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OODA loop: “observe, orient, decide, and act.” By acting quickly and decisively,
risk taking into two types of investments: Type 1—those you can’t walk back from (“This is the future of the company”); and Type 2—those you can (“This isn’t working, we’re out of here”).52 Bezos’s view is that it’s key to Amazon’s investment strategy to take on many Type 2 experiments
Type 2 investments are cheap, because they likely will be killed before they waste too much money, and they pay big dividends in building Amazon’s image as a leading-edge company.
“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.”
luxury brands for twenty-five years and believe these firms, from Porsche to Prada, share five key attributes: an iconic founder, artisanship, vertical integration, global reach, and a premium price.
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.
extraordinary business success requires scaling at low cost, achieved by leveraging cloud computing, virtualization, and network effects to achieve a 10x productivity improvement over the competition.1 But that explanation ignores a deeper dimension that has nothing to do with technology. 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.
Once the brain determines the rational best choice, it’s decisive, monogamous, and loyal.
Most companies are not, and can never be, the low-cost leader. It’s a select club that demands scale for long-term success.
the heart is one of the few forces that can override the decisions of the head.
The consumer spends more because the act of spending itself communicates taste, wealth and privilege, and desire.
by providing consumers with the tools of that communication. It knows that if its products work as mating brands—the market equivalent of peacock feathers—then higher margins and profits will follow, frustrating the brain and making the heart jealous.
we typically have one mate (2 people), the people we consider very close friends—as the joke goes, people who will help you move a body (6 people), and the number of people we can work with efficiently as a team (12), up to the number of people we recognize on sight (1,500 people).
Among the Four, these eight factors are prevalent: product differentiation, visionary capital, global reach, likability, vertical integration, AI, accelerant, and geography.
the majority of stakeholder value created over the last decade has been a function of removal
The strength of visionary capital begets competitive strength. Why? Because you can more patiently nurture assets (invest) and place more bets on more pockets of innovation (try crazy shit that just might change the game).
In sum, my business strategy message boils down to “What can you do really well that is also really hard?”
the key is to find the event with the greatest variance in performance and own it.
The difference between good and great can be 10 percent or less, but the delta in rewards is closer to 10 times.
Excellence, grit, and empathy are timeless attributes of successful people in every field.
Nothing is more important than emotional maturity—especially for people in their twenties,
change is a daily constant.
Curiosity is crucial to success.
Play offense: for every four things you’re asked to do, offer one deliverable or idea that was not asked for.
Another standout skill is ownership.
You need a medium to spread your awesomeness, as the path to under-compensation is doing good work that never gets explicitly pimped or attached to you.
Invest aggressively in your strength(s) and spend modest effort to get your weaknesses to average so they don’t hold you back.
The strategy is serial monogamy.
Be loyal to people. People transcend corporations, and people, unlike corporations, value loyalty.
Nothing is ever as good or bad as it seems. All situations and emotions pass. When you have a big victory, pull in your horns and be risk avoidant for a period. Regression to the mean is a powerful force, and the good luck (and a lot of it is luck) will cut the other way at some point.
If you’re in the discipline that drives the company, what it excels at, you will be working with the best people on the most challenging projects, and are more likely to be noticed by senior management.
I don’t invest in smoothie bars, new fashion lines, or music labels. My greatest success has been a research firm. When I have someone smart in front of me excited about a SaaS platform that offers hospitals a better scheduling solution (so boring I want to put a gun in my mouth), I smell money.
A decent proxy for your success will be your ratio of sweating to watching others sweat (watching sports on TV).
You need to ask for help if you plan on being successful. You also should get in the habit of helping people junior to you.
Expect that a large portion of the people you help will not reciprocate, and you won’t be disappointed. However, plant enough seeds helping others, and a few will pay off hugely where you least expect it.
Where do I thrive in the alphabet? Think of companies and products having a life cycle, A–Z.
