Category: Expectations
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“What if I’m no good?”
Let’s say you want to do something creative. You’re not sure about how good you really are, or how much money you’ll make, or whether or not you’ll “go somewhere” with it. Would you do it anyway? The answer needs to be a resounding yes. That’s the level of drive and sacrifice that it takes…
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A second opinion, before giving up
A schoolteacher writes the first three pages of a short story on a typewriter. When he’s done, he’s disgusted with it. It was getting too long, he didn’t know how to market it, he didn’t like the character, he couldn’t relate to the story, the list goes on… He throws it out. His wife finds…
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Believe it
Donny Deutsch writes in Often Wrong, Never in Doubt: There are 20,000 advertising copywriters in New York City right now. If I polled them, I’m absolutely positive that 19,990 would say they deserve to be a creative director. “I’m working for them, I’m smarter than they are, I do all the work…” Every one of…
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The dirt
In Clear Thinking, Shane Parrish writes: Too often decision-makers get their information and observations from sources that are multiple degrees removed from the problem….You can’t make good decisions with bad information. In fact, when you see people making decisions that don’t make sense to you, chances are they’re based on different information than you’ve consumed.…
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Delusions and evolutionary fitness
Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler write in Useful Delusions: In recent years, psychologists and neuroscientists have shown that the human brain is designed to make a number of errors in perception and judgment. These “bugs”—distortions, shortcuts and other cognitive cross-wiring—produce slanted pictures of reality. They exist for a reason: Evolution found that, on average, the…
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Pain, suffering, and low expectations
When asked about advice for students, Jensen Huang says that one of his key advantages is low expectations: You want to refine the character of your company. You want greatness out of them, and greatness is not intelligence, as you know. Greatness comes from character, [which] isn’t isn’t formed out of smart people. It’s formed…
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Change the metaphor
You and I constantly tell ourselves stories about our work, and these stories affect how we treat the work and treat the people we work with. The most important thing to remember is you always have a choice to flip the metaphor or introduce a new one. That’s a starting point for you to see…
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Big fish in a bigger pond
In Lucky Me, Rich Paul writes: Now I have to help guys in the league who used to be stars, but can’t let go of their ego and accept a new role. Then there are my young clients coming into the NBA; every one of them was once the star on their high school or…
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David Chang on the long, hard, stupid way
I recently came across a great quote from David Chang, “Just because we’re a casual restaurant, doesn’t mean we don’t hold ourselves to fine dining standards. We try to do things the right way. That usually means doing things the long, hard, stupid way.” David has elaborated on this quote: When your back is turned…
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Comfort zone
Going outside of your comfort zone is generally good advice. This usually means you’re pushing beyond what you expect of yourself, and what others expect of you. In the process, you’re improving your skills, building confidence, and changing what others realize you’re capable of. All of this will inevitably open up new opportunities for you.…