Personal MBA

Environment matters a lot; move to where you flourish maximally. Put yourself in environments where you have to perform to your utmost; if you can get by being average, you probably will. (Greek saying: “A captain only shows during a storm.”)

You have to build a great pipeline. Your best pipeline is going to come from your personal contacts. You literally have to sit everyone at your company down and tell them to name the 10 best people they've ever worked with or gone to school with … You get those 10 best people and then you just pound the pavement. You have lunch, coffee, breakfast,

On top of that, these are the only two metrics that you can “improve” in your business → either making customers worth more or reducing the cost to acquire them. You should be able to tie every project on your list directly to the improvement of one of these metrics.

The fastest-moving entrepreneurs are obsessive resource allocators. Similar to investors, they seek the best risk-adjusted returns with the resources they have. The main resources of the business are time (of the team), attention (of the team), and capital (of the business). So resource allocation is 1) aligning attention on the most important thin

One thesis of the internet that always stuck with me comes from Evan Williams, who founded Twitter/Blogger/Medium. He said that the best way to create a giant internet company is to take something people want to do and make it 10x easier.

Your early writing or business will probably suck.

Mine did.

They’ll improve but only if you give yourself permission to suck first.

“You will not learn anything of lasting importance from TV, movies, podcasts…they’re junk food. Successful people converge on 3 ways to learn: lots of reading time, some exercises and projects, and conversations with people who are slightly ahead of them.”

In an idea world, what you’re really buying is that person’s entire life experience. All the problems they’ve already figured out how to solve that you don’t. All the shortcuts they’ve learned about that aren’t even on your radar.

You expand the capacity of the business by adding more people who know more than you do.

In other words, today’s cloud and mobile companies — Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Google — may very well be the GM, Ford, and Chrysler of the 21st century. The beginning era of technology, where new challengers were started every year, has come to an end; however, that does not mean the impact of technology is somehow diminished: it in fact means

To get things done is management; to make people grow is leadership.