How to succeed in Business

If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup, you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble.

Before accelerating our personal bullet train, it is important to be clear what our final destination is and at which stations we will need to call.

Fortune always favors the brave, and never helps a man who does not help himself.

emulate the sparrow, the “wisest of birds.” According to the Zhuangzi, “If its eyes do not spot a suitable place, it will not look twice. If it happens to drop the nut it is carrying, it will simply abandon it and continue on its way. It is wary of people, and yet it lives among them, protected within the altars of grain and soil.”

Stop operating from the assumptions of your past self, and start finding new and unique pathways. Find the people and pathways to get where you’re trying to go.

You can choose the vision you’re looking for. You can choose the standard.

The Japanese companies looked for every point of friction in the manufacturing process and eliminated it.

It is about identifying the structure of your work and life—what you are committed to, what you want to change, and where you want to go. It is about organizing information in such a way that it supports and calls into being the future life you want to lead.

If you incentivize hitting the schedule on time, overtime, it will cost people to hit the schedule every time. If you incentivize shipping the best version of something, you will tend to ship the best version of something.