Britt Gage

The year of everyday risks

How does one live more alive ?

The concrete way I will try is taking more risks.

Not Bet the farm on red, or Climb Mt. Everest -type risks, but rather, the everyday ones.

Everyday risks — the small actions that come with a twinge of discomfort.

The thing about smart people is that they tend to think that if they think really hard about something, they might figure it out, when the truth is, in strategy (and life in general), there is never one right answer.

Strategy requires making choices about a future that is not yet known. I’m one of those people that tends to over-intellectualize

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As we encounter complex ideas, they’re often explained with a form of semantic algebra. You understand X, and this is a bit like that, but different...

Understanding is worth the effort.

More than anything else it was this feeling that captivated me—the feeling that, literally, made me captive.

s you invest in some skills, but not others, you get a greater return from activities where you have considerable training. Thus, your opportunity cost for learning new things increases. Therefore, a failure to learn new things is perfectly rational, even if it can result in inflexibility as we get older.

One way this manifests is the time horizon... See more

Part of the problem with the Lean Startup mindset is that it sees life and work as an optimization problem. The point is to help people live a good life, not just an efficient life. The goal is human flourishing, not convenience. The goal is a good future, not just a technically advanced future.

Raising money is never an accomplishment in and of itself —it just raises the stakes for all the hard work you would have had to do anyway: actually building your business.

Some signs of cultural corrosion caused by raising too much money:

• Hiring too many people—slows everything down and makes it much harder for you to react and change. You are

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