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February 7 - April 6, 2018
Our economy and prosperity are largely predicated on others’ consumption.
Fundamental to business is the notion that in a capitalist society the consumer reigns supreme, and consumption is the most noble of activities.
Consumption has taken the place of shared sacrifice during times of war and economic malaise. The nation needs you to keep buying more stuff.
Dead man (retailer) walking begins with margin erosion—the cholesterol of retail—and ends with endless promotions and sales.
the OODA loop: “observe, orient, decide, and act.”
There is a survivor bias that plagues old-economy CEOs and their shareholders. My nightmare job is the “invisible until you fuck up” position. These jobs are everywhere: IT, corporate treasurer, auditor, air traffic controller, nuclear power plant operator, county elevator inspector, TSA officer. You’ll never be famous, but you have a small, and terrifying, chance of being infamous. CEOs of successful old-economy firms have a similar bias—they are “rich until they fuck up.”
History favors the bold. Compensation favors the meek.
Most boards ask management: “How can we build the greatest advantage for the least amount of capital/investment?” Amazon reverses the question: “What can we do that gives us an advantage that’s hugely expensive, and that no one else can afford?”
Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”
A society that encourages you to get up after being beaned in the head, dust off your pants, step back into the batter’s box, and swing harder the next time is the secret sauce for printing billionaires.
We forget most of the world’s major organizations are run by humans, middle-aged humans, who have enormous egos that ensure they, on a regular basis, make an emotional/irrational decision.
Facebook and Google own media; Apple owns the phone; and Amazon is about to molest the entire retail ecosystem.
The wealthiest man in the twentieth century mastered the art of minimum-wage employees selling you stuff. The wealthiest man of the twenty-first century is mastering the science of zero-wage robots selling you stuff.
“Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity,”
However, everyone wants to be king. All it takes is strength, speed, violent aggression, and being too stupid to know you will fail, to dethrone the king.
We click on impulse rather than forethought. We are driven by deep subconscious needs for belonging, approval, and safety. Facebook exploits those needs and gets us to spend more time on the platform (its core success metric is time on site) by giving us plenty of Likes.
The right information in the right place just changes your life.
As Paul Newman explained in The Sting, the key to a great con is that the victim never realizes he was conned—indeed, he believes he is about to be a big winner right up until the last moment.
There are laws, and there are innovators. Good money is on the innovators.
As consumers we benefit enormously from a relationship with the most powerful allies you could ever have on your side. As citizens, wage earners, and competitors, we know we are being abused but just can’t break up with the hot girl.
From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, all successful businesses appeal to one of three areas of the body—the brain, the heart, or the genitals.
Google has become the nerve center of our shared prosthetic brain. It dominates the knowledge industry the way Walmart and Amazon, respectively, rule offline and online retail.
While history may not repeat itself, it does rhyme, as Mark Twain purportedly said.
If you don’t have a product that is truly differentiated, you have to resort to an increasingly dull, yet expensive, tool called advertising.
The war for tech-enabled talent has reached a fever pitch. A horseman’s ability to attract and retain the best employees is the number one issue for all four firms.
If you’re the valedictorian of your class, you have a jet pack strapped to your back in the form of intellect, grit, and emotional intelligence. But you are directionless. You are like Ironman before he learned how to fly—all over the place.
You need to find the right platform to point you in the right direction and accelerate your career.
If you are exceptional, there are thousands of firms looking for, and finding, you. If you are good, you are now competing with tens of millions of other “good” candidates all over the planet—and your wages may stagnate or decline.
Excellence, grit, and empathy are timeless attributes of successful people in every field.
On average, smart people who work hard and treat people well do better than people whose thinking is muddled, who are lazy, or who are unpleasant to colleagues.
There is neurological evidence that women’s brains develop sooner and more quickly into adult brains.
Steve Jobs took a lot of grief when he returned to Apple at the turn of the century and announced that he only hired As, because As only hired As, while Bs hired Cs—but he was right: winners recognize other winners, while also-rans can be threatened by competitors.
The path to rich(es) is a path of living below your means and investing in income-producing assets.
If your boss isn’t fighting for you, you either have a bad boss or you are a bad employee.
Take responsibility for your own career, and manage it. People will tell you to “follow your passion.” This, again, is bullshit.
Don’t follow your passion, follow your talent. Determine what you are good at (early), and commit to becoming great at it.
If you are seeking justice, you won’t find it in the corporate world. You will be treated unfairly and will be in unworkable situations that are not your fault.
Expect that a certain amount of failure is out of your control, and recognize you may need to endure it or move on. If you leave, keep in mind people remember more about how you leave than what you did while there.
The best revenge is living better than, or at least never again thinking about, the person wh...
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People who complain about others and how they got screwed...
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So, many entrepreneurs who make a lot of money on one venture turn around and lose a lot of it because they believe the victory was due to their genius and they should go bigger. At the same time, when beaten down, realize you are not as stupid as the world, at that moment, seems to think you are. When beaned in the face, the key is to get up, dust off, and swing harder.
