Are you failing enough? School is a place that trains you to give the right answer, and where failure is punished. Are you trying to do things that have never been done? Are you seeking answers no one knows already? Risk failure to find the success that follows.
Category Archives: Ideas
Start now
When you’re young you have an incredible advantage for starting something new: you don’t know that you can’t do it, and you have little to lose and much to gain. When you get older, you’ll probably have more to lose. You’ll have family and financial obligations, and you’ll risk being trapped by your present circumstances. If …
Growth
A series on the Faithlife core values: Honesty. Openness. Awesomeness. Growth. Initiative. Elegance. Shipping. We spend a lot of years preparing to be ‘all grown-up.’ Childhood is focused on learning and growth and experiences in preparation for becoming ‘an adult.’ The artificial milestones of graduation ceremonies and significant birthdays at 18 and 21 only serve to reinforce the bright-line distinction …
Ask for improvements, not feedback
Your work can be better. Mine can be, too. I want to be intentional about excellence. I want our team to decide that we are going to value excellent work and pursue excellence in our own output. And here’s the tool to make it happen: Improve the work, not the worker. Seek improvement over feedback. Nobody likes …
Without objection
“Without objection, I will ship the alpha Tuesday at 10 am.” “Without objection, this ad will go live on the front page at end of workday.” The most powerful phrase for shipping a product, a web page, or an idea is “without objection”. We are all drowning in email. But there’s no escape; sometimes there …
Advice to my 21 year-old self
An intern invited me to coffee today and asked what advice I’d give my 21 year-old self. The answer was easy: read more history and biography. As the saying goes, “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.” The only shortcut I’ve found is to study other people’s experience, and that’s mostly written …
Entourage
I was reading an article about a famous, wealthy person. The reporter noted that he was surrounded by an entourage, some of whom seemed employed only to laugh at his jokes. It reminded me that the Bible addressed this (and everything!) long ago: logos.biblia.init(); (Note the cool new embedded Bible widget! You can get it …
Advice to a young CEO
What’s the best advice for a young, first-time CEO? Get rid of your television It sounds silly, but you’re going to need every moment of every day, and television is a distraction you can’t afford. Read business history and biography Remember the old saw about how good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from …
Getting ahead
Thoughts on getting ahead, specifically in your career and earnings. This is the blunt, direct advice I give employees one-on-one, and what I’m sharing with my kids as they head off to college.
If you’re learning a lot in class, you’re doing it wrong.
I recently spoke with a student majoring in Computer Science who was interested in working for my company. When I asked if he understood a particular concept, he told me he hadn’t taken that class yet. I understand learning about English composition in a class on that subject, or even picking up some physics in …
Continue reading “If you’re learning a lot in class, you’re doing it wrong.”