Readwise Highlights

flushing out the Black Swans—and exploiting them. Remember, your counterpart might not even know how important the information is, or even that they shouldn’t reveal it. So keep pushing, probing, and gathering information.

People have vastly different desires, except for three things: Respect, feeling useful, and control over their time. Those are nearly universal.

Once you’re consistently meeting the expectations of the majority of your customers, you’ve already done the most economically valuable thing you can do.

What we remove is as important as what we add. It isn't just the ideas that get the work done.

“He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation.”

One: You have to train yourself to notice things. It's not 100% natural at first – it certainly wasn’t for me – but raising those antennae is a very worthwhile thing to do. And it snowballs: once I got started taking notes, I ended up taking more and more of them.

Two: Be very liberal about what you keep. If you're going through your notes, cross

The company's strategy is simple. Acquire small vertical software businesses with little competition, apply best practices from past experience and repeat as often as possible.

Oaktree’s investment philosophy doesn’t prohibit having opinions, just acting as if they’re right.