Building a Business

Timing influences communication.

Talk about potential mistakes before they happen and people start looking for ways to prevent them.

Talk about actual mistakes after they happen and people start looking for reasons to defend their actions.

What do we need to be talking about now, so we can learn the lessons before we need them?

Mediocrity is invisible until passion shows up to expose it

Most complexity is unnecessary, but we manage it instead of removing it because deletion requires courage that addition doesn't.

I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful.
(Phil Knight, Nike founder, from Shoe Dog)

Lighthouse Skills:

·        Sales: Sales is the most useful meta-skill for life. No matter what path you choose to go down, you need to learn to sell: Sell yourself, sell your story, sell your product, sell your vision, sell your ideas. My richest friends aren't the ones with the highest IQs. They just know how to sell. They aren't afraid of being

"It's hard to build momentum if you keep dividing your attention."

"Intelligence isn't just about what you know. It is also the ability to avoid being your own bottleneck.

·         If you lack the skills, be willing to look foolish while you learn them.

·         If you lack the connections, be courageous enough to reach out and build them.

·         If you feel uncertain, be bold enough to figure it out along the

The simple framework Jeff Bezos used to make faster decisions at Amazon:

“Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t