420 critical summaries.

People change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

Don't look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack!

I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.

The investor's chief problem - and even his worst enemy - is likely to be himself.

A blindfolded chimpanzee throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal could select a portfolio that performs as well as those managed by the experts.

Respect is like air. As long as it's present, nobody thinks about it. But if you take it away, it's all that people can think about.

You can learn to change the way you think about things, and you can also change your basic values and beliefs. And when you do, you will often experience profound and lasting changes in your mood, outlook, and productivity.

A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.

The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern.

You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Exercise is the single most powerful tool you have to optimize your brain function...exercise has a profound impact on cognitive abilities and mental health.

The 80/20 Principle is the cornerstone of results-based living.

The body keeps the score: If the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/muscular problems, and if mind/brain/visceral communication is the royal road to emotion regulation, this demands a radical shift in our therapeutic approach.

Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing; not within our power are our body, our property, reputation, office, and, in a word, whatever is not of our own doing.

The stock market is a giant distraction from the business of investing.

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.

Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love - is the sum of what you focus on.

The single most important thing [you can do] is to shift [your] internal stance from 'I understand' to 'Help me understand.'

People are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of them.

The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.

A manager's output = The output of his organization + The output of the neighboring organizations under his influence.

The core of behavioral economics is that people are not Econs. They are Humans.

He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation.

If you think of your inner voice as an inner tormentor, then it's natural to fantasize about permanently muting it.

By disentangling the people from the problem, you can be 'soft on the people' and 'hard on the problem.'

Think slow, act fast: That's the secret of success.

The story should ultimately be about your audience, not about you.

What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.

We don't like checklists. They can be painstaking. They're not much fun. But I don't think the issue here is mere laziness. The real obstacle is pride.

You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.

A nudge is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.

We swim in an ocean of feedback. Getting better at receiving it is perhaps the single most powerful move we can make toward learning and growth.

No business plan survives first contact with customers.

Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves.

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

Positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at providing something that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about.

Questions persuade more powerfully than any other form of verbal behavior.

The sprint gives teams a shortcut to learning without building and launching.

Addressing the circadian clock is more than a diet. In fact, it's not a diet at all. It's a lifestyle.

When a leader takes so much ownership that members of the team feel there is nothing left for which they can take ownership, team members will execute only at the boss's specific direction without any buy-in themselves.

Management is not a promotion. Management is a career change.

Wealth is more often the result of a lifestyle of hard work, perseverance, planning, and, most of all, self-discipline.

Compliments are the fool's gold of customer learning: shiny, distracting, and worthless.

A healthy failure culture rewards intelligent failure.

Stress is what arises when something you care about is at stake.

Good intentions don't work. Mechanisms do.

The voice in my head can be a total asshole.

Planning rarely creates Power.

In an increasingly unpredictable world, the best algorithm is the one that gives you the best expected outcome - not the guaranteed best outcome.

Good problem solvers are made not born.

World War II was decided by steel and aluminum, and followed shortly thereafter by the Cold War, which was defined by atomic weapons. The rivalry between the United States and China may well be determined by computing power.

You should try inviting AI to help you in everything you do, barring legal or ethical barriers. Familiarizing yourself with AI's capabilities allows you to better understand how it can assist you - or threaten you and your job.

We spend most of our time talking about outputs. So it's not surprising that we tend to confuse the two. Even when teams intend to choose an outcome, they often fall into the trap of selecting an output.

The only suitable reference for an early majority customer is another member of the early majority, but no upstanding member of the early majority will buy without first having consulted with several suitable references.

If you don't prioritize your life, someone else will.

Bad strategy is not the absence of strategy. It is the presence of bad strategy.

Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.

What matters, in other words, isn't what we feel but how we respond to those feelings.

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

I will teach you to be rich - but you have to do the work.

Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.

Buy quickly, sell slowly.

With deliberate practice, however, the goal is not just to reach your potential but to build it, to make things possible that were not possible before.

The biggest risk of a startup isn't building something that doesn't work; it's building something that no one wants.

The pursuit of 'efficiency' - getting the most with the least investment of energy, time, or money - was once a laudable goal, but being effective in today's world is less a question of optimizing for a known set of variables than responsiveness to a constantly shifting environment.

Challengers aren’t so much world-class investigators as they are world-class teachers.

The first thousand users are the hardest to get, but they determine everything that follows.

If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you'd be furious. Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled - have you no shame in that?

Effective executives focus on outward contribution. They ask: 'What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?'

The president of the United States gets 100 days to prove himself; you get 90.

There is no asset-allocation fairy.

An hour lost at a bottleneck is an hour lost for the entire system. An hour saved at a non-bottleneck is a mirage.

Happiness is not the belief that we don't need to change; it is the realization that we can.

There are many things money can buy, but the most valuable of all is freedom. Freedom to do what you want and work for whom you respect.

More than 99% of startups take no funding, yet every article you read glorifies raising huge funding rounds. As if raising funding is the goal - it's not.

The term sheet is critical. What's in it usually determines the final deal structure. Don't think of it as a letter of intent. Think of it as a blueprint for your future relationship with your investor.

Money is something we choose to trade our life energy for.

The only way to think like a leader is to first act: to plunge yourself into new projects and activities, interact with very different kinds of people, and experiment with unfamiliar ways of getting things done.

A job is the progress that an individual seeks in a given circumstance.

Perfectionism is the unparalleled defense for emotionally abandoned children. The existential unattainability of perfection saves the child from giving up, unless or until scant success forces retreat into dissociative depression.

You can't know what you want until you know what you might want, so you are going to have to generate a lot of ideas and possibilities.

The build trap is when organizations become stuck measuring their success by outputs rather than outcomes.

Make exercise necessary and fun. Do mostly cardio, but also some weights. Some is better than none. Keep it up as you age.

People leave managers, not companies. How long an employee stays and how productive he is while there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor.

The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you've reached, but how far you've climbed to get there.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Multipliers invoke each person's unique intelligence and create an atmosphere of genius - innovation, productive effort, and collective intelligence.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.

The foxes beat the hedgehogs. Better forecasters tend to be more open-minded, careful, curious, and self-critical.

Good management was the most powerful reason they failed to stay atop their industries.

Customers don't care about your solution. They care about their problems.

Buying good businesses at bargain prices is the secret to making lots of money.

What is the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

Change might not be fast and it isn't always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.

We need, in other words, to learn how to enjoy things without feeling entitled to them and without clinging to them.

Never do anything just for the money.

Don't generalize; specialize. If you focus on doing one thing well and hire specialists in that area, the quality of your work will improve and you will stand out among your competitors.

Emotions are tunnels. If you go all the way through them, you get to the light at the end. Exhaustion happens when we get stuck in the tunnel.

The successful investor is usually an individual who is inherently interested in business problems.

If you over-complicate the easy, you make the essential impossible.

Courage is not an absence of fear; courage is fear walking.

The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world.

Det er ikke visionen, der får os ud af sengen om morgenen, det er vækkeuret.

Loonshot: A neglected project, widely dismissed, its champion written off as unhinged.

The right word isn't just a better word, it's a completely different outcome.

Somewhere in this process, you will come face to face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy.

People don't care which company they work for. They care which team they're on.

Stress + Rest = Growth. The equation doesn't work without both variables.

A strategy is a coordinated and integrated set of five choices: a winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, core capabilities, and management systems.

Hesitation is death. Observe, orient, decide, and act.

The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future.

If the architecture of the system and the architecture of the organization are at odds, the architecture of the organization wins.

Investing can be simple, but it's certainly not simplistic.

Your advice is not as good as you think it is.

Just because consequences are difficult to predict doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Your business is not your life. Your business and your life are two totally separate things.

The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place. The Struggle is when people ask you why you don't quit and you don't know the answer.

Your job as a manager is not to dole out advice or 'save the day' - it's to empower your team to find the answers themselves.

The mind automatically sorts information into distinctive pyramidal groupings in order to comprehend it.

Morality binds and blinds.

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.

Your deepest moments of happiness don't come from easy things. They come from realizing your potential and overcoming your own limiting beliefs about yourself.

Hvis du er leder, og ingen følger dig, så er du reelt set bare ude og gå en tur

Organizational debt is like technical debt, but worse. You can choose when and how to pay down technical debt, but organizational debt often comes due unexpectedly.

Don't start a company unless you can't not do it.

Building a visionary company requires one percent vision and 99 percent alignment.

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.

Some people tell me that entrepreneurship should not be disciplined, but chaotic and unpredictable - and it is. But it is just in such situations where a framework to attack the problem in a systematic manner will be the most valuable.

What will your legacy be - what you owned or who you were?

Being right is not enough. You need enough leverage to have your point of view considered.

Særligt for træer findes aldring faktisk slet ikke.

It's about winning the war for popular opinion, teaching the world to abandon the old and embrace the new.

The best persuaders become the best through pre-suasion - the process of arranging for recipients to be receptive to a message before they encounter it.

We are pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend.

Deliberate rest helps you work better. It's not the opposite of work; it's work's partner.

Growth sucks cash.

If you're not uncomfortable, then you're probably stuck at an 'acceptable level.'

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

Your story must reflect change over time. You must begin as one version of yourself and end as a different version of yourself. Otherwise, you have no story.

The goal isn't to find good assets, but good buys. Thus, it's not what you buy; it's what you pay for it.

Tail events are all they care about.

Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.

Wealth is what you don't see. Wealth is the nice cars not purchased. The diamonds not bought. The watches not worn, the clothes forgone and the first-class upgrade declined.

Champions behave like champions before they're champions.

Your job is to make the organization better by solving bigger problems, not to be the best coder.

We do not get better without structure.

It is not weakness. It is biology being exploited.

What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

The most important thing about validation is that you need to do it before you write any code.

When there is doubt, there is no doubt.

You don't have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.

We cannot grow unless we are prepared to learn from our mistakes. Yet we can only learn from our mistakes if we are prepared to acknowledge them.

Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.

The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation.

The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive - the drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things because they matter.

The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.

Hastily planned exits seldom turn out to be happy ones.

The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.

People are not persuaded by logical arguments, they are persuaded by emotional connections. Make them feel heard and valued, and they will give you almost anything.

The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change; the signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency.

It doesn't matter how good your engineering team is if they are not given something worthwhile to build.

Man kan ikke styre sine tanker, men man kan styre, om man giver dem opmærksomhed.

The greatest source of investment risk is the belief that there is no risk.

Why are we so good at accumulating more information and power, but far less successful at acquiring wisdom?

Behind every stock is a company. Find out what it's doing.

A strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change.

The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.

Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up.

Most business owners try to grow their way out of their problems, hinging salvation on the next big sale or customer, but the result is simply a bigger monster.

It's not mean, it's clear.

I'm a shameless copycat. Everything in my life is cloned. I have no original ideas.

Charisma is the result of specific nonverbal behaviors, not an inherent or magical personal quality.

Today's comfort is tomorrow's discomfort. This leads to a new level of what's considered comfortable.

Culture is not something you are - it's something you do.

Heads, I win; tails, I don't lose much!

Your margin is my opportunity.

A part of all I earn is mine to keep.

The scout asks: Is this true? The soldier asks: Can I believe this?

Most founders only consider using traction channels they're already familiar with. This means that far too many startups focus on the same channels and ignore other promising ways to get traction.

Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.

The customer is the judge, jury, and executioner of your value proposition.

We believe we're rational beings, but our decisions are often shaped by the time of day.

If you give people freedom, they will amaze you.

No matter how much effort you put in, you can't sit there and make brilliant decisions all day the way a truck driver can stay on the road.

Everyone wants to outperform the market over every single time frame, both short term and long term. There's a name for this strategy - it's called impossible.

Word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions.

The leader is truly and ultimately responsible for everything. That is Extreme Ownership.

The more I help out, the more successful I become. But I measure success in what it has done for the people around me. That is the real accolade.

Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great.

If you're not running experiments, you're probably not growing.

The vast majority of premature deaths can be prevented through simple changes in diet and lifestyle.

Every institution is vulnerable to decline, no matter how great. There is no law of nature that the most powerful will inevitably remain at the top.

Our attention has never been as overwhelmed as it is today. At the same time, our world has never had more things competing for it.

Time management is pain management. Understanding that truth is the first step in learning to manage our time and, therefore, our distractions.

The key to being a successful skipper is to see the ship through the eyes of the crew.

Exercise is the single most important thing anyone can do to improve brain function and resiliency to disease.

The answer is simple: a good leader builds a great team that counterbalances their weaknesses.

With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.

The greatest team members are not just skilled but also deeply aligned to where the company needs to go.

There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.

We are hyper-vigilant about everything we put into our body, and we are proud of this. We Instagram how proud we are of this, and we follow Goop and Well+Good, and we drop 40 bucks on an exercise class because there are healing crystals in the floor. And we drink fucking rocket fuel.

OKRs aren't about hitting targets, but about learning what you are really capable of.

A sound operating system running on an efficient cadence is essential to execution and lays the groundwork for great management.

Your largest expense is your life. Most people never question whether their lifestyle matches their values or their goals.

Saying no is not subtracting.

Most unicorn founders had no industry experience. There's no disadvantage to being a solo founder or to being a non-technical CEO.

The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing.

If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.

The role of a consultant is to improve the client's condition.

The quality of our thinking is proportional to the models in our head and their usefulness in the situation at hand.

Happiness comes from between.

Profitability means sustainability. Instead of treading water until a lifeboat comes along to save you - which is how many founders think about raising their next round of VC funding - it means building your own boat.

You don’t have to wait until you feel confident, motivated, or until you know it all; you start now and see what comes to you.

Diet is Batman and exercise is Robin.

The job of a CEO is not to manage day-to-day operations but to be the chief capital allocator of the business.

Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.

No one is coming to save you. If I don't do something, nothing is going to change.

It's not just about the cards you're dealt, but how you play them.

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

Vision without traction is merely hallucination.

Every transition begins with an ending. We have to let go of the old thing before we can pick up the new - not just outwardly, but inwardly, where we keep our connections to the people and places that act as definitions of who we are.

A Tribal Leader focuses their efforts on building the tribe - or, more precisely, upgrading the tribal culture.

No one who ever changed the game did so by being reasonable.

Your culture is how your company makes decisions when you're not there. It's how they behave when no one is looking.

The goal is not to get customers. The goal is to get customers who are so happy they refer other customers.

You can choose how to spend your 168 hours, and you have more time than you think.

No one had ever stopped to wonder about whether the way we're working was actually working.

To control alcohol you have to cease seeing it as something enjoyable. If you no longer want it you have power over it rather than vice versa.

A business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value.

Don't hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time.

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.

You might be the most competent, warmest person in the world, but if you don't show it, people won't believe you.

The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

What surprised me most was how unsure the founders seemed to be that they were actually onto something big. Some of these companies got started almost by accident.

The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets.

If you're not saying 'Hell yeah!' about something, say no.

Habits are one of the ways the brain learns complex behaviors. Neuroscientists believe habits give us the ability to focus our attention on other things by storing automatic responses in the basal ganglia.

Better people make better All Blacks.

The only reason to study philosophy is to become a better person.

At the core of all anger is a need that is not being fulfilled.

Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.

Platform businesses bring together producers and consumers in high-value exchanges. Their chief assets are information and interactions.

If your business depends on you, you don't own a business - you have a job. And it's the worst job in the world because you're working for a lunatic.

The fundamental paradox of the tour of duty: acknowledging that the employee might leave is actually the best way to build trust, and thus develop the kind of relationship that convinces great people to stay.

It's not that we're dumb. We're wired to avoid pain and pursue pleasure and security. It feels right to sell when everyone around us is scared and buy when everyone feels great. It may feel right - but it's not rational.

We need to think with the perspective of 'Whose task is this?' and continually separate one's own tasks from other people's tasks.

Growth creates complexity, and complexity is the silent killer of growth.

We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.

The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.

We love talking about starts and finishes, even though the middle stretch is the most important and often the most ignored and misunderstood.

Every day you don't have the conversation is a day you're lying to your employee about their future.

The impediment to action becomes part of the action; the obstacle in our way becomes the way forward.

Finished ought to be an F-word for all of us. We are all works in progress.

Struggle is not optional - it's neurologically required: in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes; you must slowly teach your circuit.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.

Everyone wants better meetings, but no one seems to know how.

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open.

The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition.

Efficiency is not about getting more things done; it's about getting the right things done.

Designers don't analyze, worry, think, complain their way forward; they build their way forward.

Fokusér på det, du kan kontrollere

The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.