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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Scott Belsky
You can tell yourself all kinds of stories to rationalize how you spend your day, but the calendar doesn’t lie. The accounting of how you spend your minutes is the hard truth of your values.
Routines backfire when you start doing them without thinking. Throw a wrench in the machine every now and then.
But the problem with this relentless drive for productivity is surrendering your flexibility. Without a certain amount of capacity left idle, you are less able to accommodate circumstantial opportunities as they arise.
Without fluidity, you’re not able to adapt. You need to create and preserve some margin of downtime in your days to reach your full potential.
Do you have the capacity to tease out that unexpected result that could shed new insight?
When you fail to disconnect, your imagination pays the price.
I’ve long been fascinated by the diminishing returns when you pass a certain point of obsession.
get out of your element and allow for new questions and curiosities to take hold.
Ego is rust. So much value and potential are destroyed in its slow decay. Achievement rarely ages well, unless you keep sanding it down.
The people I admire most in my industry have talents that are less publicly apparent and instead reveal themselves in quiet ways.
The start of a venture is full of many humbling moments. Humility keeps you grounded, and it helps founders develop real companionship with colleagues and empathy with their potential customers.
Success means that many forces aligned in your favor, that your team outperformed itself, and that you kept yourself from screwing it up. When you feel yourself becoming headstrong and invincible, shift your focus away from yourself and onto your team.
Remove yourself to allow others’ ideas to take hold.
Even if you think your first draft is perfect (unlikely), allow your colleagues to play with an idea without your presence.
This fosters a sense of ownership and alignment that expedites execution. More often than not, great ideas grow out of good ideas—and it keeps the band together.
Getting attention is distracting. In the early stages of a venture, one of the greatest benefits of isolation and anonymity is uninterrupted focus.
the cost of basking in a burst of attention from others is becoming less interested in the content that others are posting.
publicity stalls progress.
attention also tolls your creative process. Imagination thrives when you’re fully absorbing everything around you.
Your primal need for validation takes hold and shifts your focus to who is seeing your work and what they’re saying about it.
Some CEOs and public figures appear to overcome the gravity of fame with curiosity.
For example, I was once part of a small group dinner with Jeff Bezos, who was an early investor in Behance. I remember being struck by just how many questions he was asking the group about our work and opinions on new design and tech trends among other topics.
curiosity overpowering others’ attention
In such circumstances, there is a natural drive to keep the peace and avoid conversations about seemingly unnecessary risks. In certain meetings, when the metrics looked great but underlying questions felt buried, I could hear Seth’s advice in the back of my head: “If it doesn’t feel right, just ask!” Sometimes the question did nothing, but other times it acted as a poke to the elephant in the room.
Responsible leaders can stomach the pain of being the catalyst.
The trick is to pick your fights wisely and know how to push people without depriving them of their own process.
Sometimes the best way to instigate change is one-on-one, planting questions as seeds and letting them take root in your colleagues’ heads for a while.
Reactions tend to overpower rationale, so you can circumvent gut responses to controversial questions by dropping hints...
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finish, it turns out, is an abstract mile marker that makes your long journey through life more digestible.
You can run a race so well and still screw up the final mile and lose. A great founder isn’t necessarily a great finisher.
The final mile is not meant to be traveled alone.
THIS JOURNEY IS 1 PERCENT FINISHED.
Most companies are more like the Myspaces of the world: They iterate their way to a “successful” product and then focus relentlessly on sustaining it.
In contrast, Facebook has consistently acted like they were in the early innings.
Facebook intended to own messaging and how people connect with one another beyond its platform, they needed to own the industry’s leading messaging app, WhatsApp. It was ultimately an incredible acquisition and, in February 2018, WhatsApp reported having more than 1.5 billion monthly active users.
Only a company that believes they are 1 percent finished would make such a bold bet.
You’re falling asleep and waking up with ideas and insights for small tweaks that could make a big difference. And in the early innings, you’re always selling: Everyone you meet is a potential supporter, investor, employee, teacher, or customer.
As you approach the later stages of your project, your challenge is to hold on to some of the openness, humility, and brashness you had in the beginning.
Overcome your resistance to a great outcome.
When you pour so much of your life into a project, the final mile can be emotional. For better or worse, a labor of love becomes a part of who you are.
As you approach the finish line, it is only natural to wonder how your venture has changed you. You’ll face the challenge of reconciling ...
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When you don’t feel ready for an outcome or wonder whether or not you deserve it, you may unknowingly fight it.
Some people sit on nonprofit boards because of their financial contributions, while others are invited for their expertise.
Preserve some patience to improve something that will last forever. By adding a brick instead of continually searching to create something new, your contributions may outlast your stay.
The final mile is rich with lessons to absorb and steps you must take to preserve your reputation and take care of those who helped you.
the entrepreneurs I respect the most own their outcome, no matter what it is. They end gracefully.
How do you build something that is a creative expression of yourself but not fail if it fails?
He put up the first affirmation on a slide: “I am not my Twitter bio.”
“I am not my company.”
affirmation: “I am not my work.”
