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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Scott Belsky
The Power of Passion and Perseverance about her findings. Duckworth explains that what determines whether you succeed or fail is grit, a special blend of passion and perseverance directed at accomplishing long-term goals.
The trick is to separate the hardship from what you’re learning. If you’re learning that your assumptions were wrong—that customers don’t want your product or that you’re building the wrong thing—then you should ask yourself: Knowing all that I know now, would I pursue the project all over again? Would I invest the money and energy all over again to get as far as I’ve come in solving this problem? If the answer is yes, don’t quit. Keep at it. Feeling impatient with progress and deflated by process is fine, so long as you still have conviction.
I’ve never been fond of the “winners never quit” mantra because it goes against what I’ve learned from many successful start-ups that pivoted from their original idea with great success. Twitter, Pinterest, Airbnb, and many other companies started with either a different approach or a vastly different product before they got it right.
“strong opinions, weakly held.” Only by letting go are you able to truly attempt a new perspective of your venture before you quit.
Kathryn’s story is a common one. Conflict prompts disappointment, followed by perspective and self-examination, and ultimately another attempt with a renewed sense of purpose.
Curiosity is the fuel you need to play the long game. When you’re genuinely curious about something, you’re less likely to measure productivity in traditional ways.
The seeds you’re planting—long-term relationships, curiosity-driven explorations, thought experiments—are less likely to be supported by others both socially and financially.
“Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood,” he said. “When you do something that you genuinely believe in, that you have conviction about, for a long period of time, well-meaning people may criticize that effort.”
To sustain yourself over this time, you can’t look for accolades, and you can’t rely on being understood. Playing the long game is a test of your fortitude, your ability to persevere, and just how genuine your interests are.
very few people can stay loyal to a strategy long enough for their vision to materialize.
We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages.
Designing the structure of a project or company to foster patience is ultimately an effort to limit our natural tendency to obsess over measuring progress with traditional near-term measures.
Patience doesn’t mean tolerating inaction or slower progress: It means allowing alternative forms of measuring the impact of action. Aaron Levie, founder and CEO of enterprise cloud-storage provider Box, said it best on Twitter: “Startups win by being impatient over a long period of time.”
Seemingly quick wins have deep roots.
challenges will ultimately distinguish you and become your moat of defensibility—if and when they are conquered. Sustained patience and persistence can be such an amazing competitive advantage. Progress takes time, even when you have the very best strategy, people, and resources at your disposal.
To foster patience for yourself and those you lead, pick a speed that will get you there, and then pace yourself.
THE EASY PATH WILL ONLY TAKE YOU TO A CROWDED PLACE
The long game is the most difficult one to play and the most bountiful one to win.
Just stay alive long enough to become an expert.
The established paths, tactics, and assumptions relied upon by experts become antiquated. And the more expertise you have, the harder it can be to deviate from established norms.
They then stayed alive long enough to become experts and compete with better technology, a superior path to market, and a lower cost structure.
the first dozen or so people on our team, ten of us were still working together seven years later.
The degree of loyalty, tolerance, patience, and shared commitment to a mission was admittedly our team’s only advantage executing in a space that we knew very little about.
the best start-ups are really just “stay-ups.” As he explains it, “Outlasting is one of the best competitive moves you can ever make.”
So much of excellence is about just doing the work—even when it’s not yours to do.
Do it yourself, even if someone else ultimately gets the credit (attribution has a way of finding its way over time).
how quickly an idea takes hold when someone proactively does the underlying work no one else clearly owned.
scarcity of people willing to work outside the lines.
You need to be open to surprises, insanely curious about why things happen, and optimize the hell out of everything that gets traction.
You should be proud of what you’ve accomplished, but never satisfied.
actually think you learn a lot more from your successes [than your mistakes]. There are a million reasons why something can fail, but usually very few reasons why something can work. When you want to learn to be a great runner—do you study slow people or fast people? I think taking time to understand why things succeed—whether they are your successes or others—is time well spent . . . you learn the most from things that go really well by asking why. Those are the things you want to understand and do more of.”
Industry incumbents lose their position because their success limits their efforts to optimize.
When you think you already have the answer, you don’t experiment with other options—if only for the sake of efficiency.
Only when we stick with and deeply explore one area, whether by choice or by accident, do we learn better routes.
Great teams are more than the assembly of great people. On the contrary, great teams are ultimately grown, not gathered.
In an entrepreneurial environment, you must prioritize your team over your goals and tend to your team before your product. If your team is not in a good place or your office culture is lacking, your most valuable resources will not be able to make great products or execute well over time.
the best managers know that growing the team is not always the answer. Too many teams hire when they should be optimizing the people they’ve already got. You can always get more resources, but resourcefulness is a competitive advantage. Resources become depleted. Resourcefulness does not.
Before adding more people to a team, optimize how the team works together. Are there better tools that could be adopted? Can some of the work be automated or outsourced? Are there time-consuming processes that can be killed? Looking back, I am grateful for the years we didn’t have resources. The human resourcefulness that resulted made our team smarter.
I’ve seen many startups shift from doing more with less to doing less with more once they’ve raised funding. It’s easy to think money can buy your way out of problems.
One of the risks of raising money too early is becoming incentivized to do something you don’t love, and that you don’t truly believe in.
As you assemble your team, look for people with excitement about the idea, ability to contribute right away, and the potential to learn.
the lack of conventional wisdom, which helps you think differently.
The greatest disruptions of industries are facilitated by relative outsiders, obsessed with the industry, who find a way to survive long enough to become an expert and then leverage new techniques to change the game.
While expertise qualifies you, obsession mobilizes you in a way that runs circles around the experts.
Creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions.”
When you are hiring, identify your unconscious bias.
Hire people who have endured adversity.
“Courage is our first value. The reason I have courage as a first value is because without courage, you can’t practice any other value consistently.
adversity matures you.
The best team players will be the ones who are as willing to throw around their own nascent ideas as they are helping build upon others. People who shut down new notions in favor of wanting to advance their own may be heralded as creative firecrackers, but they do not make for good team players in the long term.
