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success I’ve had in life has had more to do with my knowing how to deal with my not knowing than anything I know.
Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals.
classify these situations into types and have good principles for dealing with them, we will make better decisions more quickly and have better lives as a result.
To be principled means to consistently operate with principles that can be clearly explained.
refine them as you encounter more experiences and to reflect on them, which will help you make better decisions and be better understood.
adopting principles without giving them much thought can expose you to the risk of acting in ways inconsistent
my first principle: • Think for yourself to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true, and 3) what you should do to achieve #1 in light of #2
People who have shared values and principles get along. People who don’t will suffer through constant misunderstandings
be clear about your principles and then you must “walk the talk.”
the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well. By failing well, I mean being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game.
Make believability-weighted decisions.
shifted me from having a perspective of “I know I’m right” to having one of “How do I know I’m right?”
Learning how to weigh people’s inputs so that I chose the best ones—in other words, so that I believability weighted my decision making—
Systemize your decision making. I discovered I could do that by expressing my decision-making criteria in the form of algorithms
thoughtful, unemotional disagreement by independent thinkers can be converted into believability-weighted decision making that is smarter and more effective than the sum of its parts. Because the power of a group is so much greater than the power of an individual, I
Time is like a river that carries us forward into encounters with reality that require us to make decisions. We can’t stop our movement down this river and we can’t avoid those encounters. We can only approach them in the best possible way.
Ask yourself what you want, seek out examples of other people who got what they wanted, and try to discern the cause-and-effect patterns behind their achievements
almost everyone expects the future to be a slightly modified version of the present, it is usually very different.
“You better make sense of what happened to other people in other times and other places because if you don’t you won’t know if these things can happen to you and, if they do, you won’t know how to deal with them.”
Visualizing complex systems as machines, figuring out the cause-effect relationships within them, writing down the principles for dealing with them,
shifted my mind-set from thinking “I’m right” to asking myself “How do I know I’m right?” And I saw clearly that the best way to answer this question is by finding other independent thinkers who are on the same mission as me and who see things differently from me. By engaging them in thoughtful disagreement, I’d be able to understand their reasoning and have them stress-test mine.
1. Seek out the smartest people who disagreed with me so I could try to understand their reasoning. 2. Know when not to have an opinion. 3. Develop, test, and systemize timeless and universal principles. 4. Balance risks in ways that keep the big upside while reducing the downside.
beneficial change begins when you can acknowledge and even embrace your weaknesses.
There is almost always a good path that you just haven’t discovered yet, so look for it until you find it rather than settle for the choice that is then apparent to you.
what was most important wasn’t knowing the future—it was knowing how to react appropriately to the information available at each point in time.
whenever I took a position in the markets, I wrote down the criteria I used to make my decision. Then, when I closed out a trade, I could reflect on how well these criteria had worked.
break each company down into distinct logical components and then come up with a plan for managing each part,
I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.
leaders must be judged within the context of the circumstances they encounter
two types of people: those who work to be part of a mission, and those who work for a paycheck.
wise people stick with sound fundamentals through the ups and downs, while flighty people react emotionally to how things feel,
Making a handful of good uncorrelated bets that are balanced and leveraged well is the surest way of having a lot of upside without being exposed to unacceptable downside.
Having a process that ensures problems are brought to the surface, and their root causes diagnosed, assures that continual improvements occur.
1. Put our honest thoughts out on the table, 2. Have thoughtful disagreements in which people are willing to shift their opinions as they learn, and 3. Have agreed-upon ways of deciding (e.g., voting, having clear authorities) if disagreements remain so that we can move beyond them without resentments.
the logical part of people’s brains could easily understand that knowing one’s weaknesses is a good thing (because it’s the first step toward getting around them), the emotional part typically hates it.
while one gets better at things over time, it doesn’t become any easier if one is also progressing to higher levels
More and more, we saw everything as “another one of those”—another of a certain type of situation like hiring, firing, determining compensation, dealing with dishonesty—that had principles for handling them. By having them explicitly written out, I could foster the idea meritocracy by having us together reflect on and refine those principles
the greatest success you can have as the person in charge is to orchestrate others to do things well without you. A step below that is doing things well yourself, and worst of all is doing things poorly yourself.
shaper is someone who comes up with unique and valuable visions and builds them out beautifully, typically over the doubts and opposition of others.
independent thinkers who do not let anything or anyone stand in the way of achieving their audacious goals. They have very strong mental maps of how things should be done, and at the same time a willingness to test those mental maps in the world of reality and change the ways they do things
able to see both big pictures and granular details (and levels in between) and synthesize the perspectives they gain at those different levels,
passionate about what they are doing, intolerant of people who work for them who aren’t excellent at what they do,
extreme determination to achieve their goals can make them appear abrasive or inconsiderate,
Nothing is ever good enough, and they experience the gap between what is and what could be as both a tragedy and a source of unending motivation.
faced with a choice between achieving their goal or pleasing (or not disappointing) others, they would choose achieving their goal every time.
The most important difference lies in whether their shaping comes in the form of inventing, managing, or both.
Those that do best both see a wide range themselves while triangulating well with other brilliant people who see things in different, complementary ways.
far fewer types of people in the world than there are people and far fewer different types of situations than there are situations,
by knowing what someone is like we can have a pretty good idea of what we can expect from them.
aligning people’s responsibilities with their merits.
