Metadata
- Author: ExecutiveGrowth Summaries
- Full Title: Summary
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Highlights
It takes courage to hold yourself and other people accountable, but there’s no point in avoiding reality. (Location 133)
Make sure that your goal is clear. Human beings have needs and desires on many levels, so it’s important to take the time to think clearly about exactly what it is that you’re going after and why you’re going to invest the time and effort to get it. Aim high, and aim for something that will enhance your life in the long run. (Location 140)
If you convince yourself that you know it all and remain closed off to the ways others see things, you’re going to struggle a lot more in life. Merely arguing for the sake of arguing, or insisting on being right, can easily make you blind to the subtleties of each situation – the ones that make all the difference. (Location 159)
It’s okay to make mistakes, but it’s unacceptable not to learn from those mistakes. (Location 190)
“My most fundamental work principle: Make your passion and your work one and the same and do it with people you want to be with.” (Location 304)
If your focus is only on how you appear to others (as either “good” or “bad,” or as “successful” or “a failure”) rather than on achieving your goal, you’re actually avoiding reality and playing ego-games. Honest feedback from reliable people is invaluable. It accelerates learning and helps you understand others as well. (Location 361)
When someone challenges your thinking, and you get angry at them, it’s a sign that your ego feels threatened. The need to appear knowledgeable, or to be right, is hijacking your pursuit of truth. Even the most intelligent people suffer from it. It’s helpful to become more aware of this process that is always at work within you. (Location 496)
“For me, not telling people what’s really going on so as to protect them from the worries of life is like letting your kids grow into adulthood believing in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. While concealing the truth might make people happier in the short run, it won’t make them smarter or more trusting in the long run.” (Location 808)
“Meaningful relationships are invaluable for building and sustaining a culture of excellence, because they create the trust and support that people need to push each other to do great things.” (Location 828)
There’s no point in feeling bad about your mistakes and shortsightedly focusing on the short-term outcomes. It’s better to accept failure and look at how that failure can guide your future evolution. (Location 842)
The person running the meeting needs to run the conversation and needs to be clear about the objectives, the levels of discussion, and the kind of disagreements that will help the process, not hinder it. (Location 872)
Remember, people seldom change on a fundamental level. You can teach someone, guide them, and encourage them, but they will always be the same kind of person at the core. If they lack character or are impractical idealists, there is little hope. (Location 954)
Choose someone who you want to share your life with – because essentially, that’s what’s going to happen. Don’t be shy about sharing your “warts” or the things about your company that you’d rather hide; they’ll find out soon enough anyway. (Location 957)
Your metrics are your diagnostic tools, so they need to answer the most important questions and light the warning signals on your dashboard before it’s too late to fix a problem. Whenever you solve another problem, also think about how to improve your machine from what you’ve learned during the process. (Location 998)
Every problem you find is an opportunity to improve your machine.” (Location 1025)
A well-designed machine takes into account the fact that people are not perfect. In Dalio’s view, an organization is built from the top down, so he paid more than the usual attention to hiring the best top-tier people he could find. They, in turn, had to extend the pyramid downwards, designing their parts of the machine along the same principles. This way, everyone in the organization reports to a believable person, someone who has the highest standards. (Location 1063)
Each of us has a different reason to get out of bed in the morning, and to work at what we do. It’s easy to get lost in the task at hand and forget about why you love doing your job. To stay motivated, you need to stay connected to your excitement, your passion, and to visualize the things you want to turn into realities. Transferring this enthusiasm to people who work for you isn’t always easy. It’s a challenge to stay in sync with team members and coordinate your reasons for achieving goals. Sometimes you have to use a carrot and sometimes it’s a stick – but if you’re not excited about what you’re doing, then you should stop working for it. (Location 1080)