Category: Expectations
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Selling and transparency
When Michael Karnjanaprakorn worked as a CEO, a fair part of his job involved getting people to join, invest in, or partner with the company. In order to do this, he would need to persuade people to buy into his vision. In other words, he would sell. As he gained more experience with selling, Michael…
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Pursuing vs. ensuing
There are two extremes at how you approach a goal. Pursuing: At one end, you are in pursuing mode, chasing the goal directly, stopping at nothing to achieve it—you are going to get it, or you will die trying. You say no to the many inessential items because they are distractions. You do your best…
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Earning confidence
When you go to the gym, you only see benefits if you actually do the exercise. While a coach, trainer, or friend can support you through the process, they can’t do the actual work for you. If they lifted the weights, they would get stronger—not you. Similarly, you can’t simply trade bodies with someone who…
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Prove it
If you want to do something, like really want to do it, you need to prove it. That starts with you proving it to yourself. In difficult circumstances, do you make excuses? Or do you face your problem head on? Are you willing to make difficult decisions to do what you’ve committed to? Are you…
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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…