Greatness

Walter Isaacson on the link between suffering and greatness and those with happy childhoods: “We grow up with fewer demons but we grow up with less drive. We end being Boswell and not Johnson. We end up being the observer and not the doer. Respect those who are in the arena…” A few... See more

Patrick Collison on Stripe: “My intuition is that more of Stripe success than one would think is down to the fact that people like beautiful things and for rational reasons. Because, what does a beautiful thing tell you? It tells you the person who made it really cared, and you can observe... See more

"It is rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the top, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a basic skill set." —Josh Waitzkin Mastery of basics, not secret techniques, makes legends. Look at Roger Gracie's BJJ dominance—leverage and positioning. Jiro... See more

Morale compounds via work: high morale helps you do good work, which increases your morale and helps you do even better work. But this cycle also operates in the other direction: if you're not doing good work, that can demoralize you and make it even harder to. Since it matters so much for this cycle to be running in the right direction, it can be... See more

The most important lesson I’ve learned for developing new products: You don’t have to be the first person to come up with a product idea. In fact, that will rarely be the case. But you can almost always make an existing idea better. And that’s when you get the big wins.