All in On Not Screwing Up
And while many things are beyond your control, the one thing that is within your control is what you choose to pay attention to; and that can tip the scales.
It has been said that urgent things are often the reason that important things don’t get done.
It’s critical to inject an opinion into everything - even it’s it’s simply to ensure people around you fight you to make it better.
There will be things you can control and things you can’t. Being calm about the things beyond your control and clear about the things within your control - and not confusing the two - is pretty important.
If you like being a hammer, then everything is in danger a being a nail to you ... it happens even to the most principled of us hammers.
We talk about planning and strategy and BHAGs and the like, but then act like the choice of game is already set and non-negotiable. It’s not; you get to choose. In fact, you need to choose
There is a probability of success. While this probability is properly unknowable, everything you do will either increase the probability or will eat away at your chances that things line up the way you need them to.
You have the better mousetrap, yet customers churn and use the budget to go in some other direction.
One of the great lies we as CEOs tell ourselves is that the problem is real and product is a great fit for our addressable market and we are just an iteration or two away from scaling like crazy.
The failure to focus started and ended with a failure to clearly synthesize a view of the reality around you