A good player works hard to win the game everyone else is playing. A great player creates a new game that favors their strenghts and avoids their weaknesses. -Atomic Habits, p.225 Continue reading When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different.
Ex: If you have a successful monthly magazine, for instance, and then launch a weekly in the same category, you will inevitably weaken sales of your original title. So should you launch the weekly? YES! A thousand times yes! Why? Because if you don’t launch the weekly, your rivals will do it for you. You will be left with a damaged monthly and no weekly. -How to get rich, p.124 Continue reading Strangling your own baby, in order to grow, is far more common than you might think.
In general, you have to try to recognize that when the stakes of a project are very high, there’s not much to be gained from putting additional pressure on the people working on it. It’s subtle, but there’s a difference between communicating that you share their stress- that you’re in it with them OR communicating that you need them to deliver in order to alleviate your stress. The Ride of a Lifetime, p.184 Continue reading Be soft on people working on hard, challenging projects.
There is no middle ground. -Steve Jobs Continue reading It’s either ‘insanely great’, or it’s ‘total shit’.
If there’s no way that the PR release is exciting and gets people excited, don’t even bother making the product. If the response is great, go build it. -Shaan Puri Continue reading When about to develop something, make the PR release first
-Stewart ButterfieldWe don’t sell saddles here Continue reading Process of building a product
It’s inevitable, you will plateau at some point. This is a cycle. Once I’m there, I start asking my brain questions: What does the data actually say is happening? What is the stupidly obvious thing I haven’t tried yet? What would a friend or mentor of mine do in this scenario? If I was going to make a simple tweak to the current product, what would I change? Let’s look at the first-mile of the product with a fresh set of eyes, what 10% tweaks would make this 200% better? Who’s already successfully doing this? What the heck are they … Continue reading Greet a Plateau like an old friend
This is a copy of a blog post from Amy Thibodeau One of the best pieces of advice I have for people who are early on in a career in R&D is to learn to hold tension and sit with it, rather than seeing tension as negative or to be resolved. When I look back, I can see that many of the things I struggled with earlier in my career came down to a worldview that assumed tension is bad. I spent a lot of time trying to resolve things that didn’t need resolution rather than recognizing tension as an … Continue reading Tensions don’t need to be resolved
You can have two out of three: Cheap, High Quality and Fast. -Amy BilodeauTensions don’t need to be resolved Continue reading Cheap, High Quality, Fast. Pick 2
Roadmap to Billions 