishes you the most
• every product has a few differentiating attributes, don’t take shortcuts, rush, or strip down the process of creation for these features
• speed through the generic stuff - take time to perfect the few things that you’re proud of
• Asking for permission leads to hesitation or rejection.
• Very few critical and difficult decisions can be made in a group. BUT the knowledge around you is greater than the knowledge within you. Tap into the knowledge, but don’t give tough problems to committees.
• Simple is sticky. It’s hard to make a simple product, it’s even harder to keep it simple. Make one subtraction for every addition
• The greatest cost of trying to sustain too many initiatives is having too little to thrust behind each goal
• Beware of creativity that compromises familiarity
• Effective design is invisible, good design is as little design as possible
• Never stop crafting the first mile of your products experience
• Do > Show > Explain - getting new users to do something is the most powerful onboarding
• Break incrementalism by questioning core assumptions
• You don’t want all the customers straight away. You want to right group to start iterating with
• The ideal customer is … Willing > forgiving > viral > valuable > profitable
• Build your narrative before your product
• Best to market > first to market
• identify and prioritise efforts with disproportionate impact
• engagement drivers (longterm) interest drivers (short term).
• The information gap. First a situation reveals a painful gap in our knowledge (headline) then we feel an urge to fill this gap and ease that pain (we click)
‣
Loewenstein outlines 5 curiosity triggers
• questions or riddles
• unknown resolutions
• violated expectations
• access to information known by others
• reminders of something forgotten
• Skills and relationships transcend the success or failure of a project
• If somebody asks you to do something, ask them 0 - 10 how much are you asking me?
• Mine contradictory advice and doubt to develop your own intuition
• The danger with measures is their gravity, and how quickly they dictate our daily actions
• Measure each feature by its own measure - determine what each measure is intended to achieve and measure it accordingly. Tow hooks aren’t meant to be used all the time - but they need to be discoverable and effective when needed
• Avoid having too many metrics - the more you track the fewer you’re focusing on changing
• Boil the business down to one or two core metrics.
• Keep evaluating their efficacy and alignment with your longterm goals
• ‘People don’t use that’ is not deep analysis. We don’t want people to use password reset functionality but we should have it
• Do things that don’t scale in the beginning -don’t forget the little things as you scale
• Two types of commitments:
• Active Commitments: investments of time, energy and resources in areas you willingly choose to love and pursue
• Passive commitments: commit to doing something that doesn’t align with your interests. Operating out of guilt rather than intention
• When you stop nourishing something let it go. Everything you do should be an active commitment or nothing at all
• Build a network that amplifies signal - after a while, you need a strong filter, you need to discriminate your information source

The Final Mile

• keep repositioning the ultimate goal as being the furthest away point that you can see

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Part 1: Introduction

• The magic happens in the middle. But we often only talk about starts and finishes.
• The journey is not linear. The reality is jagged peaks and troughs. You can only see where you are in the moment. The fact you’re slowly making progress eludes you
• The Messy Middle often isn’t chronicled, because its unappealing and too revealing
• Nothing headline worthy yet everything important.
• 99u (the conference) is named after this quote:

Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration Thomas Edison

• How do you survive long enough in an industry you know nothing about until you become an expert?
• What entrepreneurs hate to admit - is just how fine the line is between success and failure
• Start, Endure, Optimise then repeat

Start	Joyful. You don’t known what you don’t know. Reality strikes. You will be in free fall. You’ll hit the bottom hard. Realising what’s ahead.
The Middle Endurance + Optimisation	Excruciating struggle. Enduring the valleys and optimising the peaks. Volatility is good for velocity. Bad for morale and anxiety though. Experiments. Customer feedback and seeing your DNA in the product will help keep you going.
Finish	More of a state of mind. The race continues but you’re no longer racing against the clock You can take a break and make a change.

Part 2: Endure

• Endurance is more than surviving late nights with no reward
• You need to develop a source of renewable energy → Without any customers or evidence of progress, without a steady stream of rewards, you will feel empty
• You have to manufacture optimism
• Persistent frustration
• Self belief
• You can get the important stuff right and still lose by not enduring enough

Leading through the anguish and the Unknown

• Short-Circuit your reward system. You won’t see progress or get recognition for a long time.
• Manufacture motivation by lowering the bar for how you define a win, find things to celebrate, milestones along the way
• Don’t go looking for positive feedback. Stay objective. Create a space to talk about what’s not working.
‣
How to deliver news honestly
• State the facts clearly and honestly.
• Explain what went wrong, and what you learnt.
• Explain why taking the action is essential to the mission. What good can come of it.
• Tolerate uncertainty, be in harmony with it. Be comfortable with not knowing and experimenting
• Bringing your idea to fruition will take years of suffering. Commit. Be willing to throw away months of work, if it’s not working.
• Friction creates character. Hardship brings teams together. Don’t avoid struggle. A group collaborating to survive is what aligns interests. What stands in the way becomes the way.
• Zuck helped Sheryl Sandberg when she lost her husband suddenly. He was at her house when she got home, and went to tell her children. He helped her through it like a best friend
• Keep perspective. Remind everyone where they are and what progress they're making. Articulate a vision with passion and confidence, bend reality.
• Hire people who really believe in the mission - who would have FOMO if they weren't working for you.
• Change your path but not the destination
• Leave conversations with energy (especially when answers are not clear). Be an energy giver not a taker, leave people with more energy than when they start.
• "Hey, I know this is rough and we've got some serious work to do, but I also know we've got a good plan and the right people.
• Build relationships with people in different teams across the organisation. Be collaborative and not "correct" (don't follow the process and hierarchy if it doesn't serve the company)
• When you have to take an action that's painful in the moment. DYFJ. Do your fucking job. It can be tempting to wait (time, information) but often best to act

Strengthening your resolve

• Self-awareness starts with the realisation that when you're at a peak or valley, you're not your greatest self.
• know your triggers (to frustration or irritation) - often relate to a core value
• the less defensive you are, the more potential you have. Seek feedback, be open minded
• dispel your sense of superiority and the myths that people believe about you
• You are many decisions away from success, but always one away from failure. Clarity matters. The more you aware you are of yourself and your surroundings, the more data you have - the more competitive you'll be.
• Your weird is the source of your power. Don't try to fit in, with what is common and familiar.
• Larry Page often asked, what would it take to achieve 100x of what you're trying to achieve?
• Tony Fadell on the two types of resets...
• Product based - not meeting the customer needs.
• Engineering based - not being able to implement the plan
• As long as you're gaining confidence in the opportunity and absorbing the lessons learned, you have a renewable energy source. Stop and reset. Describe the lessons learnt (what assumptions changed?). If theres a customer need there keep going, else be ready to realise sunk costs. Strong opinions weekly held.
• Don't do insecurity work (no intention, doesn't move things forward, so quick you can do it a few times a day)
• Focus only forward, remove yourself from what's happened

Prompt Clarity with questions

• Focus on asking the right question, sometimes that's a new question.
• The perfect question is the key to clarity, it unlocks truth and opens minds
• 6 phases of leading a reset: feeling anger, removing yourself, dissecting the situation, acknowledging your role, drafting your narrative, and then getting back into the game.

Embracing the long game

• Playing the long game requires moves that don't map to traditional measures of productivity
• Few people can stay loyal enough to strategy to have their vision realised. That's the hardest part
• Bezos focused on the longterm. We will share our thought process when making bold decisions.
• if we have a good quarter, it's because of what we did 3-5 years ago. There's a massive lag between innovations and results

Startups win by being impatient over a long period of time. Aaron Levie

• Being able to extend your team's hunger and drive over a long period of time is the ultimate form of patience
• Most people are not patient enough to reap the fruits of their own labour. Celebrate persistence over time as much as the occasional short-term wins.
• The easy path will only take you to a crowded place. There's often an easy option and a best option. Your competitors can follow the easy option.

Break the long game down into chapters

• Chapters have a beginning goal, reflection period and reward.
‣
Examples:
• Become a mobile service
• Become a global service
• Become a cash-flow positive service
• Chapters are clear goals - underscored by why they’re important - teams do tactics
• To disrupt and industry be a thesis driven outsider → and stay alive long enough to become an expert. Understand when expertise is an advantage and when it’s a disadvantage

Do the work regardless of whose work it is.

• Everyone has an opinion but few are willing to do something about it.
• The best way to complain is to make things. When you are frustrated or critical, channel that energy into persistent creation.
• There is too much wondering and talking and too little doing. So don’t talk; do. Care indiscriminately. If you’re actually willing to do the work, you’ll have more influence than those who simply do their jobs.

Part 3: Optimise

• Why did that work? How do you do it again? How do you spread it to your team?
• Be open to surprises, and insanely curious about why things happen, and optimise the hell out of everything that gets traction
• Optimisation stems from a conviction that you can do better.
• Incumbents lose their position because their success limits their efforts to optimise
• Optimisation is hardest when you think you have the best solution already

Optimising your team

• Great teams aren’t assembled they’re grown, constantly optimise how you work

Building, Hiring and Firing

• Resources become depleted, resource-fullness doesn’t. Refactor, Refactor, then hire.
• before adding more people to a team, optimise how it works together
• Initiative > experience
• look for hustle and a willingness to learn over industry pedigree
• initiative is contagious, expertise is not
• look for signs of past initiative - initiative comes from obsession
• Diversity drives differentiation
• Your product’s unique attributes distinguish you from the competition. These come from diverse teams, clashes of opinion, diversity. Extending the possible solutions for every problem that you face
• Check you unconscious bias when hiring
• Hire people who have endured adversity. Without courage you can’t practice any other value consistently. Ask potential hires about their most defining challenges
• Look for people who put forward ideas, but are equally keen to build on the ideas of others
• Great creative minds have their daemons. Polarising people can help create bold outcomes. Often you have the fear. Teach the team to value conflict.
• Cultivate your team’s immune system. Ability for the team to kill off foreign and risky ideas. Higher a mix of doers and dreamers. Sometimes you’ll need to suppress the team’s immune system to get change through.
• Teams need to be able to welcome and absorb new people. Empathise with team members, align new joiners strengths with an important task. Close their confidence gap.
• Foster Psychological Safety - build risk taking into the system. Top teams report more mistakes. Free to share things without recriminations
• Real-Time Communication - candid and constant communication is hard in new relationships.
• foster ongoing conversations around expectations. When you see a gap speak up immediately
• Foster apprenticeship - find a way for the new to work with the experienced. Lengthy rotational programs for new hires. 70 (experience) 20 (feedback + coaching) 10 (training)
• Shed the bad to keep the good - balance the needs of individuals with that of the team and the mission
• Run it like a sports team, not a family.
• People need to admire their team members and see their commitment
• Constantly reevaluate the people you have
• Steady states are unstable, keep people moving. Comfort breeds complacency.
• unexpected movement in a team creates opportunities for bench talent to show
• build up the team’s tolerance for change

Culture, tools and space

• Culture is created through stories - the early ones are very important (Jeff Bezos desk doors). Helps team members work out if something is uniquely x, or not... and right from wrong
• Free radical manifesto
• We do work that is rewarding. We demand the freedom to run experiments, participate in multiple projects at once, and move our ideas forward.
• We make stuff often, and therefore fail often.
• We have little tolerance for the friction of bureaucracy, old-boy networks and antiquated best practices.
• We expect to be fully utilised and constantly optimised
• Information, open-source technology and APIs are our personal arsenal
• Be frugal with everything except your bed, your chair, your space and your team
• We vastly underestimate how much the products we use impact the products we create.
• The people who deserve the right credit should get it. The person who did the work should present the work. Be wary of false attribution, was the person really responsible for the success. The best teams are credit sharing not credit seeking.

Structure and Communication

• Understand how others in the industry structure themselves, but do what works for you.
• Never outsource your competitive advantage
• Process - we all need some, but too much is lethal
• Install process for your team, to solve their problems, not to quell your anxiety.
• Spend more time on creating alignment than imposing process - goals and the plan
• Audit processes, and cut them down.
• Don’t rob people of their processes. Give them problems, let them choose how to work through them. Respect people’s work styles.
• Think about your internal brand and message. What do people think of the mission? Do they know it? Create statements and edgy visuals that keep in people’s minds. When you add a new process, give it some beauty.
• Done walls - decorated with completed project plans and checklists
• If a picture is worth 1000 words, then a mockup answers 1000 questions
• ideas are misunderstood unless they are visualised
• product concept decks - show don’t tell, show the thought process and the working
• without a mockup people are trying to interpret a concept and addressing basic questions and miss-understandings
• Present your ideas don’t promote them - ground in reality, focused on problems and solutions. Be clear about what’s uncertain and what’s clear. Be less polished and more real.
• Delegate - entrust - debrief - repeat
• As you scale, you need to rely more on others
• Develop an intuition of what can and can’t be delegated
• People have to feel in control to feel motivated and accountable
• The degree to which you order people you suppress any opportunity for greatness
• employees must feel empowered
• DRI (Directly Responsible Individual)
• Appoint the responsible person
• Appoint the person they are accountable to
• Accountability is about finding out why something didn’t work and making sure it doesn’t happen again
• make sure everyone knows what they’re doing and how it contributes to the mission / vision
• Post-Mortem everything. How did it go? What should we have done differently? What worked well?
• Know how and when to say it
• Is this a one-way share, or a conversation?
• Is the topic sensitive, or potentially controversial?
• Can the topic be addressed spontaneously, or does it require preparation?
• Be explicit about what your product does
• Be explicit when you are asking for something - you’re more likely to get what you want
• There is power in brevity
• shorter emails get faster response times
• fewer words go further and are listened to more intently
• standing meetings - prioritise the point
• Less preamble. Start with your point, don’t end with it.

Clearing the path to solutions

• Leaders who can’t make decisions accrue organisational debt. Technical debt is old code and short-term decisions. Clear obstacles in your organisation, don’t go around them
• When tackling a problem is hard, solve it, make it easier for the next person
• Big problems don’t get solved because we can solve small problems faster. Our desire to make progress means we don’t tackle the bigger more important problems
• Persistent questioning keeps things moving. Why don’t we just try it? Why does it feel we’re having the same meeting over and over again?
• Avoiding conflict stalls progress.

Channel Competitive energy

• Observe and learn, don’t emulate. Sometimes seeing what competitors do should strengthen your resolve.
• If your strategy and goals are different then don’t worry
• If your strategy and goals are the same then ask “Is their tactic better?”
• Let them give you the impetus to act, as long as it aligns with your goals
• Be your greatest competitor

Creative Block

• Disbelieving your own ideas diminishes your creative energy and sets you up to fail
• Paul Graham - It’s easier to tell Zuck he’s wrong, than a new founder, he’s not threatened by it
• The greatest thinkers anchor their ideas around a central truth, one that they believe is unique and unrealised by others. They get curious about what they might be missing. They are willing to change that truth and put down a new anchor

Moving fast

• When it comes to speed and efficiency, the greatest risk is taking a shortcut in the one area that distinguishes you the most
• every product has a few differentiating attributes, don’t take shortcuts, rush, or strip down the process of creation for these features
• speed through the generic stuff - take time to perfect the few things that you’re proud of
• Value the merits of cooking something slowly - move fast and break things BUT also deep attention and patience
• Brain is wired to intensely respond to immediate threats - we struggle to focus on long-term dangers or goals

Ask for forgiveness not permission.

• Asking for permission for something that you know needs to be done... leads to hesitation or rejection. Sometimes to give bold ideas a chance, sometimes you need to act first and then adjust them as necessary.
• Conviction is better than consensus - very few critical and difficult decisions can be made in a group. BUT the knowledge around you is greater than the knowledge within you. Tap into the knowledge, but don’t give tough problems to committees.
• Don’t give resistance to change false hope.

Product Optimisation

• Simple is sticky. It’s hard to make a simple product, it’s even harder to keep it simple.
• Optimising a product is about making it more human friendly

Simplifying and Iterating

• Make one subtraction for every addition
• Kill your darlings - as you do experiments you have to prune back most of what emerges
• The greatest cost of trying to sustain too many initiatives is having too little to thrust behind each goal
• Disney films innovation flow:
• Room 1 Rampant idea generation without limits (as individuals)
• Room 2 Idea aggregation and organisation (together)
• Room 3 Critical review, no restraints or politeness
• As ideas were meshed together in room 2, nobody is personally offended in room 3
• If you don’t think it’s awesome, stop making it. Teams need to admit if they don’t believe in what they are building. If it’s not fucking awesome, switch it up
• Beware of creativity that compromises familiarity
• Too much scrutiny is not helpful, move on when you’re obsessing out of passion and not reason
• Effective design is invisible, good design is as little design as possible
• Never stop crafting the first mile of your products experience
• What happens in the first 30 seconds?
• Prime customers so they know ...
1. Why they’re there
2. What they can accomplish
3. What to do next
• the first mile of a product is typically neglected over time, despite becoming more important over time
• optimise for laziness, vanity and selfishness (give them something quick, now)
• Do > Show > Explain - getting new users to do something is the most powerful onboarding
• Novelty precedes utility, sometimes products are used for something fun before something serious (slack for memes and emojis, before release planning)
• Break incrementalism by questioning core assumptions - don’t get stuck in a local maxima.
• what initial assumptions have changed? what is worth revisiting?
• old assumptions don’t get questioned enough because we’re used to them
• new ideas get shot down too quickly because they’re foreign and challenge conventions
• Foster innovations from within the team, align your team to a mission they identify with, and let them evolve the product

Anchoring to your customer

• Empathy and humility before passion
• spend a couple of weeks learning about customer wants and needs before building anything
• get motivated about a problem (not a topic)
• Run your idea through these filters:
1. Empathy with a need and frustration
2. Humility with the market
3. Passion for the solution
• Engage the right customers at the right time
• You don’t want all the customers straight away. You want to right group to start iterating with
• The ideal customer is
• Willing > forgiving > viral > valuable > profitable
• Willing - most willing to try
• Forgiving - most forgiving for your MVP
• Viral - most likely to share and engage
• Valuable - over their lifetime
• Profitable - over their lifetime
• The people that you want to engage with are different at different stages in your journey
• Build your narrative before your product -
• every creation needs a narrative, the narrative story of what you’re building in the context of why it matters
• it’s what attracts team members and investors
• developing a brand early on, even before investors, helps develop a values driven narrative akin to the company having it’s own voice
• brand needs to be recognisable, understandable and easy to share
• leaders of communities act as stewards not owners
• protect and enrich the network - don’t own it
• networks are best served, not led - put the needs of you network’s participants first
• leaders in networks emerge organically
• you need to be good at sales - meet people where they are - push yourself to share your ideas
• best to market > first to market
• being the best in your market exceeds the benefit of being first
• a cool new product can be an indication of the next big thing, but it’s not always the next big thing
• your product is at its worst when it first launches, so you’ll want more time
• identify and prioritise efforts with disproportionate impact
• there’s always an area of the product that needs your attention most
• focus your team on levers that have a disproportionate impact
• rate by impact 1 to 3, rate by difficulty 1 to 3 → then work on the ones that are high impact and easy to implement
• Measure each feature by its own measure
• determine what each measure is intended to achieve and measure it accordingly
• tow hooks aren’t meant to be used all the time - but they need to be discoverable and effective when needed
• engagement drivers (longterm) interest drivers (short term). Fanfare around new and novel features can get people excited.
• Mystery is the magic of engagement
• curiosity can be an effective hook - narratives should be short, and tap into people’s tendency to want to learn more
• The information gap. First a situation reveals a painful gap in our knowledge (headline) then we feel an urge to fill this gap and ease that pain (we click)
• Loewenstein outlines 5 curiosity triggers
• questions or riddles
• unknown resolutions
• violated expectations
• access to information known by others
• reminders of something forgotten
• curiosity is at its greatest between the midpoint of ignorance and wisdom

Optimising Yourself

Planning and Making Decisions

• The act of planning tunes our judgement - they should be approached as a thought process not a map
• Success fails to scale when we fail to focus
• Skills and relationships transcend the success or failure of a project
• Edit using opportunity cost, or edit using potential upside, but edit
• If somebody asks you to do something, ask them 0 - 10 how much are you asking me?
• As I’m really busy right now I could do without this. Most true friends don’t ask
• Learn how to say no
• The art of choosing - Schwartz divides people into maximisers and satisfiers
• maximisers - need to be assured that every purchase or decision was the best that could be made
• satisfiers - settle for something that is good enough, and do not worry about the possibility that there might be something better
• maximisers might feel like they’ve made the right decision, but the satisfiers often do so much quicker and end up being happier with the choices they’ve made
• sometimes is better to go with the option that feels right first
• In negotiating, optimise for the best longterm outcome, not short term deal. Be fair, make it a win win. Layout your offer and why you think it’s fair - where you got it from. The end of a negotiation is the start of a relationship
• The right decision at the right time. Pacing is really important. Generating buy-in, testing and allowing time to pass for ideas to sink in. Sometimes you need to rip the band aid.
• In almost all cases it is better to ignore sunk costs (the endowment effect). All beliefs should be subject to rapid change.

Crafting business instincts

• Mine contradictory advice and doubt to develop your own intuition
• You must determine when best practices become antiquated - they are often context dependent
• Believing you can accomplish what others can’t is the biggest strength and weakness of entrepreneurs.
• Don’t blindly optimise - keep auditing your measures
• the danger with measures is their gravity, and how quickly they dictate our daily actions
• sometimes the thing that matters doesn’t make it easy for you to measure. Find a stand in for what you care about, and measure that instead. Stand ins are almost always not quite right.
• be obsessed in what they represent, the why. Don’t obsess over the stand in metrics
• always be asking “what is the real goal here?”
• Avoid having too many metrics - the more you track the fewer you’re focusing on changing
• Boil the business down to one or two core metrics.
• “Working pairs” measure for referral networks.
• Are we investing our time in the most important things?
• Measures become your anchors - restrain your thinking - determine your blindspots
• Set them where you wish to explore - where has impact
• keep evaluating their efficacy and alignment with your longterm goals

Data is only as good as its source, and doesn’t replace intuition

• Data without context is misleading
• ‘People don’t use that’ is not deep analysis. We don’t want people to use password reset functionality but we should have it
• Common sense and near-term metrics help you optimise your product incrementally and reliably - but iconic and breakthrough product insights are not the result of trying to improve a metric.

Your ability to deal with not knowing - is more powerful than knowing.

• the goal is to come up with the best answer - the probability you have it is small
• constantly worry about what you’re missing - ask for criticism of others and consider its merit
• challenge yourself to give feedback and absorb it too
• Knowing when to ignore your experience is a true sign of experience. Ignorance is the ideal operating state at the start of a bold project. Gives you the confidence to tackle something hard. Surround yourself with fresh people and perspectives.
• The science of business is scaling, the art of business is doing things that don’t
• do things that don’t scale in the beginning
• don’t forget the little things as you scale
• the little details all added up make a big difference

Sharpening your edge

• Your true blind spot is how you appear to others. You can’t understand how others perceive you - same for employees and customers.
• Two types of commitments:
• Active Commitments: investments of time, energy and resources in areas you willingly choose to love and pursue
• Passive commitments: commit to doing something that doesn’t align with your interests. Operating out of guilt rather than intention
• When you stop nourishing something let it go. Everything you do should be an active commitment or nothing at all
• Build a network that amplifies signal
• after a while, you need a strong filter, you need to discriminate your information source
• expand the surface area of what you know and who you meet
• then shift your focus from expanding the surface area to going deeper with some people
• when you meet somebody highly competent - ask questions and listen. Tune in. Don’t showcase yourself
• There is no better measure of values than how you spend your time
• at the end of the week, as if you spent your time in service of your priorities
• audit your routines before they become mindless habits
• leave some idle capacity to take advantage of circumstantial opportunities
• find time to disconnect - periods of non stimulation
• avoid tech, connect with loved ones, nurture your health, go outside, avoid commerce, light candles, drink wine, eat bread, find silence, give ba

Staying Permeable and Relatable

• The more credit you need, the less influence you’ll have
• don’t market yourself
• success is sustained only by reminding yourself repeatedly it wasn’t you
• nothing corrodes the potential of a team faster than a sense of superiority
• the danger of getting attention is that you stop paying attention
• Bezos was an early investor in Behance, they had dinner and he spent the whole time asking them questions, learning about what they do. They didn’t speak about Amazon, Blue Origin or the Post.

Part 4: The Final Mile

• keep repositioning the ultimate goal as being the furthest away point that you can see
• you deserve it, sit with that
• Larger institutions expect to be around for hundreds of years. Lay a brick to their foundation and your legacy will live on
• if you can’t end wonderfully end gracefully

I am not my Twitter bio

I am not my resume

I am not my company

I am not my work

• Buffett reads 500 pages a day
• WE are so willing to trade time for money when we are young, and money for time as we age