Simon Joliveau Breney

1. Write all of my thoughts on a subject.


2. Argue against those ideas.


3. Explore different angles until I’m sick of it.


4. Leave it for a few days or years, then repeat those steps.


5. Hate how messy these thoughts have become.


6. Reduce them to a tiny outline of the key points.


7. Post the outline. Trash the rest.

Choosing your daily Highlight starts with asking yourself a question: What do I want to be the highlight of my day?

If instead of 10% you try to improve 10x, you completely change the conversation.

Doing more won’t cut it. You can’t go 10x with optimization. You need to radically re-think how you get from A to B.

Only when you make a goal impossible, you’re forced to stop working based on your current assumptions and knowledge.

At a high level, the steps of this process are to:

• Observe: Gain situational awareness via all your senses

• Orient: Contextualize what you observe based on everything you know

• Decide: Formulate the optimal course of action

• Act: Execute on your decision without delay

The five essentials ingredients to any company strategy document are:

1. Mission - What are you meant to achieve




2. Vision - What does it look like once you’ve achieved it




3. Goal - How do you concretely know you’ve achieved it




4. Strategy - What is the path to achieving it




5. Strategic pillars - Three to five key bets that the company needs to make

“A good failure is when the value of the lesson is greater than the cost of the lesson. A bad failure is when the value of the lesson is much less than the cost of the lesson.” — Alberto Savoia, author of The Right It