Table of contents

Child pages

• Going through all of these things I've collected, I feel like someone who's been given a big tub in which two dozen different jigsaw puzzles have been broken up and mixed together, and I'm trying to sort them all out and eventually put them all back together again.

• Amazon's Leadership Principles

• The reason it's so important to be able raise money and manage large amounts of capital (millions of dollars) is that generally the smaller opportunities (that require less capital) also produce less profit. This sounds obvious to me as I'm writing it, but it isn't a skill most people spend any time studying.

2008.02.27 - Bloomberg BusinessWeek - Aubrey de Grey: How to be a Successful Heretic

1. Be right (diligence before oratory)
2. Be boastful (about your topic)
3. Be a doer (as well as a talker)
4. Be indomitable (if not invincible)
5. Be diplomatic (not maybe all the time)
6. Be everywhere (a pint is worth 1000 words)
7. Be pithy (especially under pressure)
8. Be inspirational (with a team that's organisational)
9. Be selfless (remember that control is only a means to an end)
10. Be right (and be able to explain why to experts and laymen)

A degree of callousness

Related pages

• Experiential / environmental patterns of successful / rich people (there's a section on callousness)

• I think the reason this is a pattern among successful people is that as you make your way along, you will at some point end up in a situation in which you can choose to either share your wealth with other people or keep it for yourself, and if you don't have that necessary degree of callousness you will be more likely to share away your wealth.

  • This is exactly what happened to Steve Wozniak: he shared his wealth, and yet isn't adored as much by the general public as Steve Jobs, who was extremely protective of his shares, and later did some financial maneuverings at Pixar that could be seen as callous towards the employees.

  • I've also read that this is a trait of the culture in Thailand: the culture there is to always share whatever you have when someone in your family needs it, and so the people who have that habit have trouble accumulating any money / getting out of poverty.

• Barbara Corcoran:

• Felix Dennis:

Exercises for increasing your callousness

• I should include all the little callous things that Steve Jobs would do.

Be Right a Lot

• I think you get this from having read a lot, experienced a lot, and thought a lot.

  • Example: This is how good chess players end up being 'right a lot'.

• As the Amazon quote below mentions, it also comes from having spent time trying to figure out how you could be wrong. So it's not really that you're just magically 'right a lot'; you come up with lots of different ideas, most of which are wrong, and you only show the outside world those ideas which survived that process.

• 2018.01.04 - Off the top of my head, this comes from a few things: 1) domain expertise, 2) tracking how much evidence they have for various beliefs, and 3) being able to properly adjust the strength of their claims based on the strength of the evidence they have.

Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

Leaders are right a lot. They have strong business judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.

Bias for Action

Related pages

• Overcoming perfectionism / Keeping track of the big picture

Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.

• Felix Dennis

  • How to Get Rich

    • "No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not start. It becomes a nightmare." - Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare

      • The epigraph to Chapter 1

How to practice

• Play Blitz Chess

  • I think the reason this can help is that it gets you into the habit of keeping your mind on the big-picture and jumping back-and-forth between an in-depth examination of your current situation and a zoomed-out view of how much time you have and whether you should allocate more time to your current problem or conserve time for later.

  • Try the 5-minutes-per-side games at https://www.chess.com/, and focus on not losing on time. Don't worry if you actually win or lose the game, but make sure you don't lose by running out of time.

  • 2016.10.25 - Something I just noticed / remembered is that chess games (just like Warcraft 3 and Starcraft games) can get really tense. It's probably good practice for dealing with the tension of a start-up.

Customer Obsession

Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

Delegation

2013.09 - New York (Magazine) - In Conversation: Michael Bloomberg

The quote below was transcribed from the video. I don't think it shows up in the text of the interview.

Regarding his first 100 days:
Bloomberg: Everybody kept saying, "Well, what have you done?" And I kept saying, "Build a team." And they said, "Oh yeah, that's nice, but what have you done?" And I kept saying, "Build a team." When you have a business or an organization with 280,000 employees, 8.4 million customers (that we want to phrase it), $70 billion budget, you just have to delegate, and you have to give authority to go along with responsibility. That not only lets you run the place, but it also lets you attract great people. And many businesses don't, and most governments do not delegate. And so why would you want to go to work in a place where you're going to be held responsible if the shit hits the fan, but you don't have any real say in it.