Principles: Life and Work

If you didn’t make an expectation clear, you can’t hold people accountable for it not being fulfilled. Don’t assume that something was implicitly understood.

Think like an owner, and expect the people you work with to do the same. It’s a basic reality that if you don’t experience the consequences of your actions, you’ll take less ownership of them. If you are an employee, and you get a paycheck for turning up and pleasing your boss, your mind-set will inevitably be trained to this cause-effect relations

I wonder how many centuries it will take for us to evolve into a higher-level species that will be much closer to omniscience than we are now—if

You must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true.

Don’t build the organization to fit the people. Managers will often take the people who work in their organization as a given and try to make the organization work well with them. That’s backward. Instead, they should imagine the best organization and then make sure the right people are chosen for it. Jobs should be created based on the work that n

My ultimate goal is to create a machine that works so well that I can just sit back and watch beauty happen.