Principles

Life Principles

1. Embrace Reality and Deal with It

2. Use the 5-Step Process to Get What You Want Out of Life 

3. Be Radically Open-Minded 

4. Understand That People Are Wired Very Differently

5. Learn How to Make Decisions Effectively

Work Principles

1. Trust in Radical Truth and Radical Transparency

2. Cultivate Meaningful Work and Meaningful Relationships

3. Create a Culture in Which It Is Okay to Make Mistakes and Unacceptable Not to Learn from Them

4. Get and Stay in Sync

5. Believability Weight Your Decision Making

6. Recognize How to Get Beyond Disagreements

7. Remember That the WHO Is More Important than the WHAT

8. Hire Right, Because the Penalties for Hiring Wrong Are Huge

9. Constantly Train, Test, Evaluate, and Sort People 

10. Manage as Someone Operating a Machine to Achieve a Goal 

11. Perceive and Don’t Tolerate Problems

12. Diagnose Problems to Get at Their Root Causes

13. Design Improvements to Your Machine to Get Around Your Problems 

14. Do What You Set Out to Do 

15. Use Tools and Protocols to Shape How Work Is Done

16. And for Heaven’s Sake, Don’t Overlook Governance!

Key Concepts

5-step process for getting what you want out of life

1. Have clear goals. 

2. Identify and don’t tolerate the problems that stand in the way of your achieving those goals. 

3. Accurately diagnose the problems to get at their root causes. 

4. Design plans that will get you around them. 

5. Do what’s necessary to push these designs through to results. (p. 168)

Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life

(p. 134)

Pain + Reflection = Progress

(p. 152)

The importance of taking your weaknesses seriously

“When encountering your weaknesses you have four choices: 1. You can deny them (which is what most people do). 2. You can accept them and work at them in order to try to convert them into strengths (which might or might not work depending on your ability to change). 3. You can accept your weaknesses and find ways around them. 4. Or, you can change what you are going after.” (p. 160)

Why principles are helpful—

“Recognize that 1) the biggest threat to good decision making is harmful emotions, and 2) decision making is a two-step process (first learning and then deciding).” (p. 236)

“While it might seem obvious to you by now, it’s worth repeating that realizing that almost all ‘cases at hand’ are just ‘another one of those,’ identifying which ‘one of those’ it is, and then applying well-thought-out principles for dealing with it. This will allow you to massively reduce the number of decisions you have to make (I estimate by a factor of something like 100,000) and will lead you to make much better ones.” (p. 255)

The importance of culture

“A great organization has both great people and a great culture. Companies that get progressively better over time have both. Nothing is more important or more difficult than to get the culture and people right.” (p. 299)

“If the overwhelming majority of people care about having an excellent community, they will take care of it, which will yield both better work and better relationships.” (p. 338)

Idea Meritocracy = Radical Truth + Radical Transparency + Believability-Weighted Decision Making. (p. 309)

“Learning is compounded and accelerated when everyone has the opportunity to hear what everyone else is thinking.” (p. 324)

“That’s because the best decisions are made by an idea meritocracy with believability-weighted decision making, in which the most capable people work through their disagreements with other capable people who have thought independently about what is true and what to do about it.” (p. 370)

“The most believable opinions are those of people who 1) have repeatedly and successfully accomplished the thing in question, and 2) have demonstrated that they can logically explain the cause-effect relationships behind their conclusions.” (p. 370)

Get the organization right

Don’t design jobs to fit people; over time, this almost always turns out to be a mistake. (p. 407)

Hire right

Think through which values, abilities, and skills you are looking for (in that order). (p. 407)

Focus on the machine itself

“The most common mistake I see people make is dealing with their problems as one-offs rather than using them to diagnose how their machine is working so that they can improve it.” (p. 481)

Design for errors

“Remember that a good machine takes into account the fact that people are imperfect. Design in such a way that you produce good results even when people make mistakes.” (p. 501)

Quotables

“Having a good set of principles is like having a good collection of recipes for success.” (Introduction)

“That brings me to my first principle:Think for yourself to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true, and 3) what you should do to achieve #1 in light of #2 . . .” (Introduction)

“There is almost always a good path that you just haven’t discovered yet, so look for it until you find it rather than settle for the choice that is then apparent to you.” (p. 38)

“Making a handful of good uncorrelated bets that are balanced and leveraged well is the surest way of having a lot of upside without being exposed to unacceptable downside.” (p. 58)

“Most people fight seeing what’s true when it’s not what they want it to be. That’s bad, because it is more important to understand and deal with the bad stuff since the good stuff will take care of itself.” (p. 135)

“Don’t get hung up on your views of how things ‘should’ be because you will miss out on learning how they really are.” (p. 140)

“To be successful, the ‘designer/manager you’ has to be objective about what the ‘worker you’ is really like, not believing in him more than he deserves, or putting him in jobs he shouldn’t be in.” (p. 158)

“To be effective you must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true.” (p. 185)

“People who change their minds because they learned something are the winners, whereas those who stubbornly refuse to learn are the losers.” (p. 191)

“Getting the right people in the right roles in support of your goal is the key to succeeding at whatever you choose to accomplish.” (p. 231)

“‘By-and-large’ is the level at which you need to understand most things in order to make effective decisions.” (p. 244)

“You can significantly improve your track record if you only make the bets that you are most confident will pay off.” (p. 253)

“This brings me to my most fundamental work principle: Make your passion and your work one and the same and do it with people you want to be with.” (p. 317)

“For me, not telling people what’s really going on so as to protect them from the worries of life is like letting your kids grow into adulthood believing in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus.” (p. 326)

“Of course, in managing others who make mistakes, it is important to know the difference between 1) capable people who made mistakes and are self-reflective and open to learning from them, and 2) incapable people, or capable people who aren’t able to embrace their mistakes and learn from them.” (p. 350)

“Spend lavishly on the time and energy you devote to getting in sync, because it’s the best investment you can make.” (p. 360)

“It’s critical that conflicts actually get resolved—not through superficial compromise, but through seeking the important, accurate conclusions.” (p. 388)

“Know that most everyone thinks that what they did, and what they are doing, is much more important than it really is.” (p. 427)

“The most effective leaders work to 1) open-mindedly seek out the best answers and 2) bring others along as part of that discovery process.” (p. 465)

“Distinguish between a failure in which someone broke their ‘contract’ and a failure in which there was no contract to begin with. If you didn’t make an expectation clear, you can’t hold people accountable for it not being fulfilled.” (p. 467)

“On your way to your goals, you will inevitably encounter problems. To be successful you must perceive and not tolerate them. Problems are like coal thrown into a locomotive engine because burning them up—inventing and implementing solutions for them—propels us forward.” (p. 472)

“If you’re focused on the goal, excited about achieving it, and recognize that doing some undesirable tasks to achieve the goal is required, you will have the right perspective and will be appropriately motivated. If you’re not excited about the goal that you’re working for, stop working for it.” (p. 520)

“Winston Churchill hit the nail on the head when he said, ‘Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.’” (p. 522)