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Take the envelope off.…Walk good. 28all. Eya. *KC, PR* The Warm-Up: “If you could buy a map to the top, everyone would already be there. You need to make your own path.” ~Shane Parrish The Core: “You become less anxious as you become more honest.” ~Orange Book “When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well.” ~William Gibson “Types of investment information, in order of volume: *useless *useful but perishable *useful and permanent.” ~Morgan Housel “We’re simply trying to buy things for less than they’re worth. We’re not making microeconomic decisions or forecasts.” ~Charlie Munger “Sometimes when you see beyond people’s mask, they will start avoiding you. Let it be so. Some are not ready to be seen.” ~Dr. Thema Bryant “No one cares if you took ten years to create something no one needs. No one cares if you took one month to create something everyone values. At the end of the day, it’s about the value you create for people.” ~Orange Book “‘Man, I cannot believe Apple makes that much money.’ *Takes off $550 headphones. *Looks down at $1200 phone. *Pushes back from $1500 computer. *Checks time on $500 watch. How do they do it?” ~Austen Allred “If you are inexperienced you are going to take more than you give even though it may not feel that way. To offset, figure out how to compound trust and avoid being transactional. Givers are more generous to people they trust and distrustful of people always looking to transact.” ~Paul Enright “The greatest rewards come from working on something that nobody has a name for. If you possibly can, work where there are no words for what you do…Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you…If you can avoid seeking approval of others, your power is limitless…Each time you reach out to people, bring them a blessing; then they’ll be happy to see you when you bring them a problem.” ~Kevin Kelly, 99 Additional Bits of Unsolicited Advice “You have to find peace in the fact that not everybody is ready to receive what you have to offer. Don’t take rejection personal. Instead, take yourself where you are appreciated. What you want from certain people may be more than they’re able to give. Be honest with yourself. Grow with people who value you. The relationships flow differently when you’ve been loving yourself well. Eventually, you will figure out who to keep close and who to put at a distance. Unfortunately, it takes being wrong a few times to really learn what’s best for you.” ~Rob Hill Sr. Last Set: “Rarely talked about, and the heart of marketing and more than that, of culture. We can’t possibly know precisely what’s inside the book or the box or the bottle before we buy it for the first time. We take meds or go to the movies in anticipation of an outcome, and we give the producer the benefit of the doubt (or we don’t go, because the doubt is too much for us to handle.) And we do the same thing with people. Who we hire, who we are afraid of, who we marry. We can’t know, not for sure, not until our experience with them is complete. And we make all of these decisions without a conscious thought. When we persistently and consistently do it incorrectly, we suffer. We create injustice, we miss out on opportunities, we fall prey to scams. The more we generalize our benefit of the doubt (and worse, the amplification of the doubt) the more damage we do. The internet has overwhelmed us with data, and some of it (but not much) is actually turned into useful information. Some of that useful information is helping us see how long we’ve been mistaken about the benefit of the doubt in so many of the biases and actions we take (and don’t take). Examining how we instinctually make these choices is a powerful first step in making better ones.” ~Seth Godin, The benefit of the doubt Food for Thought: “That’s really the great mystery about bureaucracies. Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it’s time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they’re done. Just keeping the routine going. I tell you this to forewarn you, because I promise you that you will meet these people and you will find yourself in environments where what is rewarded above all is conformity. I tell you so you can decide to be a different kind of leader. And I tell you for one other reason. As I thought about these things and put all these pieces together—the kind of students I had, the kind of leadership they were being trained for, the kind of leaders I saw in my own institution—I realized that this is a national problem. We have a crisis of leadership in this country, in every institution. Not just in government… Finally—and I know I’m on sensitive ground here—look at what happened during the first four years of the Iraq War. We were stuck. It wasn’t the fault of the enlisted ranks or the noncoms or the junior officers. It was the fault of the senior leadership, whether military or civilian or both. We weren’t just not winning, we weren’t even changing direction. We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don’t have are leaders. What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.” ~William Deresiewicz, Solitude and Leadership (March 1st, 2010)
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