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“One easy way to show you care about others is to ask them questions about their life. What are they excited about? What are they working on?
Prepare as if this is your only opportunity, and perform as if nothing can go wrong.
“Observation is a skill, and like any skill, it can be trained and honed. Even if you're not a negative person, you may be skilled at noticing negati
Most beliefs are soft until challenged. When you tell someone they’re wrong, the belief hardens. Instead of trying to convince someone they’re wrong,
Chesterton’s Fence, an economic principle that cautions against dismantling a (proverbial) “fence” before understanding why it was built in the first
So if your career offers you the choice of being a starving saint or a wealthy sinner, consider being a middle-class mensch instead. You may not be he
When I worked at Yahoo!, our team needed another engineering manager. We didn’t run a hiring process, or even do interviews. Instead, our Director bro
Nothing great was ever built by someone who had to be talked into building it.
Effort is a choice. If it’s important to you, there is no excuse for someone putting in more effort than you.
So if your career offers you the choice of being a starving saint or a wealthy sinner, consider being a middle-class mensch instead. You may not be he
“Challenge yourself when life is easy, so you'll be ready when life is hard.”
Pressure feels like a threat, but it’s not. You feel pressure when your decisions matter, and people depend on you. It can feel uncomfortable at ti
Who do you secretly envy—and what does that reveal about what you truly value?
What is something you deeply believe but rarely live out?
Which single expense in your life delivers the least happiness per dollar and which delivers the most happiness per dollar?
What is the most important conversation you are currently postponing?
“Especially when under time pressure, they perceive planning to be wasted effort.”[22]
When this bias for action is generalized into the culture of an organization, the reversibility caveat is usually lost.
It is also inapplicable to many decisions on big projects because they are so difficult or expensive to reverse that they are effectively irreversible
A preference for doing over talking—sometimes distilled into the phrase “bias for action”—is an idea as common in business as it is necessary.
Complexity is like energy. It cannot be created or destroyed, only moved somewhere else.
More fiction has been told in Microsoft Excel than in books.
When we lack real problems, we create imaginary ones; when we lack meaningful work, we perfect the unimportant.
“The camera never lies... but you can take a thousand different pictures of the same scene.”
“The truth shrinks as the crowd grows. In a large meeting at work, people hold back their honest opinions. The resulting conversation offends the f
“The best way to think is to write.”
First identified by Randy Steve Waldman [Wal12], the term refers to something people treat as though it works, generally for social or institutional r
When you truly understand something, you can express it at any level of detail while maintaining coherence. The master can provide the one-sentence
Do I need to spend more time searching for better information or do I need to spend more time acting on the information I already have? Is the bottlen
Some questions Who’s it for? What’s it for? What change do you seek to make? What’s the hard part? If you could learn one skill that w
24 Powerful Razors to Simplify Decisions
“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.” — Daniel Kahneman
“For a long time, I looked for consensus. I think consensus is really the enemy of scale, and so I used to say, “Whenever we’re making an important de
