implementation

When you choose your pond wisely, you can best leverage your type, your signature strengths, and your context to create tremendous value. This is what makes for a great career, but such self-knowledge can create value wherever you choose to apply it.

When working with portfolio companies, he opts for hands-on involvement . This approach establishes trust and partnership with founders, providing firsthand insights essential for offering feedback.

“We humans sort of suck at all of them individually, but we have some kind of very approximate idea about each of them and can combine them and be somewhat adaptive. That seems to be what the trick is.”

Category design involves educating the market about a new, often-ignored problem as well as a solution that you can provide.

Rather its effort is to show that many of the ideas which now pass for brilliant innovations and advances are in fact mere revivals of ancient errors, and a further proof of the dictum that those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it.

This pattern repeats everywhere:

• Traditional path: Pay $50,000 for an MBA, then hope someone notices you.

• Attention path (shortcut): Create valuable insights for industry leaders, then get hired directly.

When you reframe every “how will I pay for this” problem as a “who can I serve” problem, you win. This is the Audience Shortcut:

• Instead of

These successful practitioners have in common their apparent understanding—whether explicit or intuitive—of both their customers’ trajectories of need and their own technologists’ trajectories of supply. Understanding these trajectories is the key to their success thus far. But the list of firms that have consistently done this is disturbingly

When an intervention doesn’t create the behavior change you want, you’ve got a decision to make. And like intervention selection, this one is something you ultimately just have to intuit: either you revise the pilot and rerun or you kill it and return to your pressure map and intervention design.

For these reasons and more, we’re going to spend the rest of this book exploring a quartet of cognitive abilities—motivation, learning, creativity, and flow.