Nathan Wailes - Blog - GitHub - LinkedIn - Patreon - Reddit - Stack Overflow - Twitter - YouTube

Behaviors / skills / habits to develop

Owned by Nathan Wailes
Last updated: Jan 04, 2018
13 min read

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.


  • 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


  • 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:
    • "Well, Mary, after working with so many different people, I guess I've concluded that great salespeople have a few things in common. The first is empathy. You know, the ability to get along with people. And, Mary, it's obvious to me that you're very, very good with people. Would you agree?"

      Mary straightened her back, sat up proudly, and agreed. "Yes, of course. Yes, yes, I'm very good with people."

      I smiled and then paused with obvious concern. "But," I continued in a more serious voice, "I've also found that the other thing all great salespeople share is a real need to succeed–I'd almost call it a killer instinct. And for whatever reason, I'm just not getting that from you." Then I sat back in my chair and waited for her response.

      For the next five minutes, Mary gave a long dissertation on how she really was aggressive. Her words were right, but I knew her music was all wrong. So, I bade her good-bye and promised to call if a position became available. I knew it never would.

      Source: Shark Tales 
  • Felix Dennis:
    • Along with a degree of callousness and enviable powers of speedy recuperation from reverses, stamina is your secret weapon. Its attributes will see you through a raft of catastrophes that would virtually annihilate older men and women.
      (...)
      Ambition, fearlessness, self-belief, stamina, a degree of callousness, a willingness to learn. These are your advantages over the middle-aged and the old.

      Source: How to Get Rich 


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

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.


Dive Deep

Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them.

 

Don't look back (excessively)

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

Interviewer: You’re going to miss being mayor, right?

Bloomberg: Yeah, sure. But I never, ever, look back. The day I got fired at Salomon, I think I said, “Fuck them!” on my way out the door.

 

Earn Trust

Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing.  Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume.  They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.

 

Focus / tend to finish what you start / deliver results

Related pages


  • If I look back at my emails and ideas over the years, I can see that I've had a variety of projects that I've started but never finished.
  • In contrast, people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Walton, etc. all benefited from investing their time in a single direction for an extended period of time, until they got to the point where they could get a pay-out.
  • Similarly you see that guys like Jonatan Soderstrom benefited from focusing on a single project for an extended period of time (Hotline Miami), whereas the guy who created the game that HM is based on (Ikiki) didn't benefit because he didn't invest enough time in the idea to get it good enough that people would start telling each other about it(?) and be willing to pay for it(?).


"Focusing is about saying no."

- Steve Jobs


Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.


  • The analogy that's been popping into my head recently is this one:
    1. Imagine you're a kid and you walk to your local drugstore to get some candy. You have a $1 bill. There are many different types of candy to choose from, some of which cost less than $1, some which cost more than $1, and some that cost exactly $1.
    2. In the real world, you don't (normally) have the person behind the counter keep any of your money unless you receive a candy, and you only have as much money taken from you as is necessary to pay for the candies you've received. So what you do is: you take note of how much money you have, and you take note of how much the different candies cost, and you give the person behind the counter your money, select the candy you want, and you get your change back.
    3. Imagine if I were to change the way that this situation worked, though, in this way: rather than having a $1 bill, you only have a penny at a time, and each day you must either give the person being the counter your penny or you lose it (or, what would have the same effect: you don't receive a new penny the next day). And all of the candy in the store costs more than a penny, say $0.05 and up, and the candy you'd really like to have costs $0.50 to $1.
    4. And when you give the person behind the counter your penny, you must tell him which candy that penny is being paid towards, and you can't change your mind. So it is possible, for example, to have simultaneously given the person behind the counter $0.05 towards a $0.10 candy, and $0.35 towards a $0.50 candy, and $0.94 towards a $1.00 candy.
    5. So every day, you walk into the store with your penny and need to decide which candy to put the penny towards.
    6. The problem is that your preference changes day-by-day, and so one day you want one particular candy more, and another day you want another candy more.
    7. And so, if you want to get your candies as quickly as possible, you need to force yourself to sometimes put your pennies towards candies that are not the candy you would most like to have at that moment.
  • Proverbs
    • "A man who chases two rabbits catches neither."
  • Bill Gates
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQM71ea0cHI
      • "I don't let myself start a book that I'm not going to finish. (...) It's my rule to get to the end."
      • He thinks carefully before choosing a book.
      • Update: The uploader's account was removed and I can't find the video anywhere else! If I remember correctly it was an excerpt from the David Rubenstein interview, but when I skimmed through the 25-minute video I could find of the full interview, I didn't see that quote. I vaguely remember there being two versions of the interview, one longer and one shorter, but I can't find any video longer than 25 minutes.
  • Notch
    • Get the quote from Notch about how it's important to finish things.
  • Warren Buffett
    • 2017 - HBO - Becoming Warren Buffett
      • Warren: Shortly after I met Bill Gates, Bill's dad asked each of us to write down on a piece of paper one word that would best describe what had helped us the most. Bill and I, without any collaboration at all, each wrote the word 'focus'. <cut to a different quote> Well, focus has always been a strong part of my personality; if I get interested in something, I get really interested. If I get interested into a subject, I want to read about it, I want to talk about it, and I want to meet people that're involved in it.

        Bill: We both loved to work hard. You know, neither of us like frivolous things...you know, he doesn't know much about cooking, or art, you know, a huge range of things.

        Warren: I can't tell you the color of the walls in my bedroom or my living room. 
  • Zachtronics
    • TIS-100 came about when he gauged the size of a project and concluded it would be too big, and so he decided to build a piece of it instead.
      • https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/244969/Things_we_create_tell_people_who_we_are_Designing_Zachtronics_TIS100.php

        • Barth set out to try and recapture something of his past by crafting his Second Golden Age with some collaborators, designing a game with a story and five different puzzle games within it before realizing "Oh god, I can't make another game. There's so much work here! It doesn't make sense, it will cost a fortune to make the art, I just...I don't have time for this."

          But out of that aborted attempt came a piece of game design that would become the foundation for a game he could actually make, a game about solving puzzles with assembly code.

          “One of the puzzles I designed [for Golden Age] was exactly TIS-100,” says Barth. “The original story of The Second Golden Age was going to involve, as you're going around this future city in the Middle East, you can stumble into this junk shop where you find this old computer.”

  • Arthur Schopenhauer
    • The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. -- A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

Exercises

  • Practice finishing books.
  • Practice finishing small software projects.

Frugality

Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention.  There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size or fixed expense.

 

2015.07.19 - DailyMail - Tony Hsieh - Tech CEO worth $820million lives with his pet alpaca in a tiny Airstream caravan at Las Vegas trailer park called 'Llamapolis'

 

Hire and Develop the Best

 

Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others.  We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice.

 

Insist on the Highest Standards

 

Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

Leaders have relentlessly high standards - many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and driving their teams to deliver high quality products, services and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.

 

Invent and Simplify

 

Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited by “not invented here". As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time.

Learn and Be Curious

Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.

 

Taking Ownership

Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say “that’s not my job".

 

Think Big

Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.

 

Work a lot - "every waking hour"

  • Elon Musk said "work hard, like, every waking hour" at his USC speech.
  • One of the benefits of not having a private room / apartment is that I wasn't wasting as much time watching movies. Although I did have some issues wasting time on random websites at work...but I still think it helped a lot.
  • 2015.10.09 - The past few days I've been getting very little sleep (3-6 hrs / night) and yet haven't felt inordinately tired. I've actually felt pretty invigorated at night. I think I'm feeling very excited about an idea I came up with, and I can't stop thinking about it. So that may explain when you hear about entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Elon Musk not requiring very much sleep; they may just be getting "high" on their own success the way a videogamer might while playing an online game that they're good at.
  • 2013.10.25 - YouTube - Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2013
    • [In reference to a "Rome of Augustus" art class he'd had at Harvard:] "I hadn't really gone to class all term, I just programmed, and then during Reading Period, when I should've been learning this, I programmed."


2014.04.16 - Playboy - Interview with Tony Hsieh


PLAYBOY: Is it true that when you were writing your number-one best-selling business book, Delivering Happiness, you ate coffee beans drenched in vodka to write faster?

HSIEH: Yes. I found it was easy to write once I was in the mood, but it was hard to get in the mood. So I tried various things based on feedback from writer friends. Vodka first, then coffee and then, yes, I actually soaked coffee beans in the vodka. But I found the most effective technique was taking Excedrin when I didn’t have a headache because there’s actually a lot of caffeine in Excedrin. I ended up writing the whole book in about two weeks’ time. [NW: Wow.]


Work efficiently

  • Add the link of Steven Spielberg shooting Jurassic Park.
  • I should try to make "blinders": glasses w/ holes cut in the center so you can focus on what you're working on and not get distracted by stuff going on in your peripheral vision.

Related pages


The ability to break down a large task into smaller tasks without getting overwhelmed by the size of the final task

Related pages


  • I remember what I kept thinking when I was climbing that mountain in Switzerland: "Don't look down the mountain. Don't look up the mountain. Look at where you need to step next."


  • Elon Musk
    • This seems to me to be one of Elon Musk's major talents. I strongly suspect he developed this talent through his training in mathematics and physics.
    • SpaceX and Tesla have broken down their development into very clear goals that the entire company can rally behind.
      • Tesla: "1) High-price / low-volume car, then 2) mid-price / mid-volume car, then 3) low-price / high-volume car."
      • SpaceX: "1) Small (single-engine) disposable rocket (Falcon 1), 2) medium (multi-engine) disposable rocket (Falcon 9), 3) medium (multi-engine) reusable rocket (Falcon 9 with the ability to land), 4) large (3 Falcon 9s) reusable rocket (Falcon Heavy), 5) extra-large reusable rocket (ITS launch vehicle)"

  • Justin Kan

    • 2013.03.28 - Justin Kan - How to Do Anything

      • "I’ve found that when faced with a set of seemingly insurmountable challenges, the first step towards making it easier is to break things down into as large a set of small individual tasks as possible."


Work on the right things

  • Get the quote from Paul Graham (from Twitter?) about how the right thing to work on is often simple, but difficult (psychologically?).





Follow me on Twitter