The Planning Fallacy means that people have a persistent tendency to underestimate completion times. The more complex the project, the more Interdependencies (discussed later) the project contains. The more Interdependencies there are, the more likely it is that something at some time will not go according to plan.

At the core, all successful businesses sell the promise of some combination of money, status, power, love, knowledge, protection, pleasure, and excitement. The better you articulate how your offer satisfies one or more of these drives, the more attractive your offer will become.

Focusing on experiences over material goods goes a long way if you want to step off the Hedonic Treadmill. In the immortal words of Charles Kingsley, a nineteenth-century historian and clergyman: “We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”

Analyzing data is comforting to the quantitative-minded, but to really use data properly, you must go beyond juggling numbers to understand what they’re telling you. When analyzing data from a System, it’s easy to forget that it often pertains to the actions of real human beings.

psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943.

In every negotiation, the power lies with the party that is able and willing to walk away from a bad deal. In almost every case, the more acceptable alternatives you have, the better your position. The more attractive your alternatives, the more willing you’ll be to walk away from a deal that doesn’t serve you, resulting in better deals.

Unfortunately, it’s easy to fixate on things that are easy to measure instead of things that are actually important. Take, for example, a business’s revenue—seems pretty important, right? It is, but only to a point: revenue is important only because it’s a key component of profit. It doesn’t matter if you collected $1,000,000 in revenue if you

When creating a new offering, your primary goal should be to work your way through each Iteration Cycle as quickly as possible.

Business is about creating and delivering value to paying customers, not orchestrating legal fraud. Unfortunately for us all, business schools have de-emphasized the former in favor of teaching the latter.