I’ve recently developed a close cousin to the Last Time Mediation that I call ‘The First Time’ meditation. I’d like to describe it to you now.

I first stumbled upon this practice while perched above a stunning ocean bay. I closed my eyes and pretended that I had just now become conscious and thus had only experienced consciousness for a few moments with my eyes closed. But of course I didn’t know that my eyes were closed, because I didn’t know what eyes were. Remember, I had just moments ago been born into consciousness. Not only had darkness been my only experience, but I knew of nothing else. I didn’t know what breathing was, or what a body was, or what the sounds I was hearing were, or what hearing was. I literally knew of nothing. I only knew of what I could experience with my eyes closed.

I then opened my eyes as though for the first time. The light and colours rushed in for the first time. I could approximate things making sounds for the first time, but I didn’t know what was making the sounds. I didn’t know that wind was making the whirling sound, or that the ocean was making the sounds of waves lapping against the shore. I saw foreign objects I knew nothing of. In that moment, I experienced the beauty of consciousness without the social attachments or judgments of anything I was seeing. For a moment, I had no anxiety, no random thoughts. I was only thinking ‘holy shit’ what is this I’m experiencing? Remember, I don’t know about ‘seeing’ or ‘eyes’? Just experiencing a combination of light, colour, shadow and sounds. Pure awareness.

For a brief moment, I experienced pure beauty without obstacle, and it dawned on me that this practice can help us appreciate the miracle of being alive whenever we desire.

I find the First Time works best in nature. So you might find yourself in a park, or near a body of water, or looking at the sky. Simply close your eyes, and pretend that you have just been born into consciousness. You will probably notice the sensation of breathing, darkness and sounds for the first time. When you are oriented, open your eyes, and experience the world for the first time.

The First Time is a powerful tactic for gratitude, awareness and positivity. If you can get there, I think you’ll find that it brightens your day and makes you better able to make a positive impact in your relationships, your work and the world.  

Be well.✌️

There’s no rule that says your mentors must be living and have a quarterly lunch with you. The brilliance of media enables you to choose mentors from anywhere in history. Simply find their thoughts in print or pixel and use them to guide your actions.

Charlie was like your cranky old grandpa who unapolagetically told it like it is. I recall my wife walking into the room whilst I watched an hour long interview with Charlie on YouTube. I believe the sound that came from her mouth was “Nerd Alert”.

In this week’s post I’d like to share five important lessons that I learned from Charlie.

1. The best way to get a good spouse is to deserve a good spouse.

   The lesson here isn’t about how to find a good husband or wife. It’s that, on average, you get what you deserve. If you want good relationships, work at it. If you want professional success, work at it. If you want good health, work at it. Too many people want things but don’t do the work.

2. Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day. At the end of the day - if you live long enough - most people get what they deserve.

   Again we see a theme of ‘you get what you deserve’. Charlie and Warren were also known for their patience. They would ‘sit on their asses’, reading and ‘doing nothing’ until great investment opportunities came along. This principle also touches on the power of compounding interest in your behaviour. If you get just a little better everyday - exercising, reading, thinking, writing, doing, it’s almost imperceptible. But after a year, two years, five years, you see massive results.

3. Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.

   Incentives are the most powerful forces of human nature. All human behaviour can be explained by incentives. If you lead a team in business, I urge you to inspect the incentive structure for your team to ensure it aligns with the outcomes you want.

4. It’s remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. There must be some wisdom in the folk saying: ‘it’s the strongest swimmers who drown’.

   Why do the strongest swimmers drown? Because they are the ones with the bravado to engage in risky behaviour. In markets, Charlie knew that every ten years or so, there would be excessive greed resulting in asset bubbles. If he could think long-term and avoid foolish behaviour, he knew he would do well. In the internet bubble of 2000, Charlie and Warren were heavily criticised for missing out on the mania. But they knew that the bubble would pop and there would be wonderful investment opportunities (not least because Charlie lost 50% of his portfolio in a previous bubble). Charlie was equally critical of crypto and meme stock mania. All proven right. Think long-term, and avoid stupid behaviour.

5. In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time - none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren [Buffett] reads - and how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.

   We are not born with wisdom. We must acquire it. We won’t get it on instagram, X, or CNN. If we want wisdom there is only one way - seek out the greatest minds of human species. The inner workings of those minds are in the books that document them. Unfortunately, people seem less compelled to read books these days, driven mostly by the powerful incentives of the internet. For those willing to stop scrolling and start turning the page, this is a tremendous opportunity.

These are merely five of the literal hundreds of wisdom bites from Charlie. If you want to go deeper with Charlie and his brilliant mind, I urge you to pick up The Tao of Charlie Munger which documents Charlie’s wisdom in an easy and consumable book.

Rest easy Charlie. Thanks for the lessons.

If you want to find a good spouse, be worthy of a good spouse.

This little nugget of wisdom has wide applicability.

Like everyone, I get loads of cold reach outs. DMs, emails, calls etc. Nearly all of them won’t get a response from me. To all whom are incredulous at my silence, I offer a simple reason - you aren’t offering enough specific value to me.

I had one acquaintance reach out to me a few weeks back. This is a person with whom I knew professionally in the past. They told me that they would really love to get together for coffee sometime. I declined because I didn’t see the value for me in trading my time for their attention.

This may appear cynical but we must see the world as it is, not how we want it to be. We are genetically wired for self-interest. That’s why capitalism has produced an abundance of wealth for nations and communism has failed. That’s why incentives work so well.

So how do we get people responding to that request for a call, lunch or coffee?

1. Make it convenient - Andrew Wilkinson, founder of Tiny, is a master networker. One tactic he knows well is to make meeting convenient for the other person. In this podcast, he describes wanting to get a meeting with Dan Gilbert, the founder of Rocket Mortgage. What did he do? He offered to fly to anywhere in the world to meet him. “If you’re in Delaware, I’ll come meet you in Delaware”. I always make it as convenient as possible for the person I want to meet with. I work within their life, not mine.

2. Offer specific, creative value - You must offer something of value to this person. Do the work upfront to understand what they are interested in. The difficulty of executing on this principle will vary based on the stage of your career. For example, it will be easier for me to offer perceived value than someone who is earlier in their career. Nonetheless, I promise there is always something you can offer of value. And be as specific as possible about this value that you are offering. Research what this person cares about and find an angle.

3. Be worthy of attention - All roads lead back to Munger. To get someone’s attention you must be worthy of their attention. You must be interesting to someone. This is unique to you. Find your voice. Write stuff on social media. Do stuff professionally. This doesn’t happen overnight, you must build your interest account with hard work done well over long periods of time.

A final story. There was an account executive that wanted to get a meeting with me to sell me their software. I ignored many cold emails from this person. One day, they subscribed to this newsletter and left me a thoughtful note about how a specific idea I wrote had helped them.

They got their response.

.

Habit #2 of Stephen Covey’s famous “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, Begin with The End in Mind, is the most useful tactic in approaching a problem.

The subject could be something as small as a marketing campaign or as large as your life’s legacy, beginning with the end in mind is always a good place to start.

Here’s how you can implement beginning with the end in mind:

1. Visualise your ideal end state. This could be anything from what a “finished” product looks like, to what your career looks like at some point in the future. Be decisive in articulating what you really want. Oftentimes our vision lacks boldness because we fear failure or what others will think. Fight the fear.

2. Think of the end point as a destination on a road trip. Now ideate some milestones along the drive. Where do you want to be in 12 months? 6 months? 3 months? What should be prioritized now to reach your milestones? Start with the end and work backwards.

3. Build your process to hit your milestones. Maybe you need a quick check-in every week to ensure you’re on track. Implement a tracking system to identify if you’re ahead, behind, or on target. This system can be used with any tactics you are executing. For instance, I have a daily to-do system that keeps me accountable for certain habits I want to build.

It’s no coincidence that “Working Backwards” is the title of the seminal book describing Amazon’s work process. They know how powerful working backwards can be and have used it to achieve enormous success.

So in your next planning meeting, kick it off with the words ‘let’s begin with the end in mind’ and watch your colleagues snap to action with clarity and focus.

Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world

-Albert Einstein

Everyone knows the anecdote about the penny that doubles for every square on a chessboard. For those that are unfamiliar, it goes like this - would you rather have one million dollars or the amount equal to a penny doubling for every square on a chess board.

Even knowing the answer, I find it difficult to comprehend the power of the compounding penny (which equals 184 quadrillion dollars).

What’s even harder to see is the power of compounding behaviour. If you exercise for 30 minutes per day for 60 days, each workout will build on the last. The 60th workout is easier and pays larger dividends than the 1st. Read for 30 minutes per day and you will transform your mind. Write for 10 minutes per day and you will become a better thinker.

The more you do something, the easier it becomes and the more effective it is. It’s the same principle as the compounding penny, except for your body, mind, emotions, and skills.

The key is to smart small. As small as you can think. I have several daily habits that I do for between 10 and 30 minutes. Even 10 minutes compounded over long stretches of time can add up to huge outcomes.

Another idea I’ve been thinking about is things that never change. Jeff Bezos famously articulated how Amazon would focus on the timeless constants of price, selection and delivery. Customers would forever want low prices, vast selection and fast delivery. There is no future whereby customers want higher prices, slower delivery and small selection. So Amazon would focus effort on improving these timeless truths.

We can use the concept of timeless truths to improve our personal outcomes. What are the things that will never change for you. For example, for those of us with children, there is likely no future where we think ‘I wish I spent LESS time with my kids when they were young'. Hence, it would follow that you should optimize for more time with your children. And so on..

I’d love to hear about the behaviours you are currently compounding, and your timeless truths. Just hit that reply button and let me know!

Eddie Bennett was a bat boy for the Chicago White Sox in 1919. That year, the White Sox won the pennant and infamously threw the World Series in a gambling scandal. The next year, he went to the Brooklyn Robins who happened to also win the pennant. In 1921, he moved to the Yankees who won their first pennant in team history and went on to win five American League titles over the next five years. In 1927, he earned the equivalent of a full year’s salary for the four days of work in winning the title.

To be a winner, you need to work with winners. Eddie understood that the single most important factor in his success was getting on the right team. The winning team.

That’s why your title, your salary, and your status matter little for your career success. The single most important factor is the team and the people you are working with.

I have a friend, let’s call him Andre. Andre has worked at several tech companies over the last decade. He has had the same title of VP at his last three companies. Although his title is constant, one of these companies is not like the others.

His first two companies struggled to grow sustainably for various reasons. I’d venture to guess that team was one of them. His current company has great people, a great product and explosive growth. He is on pace to far exceed the financial outcomes of any previous job he has had. All because he picked the right team.

A great idea with a bad team is destined for failure. A good idea with an exceptional team will figure it out.

Choose wisely.

When you wake up in the morning tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly.

I’m generally more of an optimist than Marcus, although it never hurts to be prepared!

While I’d wish for you to deal only with pleasant, reasonable and well-intentioned people, it’s inevitable that you will encounter people who have acute pain, fear and anger.

In fact, a friend of mine just described one such person to me today. This person would intentionally disrupt her tennis lessons, ultimately culminating in an argument and a middle finger. And I’d bet that we all know a crazy neighbour that projects anger on a weekly basis.

Since we will encounter these people, we’d be best to expect and prepare for them. It would be foolish to be surprised when someone cuts the line or honks their horn at you.

While my friend was expressing her anger to me, I was thinking to myself - by sustaining your anger, you are letting this person own space in your mind. You are giving them power over your mind. This is what they want. You are validating their tactics. They want to harm you, and you are letting them.

In your response to assholes, you have a choice - you can get angry or you can let it fall away. It rarely serves you to get angry. Again, you are giving them the response they seek. The best response would be to not get upset.

So the next time someone projects anger at you, or you perceive you’ve been harmed, remember to resist your natural urge to fight back. Don’t give them power over you.

Also from Marcus Aurelius:

Choose not to be harmed — and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed — and you haven't been.

While we’re on the topic of assholes, I’d like to share with you my ‘no assholes’ rule. This is a zero tolerance rule I apply to my teams in business. It’s a very simple rule (the best kind). Here it is: I don’t care how smart you are, how good you are, how valuable you think you are; there are no assholes allowed on my teams.

Be well 🙏

One such principle is the concept of winning time.

In the game of Chess, there is strategy whereby you “win time” by forcing your opponent to move the same piece twice, particularly in the opening of the game. If you can win time, you will generally be in a better position than your opponent.

We see time as a factor in the game of Tennis as well. The less time you give your opponent to get to a ball, the more likely they are to make a mistake.

We also see this principle at play in business. The faster we move, the more time we steal from our competitors. The harder we make it for them to play their game. The more pressure we put on them, the more disorganized they become, the more opportunities they miss.

Consider the following excerpt from Netflix’s culture document:

“In general, we believe freedom and rapid recovery are better than trying to prevent error. We are in a creative business and our biggest threat over time is a lack of innovation. So we are relatively error tolerant except where safety is an issue—and we focus on ensuring that any error prevention efforts don’t limit inventive, creative work. Rapid recovery is possible if people have great judgment.”

For most organizations, their biggest risk is lack of innovation. If your business depends on innovation for growth, you must optimize for speed. You must inspect your system (see Systems Thinking), and remove constrains. Enable your teams by giving them goals, context and coaching, and build the system that enables them to move with purpose and speed. This will look different for many organizations but in general, faster decision making will enable increased speed.

I’ve rarely heard an organization complain of moving “too fast”. Most leaders will answer in the affirmative when asked if they believe that faster velocity will improve their business outcomes. Yet they fall short on execution. Why? Because it takes courage to move fast. It takes more trust in your teams. It takes changing how you work. More speed means more mistakes. And our education system has imbued us with a belief that mistakes are bad. But the truth is that mistakes are a necessary by-product of innovation. Penicillin was a mistake, post-it notes were a mistake, the microwave was a mistake.

So if you want to win time, move faster and increase innovation, inspect your work system to diagnose and remove your speed bumps!

“There’s only so many hours in the day”

“I’ll try to find time for that”

“Time is our most valuable resource”

It’s true that we have a certain number of work hours in each day to get stuff done. But there is a critical hidden resource many of us fail to account for - energy. Energy literally means the capacity for work.

Think of your energy as a battery. When you wake from sleep your battery is full (assuming good sleep and good coffee). As the day progresses, your battery sheds its energy, until it’s finally near empty. It’s then time to recharge it with the ritual that we call sleep.

An awareness of our energy levels can have a profound impact on our effectiveness, happiness and fulfillment in work and life.

Here’s some tactics to help us increase awareness and optimize our energy battery:

The Energy Audit. Look at your calendar and identify the energy quotient of each activity. Label each as energy charging or energy draining. Maximize energy charging activities and limit energy draining activities to the extent you can. You may also consider rearchitecting certain activities to improve their energy quotient or minimize their impact. For example, you may add new structure to a meeting that has become stale, or delegate energy draining activities to the extent possible, or only check email at certain designated times throughout the day. Note: I don’t do email first thing in the morning, it’s an energy drainer.

Work / Energy Matching. Do your most important work when your battery is at its highest charge. For me this is mid-morning. Creative work, important meetings or high leverage decisions get scheduled for the morning to the extent possible. This DOES NOT mean “mailing it in” during the afternoon, it simply means having an awareness of when I am at my best and planning my work around that.

Energy Renewal. While time is a finite resource, energy is not. You can renew your energy regularly throughout the day. Take breaks, take a walk, work out, have a healthy snack, do a gratitude or breathing exercise, schedule an energizing activity with your teammates. These activities can recharge your mind, body and spirit and give you a boost of energy and effectiveness.

Invest In Your Team. Your team needs energy as much as you do. Encourage them to practice healthy energy optimization using the same tactics listed above. Communicate the imperative of energy optimization and show them you are taking it seriously, leading by example. You might even get them together to discuss ideas for increasing energy levels throughout the day. With my teams, we implemented “No Meeting Thursdays” and “Summer Fridays” to help recharge our batteries.

Energy management is why Jeff Bezos schedules his most important decisions for the morning, when his energy, cognitive ability and spirit is at its peak.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to recharge my battery with a walk.

We live in a hack culture. Everyone wants shortcuts. Instead of hacks, we should search for leveraged activities - those activities where the outputs far exceed the inputs (time, money, effort).

In a given day, we have an infinite amount of work activities that we can pursue. The key to effectiveness is to shift our energy toward activities that will have the greatest impact. In other words, we should move to the points of highest leverage.

Let’s look at some high leverage activities:

Media. Videos, articles, books, documentation are all high leverage. You write or record them once and they can be consumed an infinite amount of times. This is why I favour writing and video in my work at Gubagoo. Rather than verbalize information to a small group, I would record a video or write a doc and publish it to Slack, Confluence, e-mail etc. Similarly, a single blog post can drive hundreds or even thousands of leads.

Writing Code. You write software once and there is near-zero marginal cost in consumption. Also, it lives on forever.

1-on-1s, meetings and presentations. You present to your team or coach a direct report for one hour and it influences her work and the work of others for tens or hundreds of hours.

Watch out for negative leverage though!

Micromanaging to the point of doing someone else’s job takes your time and marginalizes their time.

Broken processes take effort to implement and have the effect of slowing everyone’s output.

Ineffective meetings drain energy, waste time and put everyone in a worse position to do great work.

Take inventory of your week and ask yourself if you are truly seeking and capitalizing on high leverage opportunities!

Podcast Announcement

I’m pumped to announce that the What We Learn podcast is coming. Look out for the first episode in your inbox and on your favourite podcast platform.

Thanks for supporting us on our mission to help each other work and live with purpose!

People often describe interactions with Clinton as “captivating”. Many say that during conversations with him, they felt as if they were the only two people in the room.

Take a look at this clip from the 1992 Bush vs. Clinton Town Hall. Notice the differences between Bush and Clinton in their responses. Clinton's presence is on full display.

We all want to be more present, but presence is elusive to many of us. Why is being present so difficult?

Evolution has wired our brain to be in constant thought mode - scanning our environment for threats and improvements. The noisy, 24/7 roommate in our head doesn’t shut the @#$% up. We worry about everything - our work, personal finances, how we are being perceived amongst our peers and so on. Focusing on the present didn't help our ancestors survive; constant fear and analysis of potential threats did. But today’s threats don’t look like yesterday’s. Most of us are no longer at risk of being eaten by a lion. We’re no longer served by our threat detector.

The Stoics say that when we worry about potential future events, we suffer twice - once when we worry about the event and again if the event actually happens. If we can navigate ourselves to the present moment, all of our fear-based suffering falls away, and we are free to live. After all, how can we fear the moment if we are simultaneously bearing it?

Presence sounds like a wonder drug - less fear, less anxiety, better performance, better relationships? So what’s preventing us from seizing our presence?

Let's explore some tactics to help us become more present:

1. Train your mind to notice the little things. Josh Waitzkin is the chess prodigy subject of the film “Searching for Bobby Fisher”. In his book “The Art of Learning” he describes the tactic of making smaller circles which essentially means plunging deep into the micro of whatever is in front of you. Train your mind to notice the small things in any given moment. In conversation it might be the breathing pattern of the other person, their body language, your body language etc. Cultivating an intense focus on the micro will help you improve the macro.

2. Make eye contact and find curiosity in your subject. Clinton draws people in by maintaining eye contact, moving toward his counterpart, and probing their world. He creates intimacy without getting weird. This conversation, this moment, is the only thing that matters right now. If you catch your mind wandering, observe it (don't judge it) and gently bring your attention back to the conversation. You can practice eye contact with strangers on the street. Look into the eyes of people as they walk by you, but only for a second or so (see "don't get weird" earlier).

3. Keep your mind in peak condition. There’s simply no way around it, without a healthy mind you cannot partner with it. At risk of broken record syndrome - cut your scrolling time, cut your news media time, invest in meditation, invest in sleep, invest in physical exercise, invest in books. If you are serious about being your best self, these tactics are critical to increasing presence and effectiveness.

   Thanks for reading What We Learn! Subscribe for free to receive new posts straight to your inbox.

   Learning to pay attention to the moment can unlock superpowers for us. Here are some resources I recommend to help you get started:

   The Power of Now (a great book on being present)

   Waking Up App (an app I use for daily meditation)

Stay present!

In Brian Halligan’s book “Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead”, he describes the key insight that drove their marketing engine. You see, nearly all bands prohibit fans from recording or “bootlegging” concerts. But not the Dead. They encouraged fans to record and share their concerts. This policy birthed a community of tape trading that enabled the music to pass frictionlessly across the USA.

Here’s the lesson - in marketing you should give, give and give some more. Just keep giving. Help your target customers succeed and you will succeed. Help with videos, podcasts, articles, webinars, content, content and more content. Don’t ask for anything in return. Don’t gate your content. Remove all friction between you and the market.

And here’s the key insight that a lot of people overlook. Your content does not need to be directly associated with your product. Instead, it needs to be broadly relevant to your target customer. And by customer I don’t mean the corporation named on the account. I mean the actual people that will influence the decision to buy your product. After all, it’s people not companies that buy products.

A brilliant example of this is the marketing strategy at Drift. For those that aren’t familiar, Drift is one of the most successful web chat companies in the world.

As a web chat product, you might expect the majority of their content to focus on web chat efficacy - how to convert more leads, what words to use when chatting with customers, and so on. Sure there is some of that. But it’s the exception. Instead, they focused on anything that might be helpful or interesting to their target buyers (again, people not corporations). Here’s some of their podcast titles to give you the flavour:

• How to Say No to Meetings

• Servant Leadership

• Lessons From Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

• Time Management

• The Secret to Becoming a Learning Machine

Nothing about web chat and everything about how to help you grow as a leader, marketer, teammate, human.

Today’s best marketing companies are media companies in disguise. They produce media that people are energized to engage with. This leads to growth in brand equity, direct sales opportunities, and revenue. This can be employed at the organizational level in your marketing strategy and also at the individual level. If you’re in sales, or customer success, think about how you can give to your customers or prospects without asking for anything in return. Give to your manager, your teammates or even your friends without any expectation of reciprocity.

As Zig Ziglar famously said “you can have anything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want”.

Why read at all? This quote by Carl Sagan articulates the magic of books:

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of fun dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never really knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

The quote is from a beautiful book entitled “For Small Creatures Such as We” by Sasha Sagan (Carl’s daughter).

We read a book and our minds are changed. Our emotions are changed. We become more intelligent, more articulate, more thoughtful, more grateful, more motivated, more empathetic, whatever it may be. We inch closer to truth. We look at these “fun dark squiggles”, have a conversation with a person that we never knew, and we are changed.

The key insight is that the quality of our thoughts determines the quality of our life. And it is within our power to influence the quality of our thoughts. An example is helpful. Let’s say you make a poor investment. You will likely have negative thoughts and emotions about that event - regret, self-deprecation, loss. It’s the emotions and thoughts that cause the degradation of happiness, not the event itself. We could easily reframe the perceived negative event as a positive or neutral event - we’ve learned what doesn’t work, we’ve become smarter, wiser. It’s the quality of our thinking, the stories we tell ourselves, that influence our experience.

If the quality of our thoughts determines the quality of our life, then we should endeavour to improve our thinking. That's where reading comes in. Reading is like superfood for the mind. It nourishes our brain, leading to higher quality thinking and emotions. Alternatively, social media and most news media is junk food for the mind. These activities result in lower quality thinking, increased anxiety, distorted views of the nature of life. They don’t help us live better.

So how do we read more? “We don’t have time” we say. False. We have time. It’s that we don’t prioritize it. We aren’t compelled to spend our time with books. So how do we become compelled? Forcing it won’t work. We must make it feel like something other than a chore. We must discover the joy in reading.

Here are five practical tactics to help you discover the joy in reading:

1. Find books that speak to you. The are over 100 million books in print. There are books that will resonate with you. Find them. Ask friends for recommendations. Fiction or non-fiction, it doesn't matter. Make it easy to fall in love with books by finding those that speak to you. Explore different genres until you find a spark - biographies, historical fiction, science fiction, romance novels. Whatever gets you started.

2. Start with easy reads. Don't be a hero by tackling Darwin straight away. The key to building any skill is to start small, make progress, get some wins, be consistent in your practice and then build from there.

3. Choose your format. Determine how you best consume books. There are many options today—Kindle, audiobook, physical book. Find your preferred method and embrace it. I recently heard someone denigrate audiobooks, referring to them as ‘not really reading’. Bullshit.

4. Put the book down. I feel no obligation to finish books. With over 100 million books in print, why struggle through when I could simply pick up another? If at any point - page 5, page 50, or page 250 - a book begins to lose your interest, drop it! Reading should be enjoyable, not work.

5. Build a habit. Life is about trade-offs. If you want to develop a reading habit, you'll need to find time, energy and consistency. Saying "yes" to reading means saying "no" to something else. Maybe it's less television or less scrolling. Whatever you choose, finding time to read will take time from somewhere.

If even one person discovers the joy of reading because of this post, I've accomplished my goal. To that end, we need to get some great books in your queue. Here’s a list of enjoyable reads that I recommend. Of course, just because I like them doesn’t mean that you will!

Fiction:

1. The Pearl, John Steinbeck - super fast read about the perils of becoming attached to monetary wealth. A wonderful short story you can easily read in one week.

2. Siddhartha, Herman Hess - I read this book every year. It’s the story of a boy’s search for purpose in life. I gain a wonderful new perspective on life every time I read it.

3. All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr - Pulitzer Prize winner. A fictional account of the converging lives of a young girl and boy in World War II (soon to be a Netflix limited series).

4. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley - A classic written in 1932 finds us in a dystopian world where humans appear to have solved for all pain and suffering.

5. Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir - Earth is facing existential calamity. An unexpected astronaut heads to a distant galaxy to try to save it.

Non-fiction:

1. Stillness Is the Key, Ryan Holiday - This was the book that introduced me to Stoic Philosophy. Very accessible with modern examples of tactics for living better.

2. Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker - The seminal book on sleep and how this physiological ritual of unconsciousness is the key to unlocking our health and happiness.

3. Ride of a Lifetime, Bob Iger - Biography of one of the most remarkable CEOs and business leaders of the 21st Century. I did the audiobook.

4. Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger - The story of The Governator. A remarkable life from the poverty of post-war Austria to Hollywood and beyond. Also did the audiobook.

I will leave you with this quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein:

With books at our side, our world is limitless.

Bob started out as an entry level employee working soap operas on ABC in 1974. His rise to the steward of Walt Disney's legacy is a story worthy of Disney. Today Disney has one of the strongest brands in the media business, but when Bob took over as CEO in 2005, the company was struggling.

His story is a PHD in leadership. Here's what I learned from it:

Trust yourself

You must trust yourself and your instinct. When Iger became head of ABC, he wasn't a content guy, he didn't know how to read a script, but he now had to not only read them, but make the ultimate call on which scripts to green-light. He relied on his experienced team to provide feedback and guidance, but also understood that you need to trust your own instincts as a leader. This doesn't mean being an autocratic dictator, but you must take all available information and make the call. Trust in yourself and your judgment.

Disrupt yourself or someone else will

You must be willing to undermine your current business model in order to adapt to changing tech and market conditions. When Iger met with Steve Jobs to discuss Pixar, Jobs pulled out a device that was kept under wraps at Apple - the Video iPod. Jobs asked Iger if he would put some of ABC’s biggest shows on it. Iger said yes on the spot, knowing that there would be implications for their traditional business model. When Amazon launched kindle, they did so with the intent to destroy their physical book business (an incredible story in its own right, can be heard here).

Nothing ventured, nothing gained

You can't survive by playing it safe. If you want to innovate and thrive, you need to take risks. Be bold. When Iger took over as CEO of Disney, the relationship with Pixar was in the gutter. Steve Jobs and Disney were not on speaking terms, and the legendary Disney animation studio was failing. Iger was a master of empathy and a deft deal maker (not shrewd, but firm). He called Jobs, repaired the relationship and proposed that Disney buy Pixar (a wild idea at the time). The Disney board shot the idea down as too risky for the new CEO. What now seems like an obviously great acquisition, was seen as very risky and outlandish at the time. Iger persevered and put the entire deal together, which in hindsight was a huge success. He later did the same with Marvel, paying $4 Billion for a bunch of cartoon characters (Jobs said he was crazy to do so, see “Trust yourself”).

Your reputation for integrity is your most valuable asset

Integrity is critical for the long term health of an organization (and your career). Without it you are lost. Integrity is a theme woven into the fabric of Iger’s life and story. At the beginning of the Lucasfilm discussions, when George Lucas said he “wanted the Pixar deal” (meaning price), Iger immediately told him he wasn't going to get that price, rather than leading him (or misleading him) on to keep talks going. The reason that Lucas was willing to talk to Iger in the first place was because Iger had done right by him on a failed project decades earlier at ABC. When Roseanne Barr made offensive tweets, Iger cancelled the show immediately and terminated her. Iger later said about the Roseanne situation - “everything depends on upholding the integrity of your team”.

Own up when you fuck up

You must be accountable for your mistakes. Everytime Iger messed up, he was the first to step up and say it was his fault. He didn't try to hide it or blame others. When J.J. Abrams and Iger presented the first Star Wars script to George Lucas, they had omitted a major storyline that Lucas had suggested. Lucas was pissed. Iger owned up to the fact that he should have told George earlier that they were going in a different direction rather than surprising him at the meeting.

You aren’t perfect

Humility and subversion of ego are core attributes of Level 5 Leaders. Your imperfection is a feature, not a bug. Iger’s book finishes with this passage - “Hold on to the awareness of yourself even as the world tells you how powerful and important you are, the moment you start to believe it all too much, the moment you look at yourself and see a title emblazoned on your forehead, you’ve lost your way”.

If you want the entire story, check out 'Ride of a Lifetime’. I recommend the audiobook.

“Ray — you deserve a “D-” for your performance today … you rambled for 50 minutes … It was obvious to all of us that you did not prepare at all because there is no way you could have been that disorganized at the outset if you had prepared. We told you this prospect had been identified as a “must-win” … today was really bad … we can’t let this happen again.”

Harsh! Dalio is well-known to value feedback both up and down the org chart, so this associate was on script! Feedback is an essential ingredient to truth seeking and improvement, yet most teams fail at it. Most of us aren’t in business to simply backslap, we are here to win.

Ultra-Candor

There has been a recent trend amongst management thinkers toward ultra candid feedback. Books like ‘Radical Candor’, Ray Dalio’s ‘Principles’, and Netflix’s ‘No Rules Rules’ have trumpeted the benefits of providing ultra-candid feedback to teammates, both up and down the org chart. Dalio calls it “Radical Honesty”.

There is merit to the message. If we want to improve as individuals, teams and organizations, we need to seek truth so that we can make better decisions. And to do so, we must be able to say what we think.

However, the execution of these radically candid feedback frameworks can precipitate the opposite of our desired effect. For instance, instead of using the feedback to improve, the recipient may instead get defensive and reject otherwise well-intentioned feedback.

As a leader, teammate, spouse or parent, giving and receiving feedback is a critical skill that results in better collaboration, improved awareness, sharpened skills and all-around growth. So let’s unpack some ideas on how we can be an excellent giver and receiver of feedback:

Receiving Feedback

As a manager, leader, or even individual contributor, your team may be reluctant to give you feedback. I’ve scarcely recieved feedback in my role as a leader. Often, your team doesn’t feel it’s safe to give you feedback. They might feel that they are risking their job! So you must go the extra mile to provoke feedback and create safety.

Ask for Feedback

Let your team know that feedback is a two way street - you are going to provide them with feedback on your perception of their work and you expect them to do the same for you. Keep asking for feedback in your discussions with your team - ask ‘Is there anything you think I can improve on?’ If they say no - they must think you’re perfect, which of course is impossible. Another tactic is to ask for advice on how you can be a better manager or leader. People love to give “advice”, but are apprehensive about giving “feedback”.

Appreciate it

Feedback is a gift. When you receive this gift, thank the giver. This will encourage a feeling of safety to give you more feedback in the future, while priming the conversation for a productive exploration of the feedback.

Acknolwedge and Summarize

Remember that feedback is the giver’s perception of something we did being good or bad. We take that feedback and add our own perception to it. You need to get on the same page by summarizing your understanding of the feedback. A good prompt is -‘What I’m hearing is that you feel x’. This will make the giver feel heard and also give them an opportunity to clarify your understanding. You’d be surprised how often your interpretation is askew.

Act

As the feedback receiver, you are free to take or abstain from action on the feedback. Regardless there is always a next action - it could be investigating other people’s opinions on the subject, changing behavior in future situations, or simply stating that you don’t feel any action is warranted. In any case, clearly state the next action and then close the loop by taking action and following up with the giver.

Giving Feedback

Some people find it very hard to give constructive feedback. People just aren’t comfortable pointing out another person’s perceived shortcoming. So how to give it and give it well?

Prepare for Feedback

People tend to dislike the unexpected. You must prime the team for feedback. It should be stated explicitly, either in docs, constitutions, informal meetings that the team is encouraged and expected to provide thoughtful feedback to other team members with the objective of continuous improvement. At my company, I publish a document entitled ‘How I work’ which sets out this expectation (amongst others about how I like to work).

Choose your approach

The objective of feedback is to have the recipient understand your opinion on their work so that they can decide if and how to act on it.

Not all relationships are equal. Our approach to giving feedback should account for these differences. If you have high trust with the recipient and you know them to be eager for feedback, you can often just say whats on your mind. If you have low trust, or the person tends to react negatively to feedback, you are going to want to be more careful with your language (and you might have a bigger problem!).

Calibrate your Mindset

Many people find it uncomfortable to give feedback. We can overcome this by reframing our mindset. We aren’t criticizing, we are helping the other person by giving our perception of their behavior or work. We are doing so because we really care about helping them succeed, be happy, grow their career, helping the company or whatever the case may be. Whatever gets you in the mindset to provide this feedback.

Be on time

Feedback is like a banana, it degrades everyday that it’s not delivered. Be timely. Waiting two weeks until your one-on-one to give feedback significantly degrades its effectiveness. Give feedback when it’s fresh.

No texting

Provide material feedback in-person or on a video call. There are visual cues that you need to see in order to effectively deliver the message. Avoid slack and email if possible.

Perception is not reality

Don’t be overly confident in your assessment. Your feedback is your opinion about how you perceived the receipient’s behavior or work, acknowledge that (both when giving and receiving). You could be wrong. Acknowledge this in your language. Use phrases like ‘My feeling was…’, “My perception was…’, ‘I felt that…’ And be specific as to why you had this perception.

Action

Finish up with action items. The recipient has three actions they can take: (1) disregard the feedback, (2) investigate the feedback further or (3) accept and state how they will change behaviour in the future. If they choose (1) or (2), set a trigger for the two of you to close the loop on the action - ‘Let’s check in next month and see the progress you’ve made’.

And don’t forget to give positive feedback as well. This is just as important as improvement feedback!

In Scott’s book, she describes Steve Job’s approach which I think captures the essence of feedback well:

Getting good at giving and receiving feedback is an essential competency guaranteed to help your team win.

If you want to go deeper on feedback, here’s a piece from Matt Mochary (one of the top executive coaches in the world) on his approach.

Amidst a circle of dejected faces, Bill said this:

“Some of you may think we’ve already lost this game, and you might be right, and if we do I can live with it, however if we go down, you must decide how you want to go down. You can lay down and let them continue this assault, or stand your ground and fight back, and only you will know. And here’s the key part, frankly I care a lot more about how we lose than if we lose”.

The 49ers mounted a spectacular second half assault, outscoring New Orleans 28-0 in the second half. It was one of the greatest comebacks in NFL history.

This speech epitomizes Bill Walsh’s approach to winning. It’s all about the inputs. He cared about how the team won or lost, rather than the outcome of the game.

He cared about execution. Doing all the little things exactly to specification. Running precise routes, being in the right position on the field, being professional in preparation, having the right attitude, meeting his standard of performance. Because he knew the secret to winning - if his team executed to his exacting standard, the score would take care of itself. And that’s what happened in the ten years that he lead the 49ers, winning three super bowls and dominating the league.

In business, this philosophy is trumpeted as “Inputs over outputs”. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care about outputs or outcomes. On the contrary, we care deeply about outcomes, and it for this reason that we need laser focus on our inputs. Same goes in our lives - good food in, healthy body out. Good books/pixels in, healthy mind out.

Amazon is famous for their maniacal focus on inputs.

In the quintessential book on Amazon’s working process entitled “Working Backwards”, there is a chapter called “Manage your inputs, not your outputs”. Amazon crafts their business as a system - inputs go in, outputs come out. Because inputs will define your outcomes, it’s critical to choose the right inputs.

As an example, Amazon rightly assumed that more selection would result in better customer experience and ultimately more sales. To represent breadth of selection, they optimized for growing the number of product detail pages (the input). They obsessively focused on adding product detail pages (PDPs), but eventually saw that growing the number of product detail pages didn’t result in increased sales. Obviously, if the products on those pages are not compelling, customers won’t buy. Additionally, if the products aren’t in stock and available to ship, customers won’t buy. They picked the wrong input (number of PDPs). They quickly pivoted to percentage of PDP views where the product is in stock and available to ship. This input hit the mark and they saw sales grow with the new key input.

The Simple Lesson

In life and in business, identify your inputs for winning. Then optimize for them.

For me it’s sleep, exercise, writing, reading amongst others. Maintaining these inputs results in increased levels of energy, fulfillment, joy and ultimately enables me to drive my purpose forward.

In business it’s about building your system. A system is nothing more than a process by which inputs turn into outputs. So write down your key inputs that drive your system and optimize, incentivize, track and hold your teams accountable toward driving those inputs. With the right inputs, the score takes care of itself.

Bill Walsh made a legendary career of inputs. And so can you.

At a party by a billionaire, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its entire history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have — ENOUGH.”

We are of course the descendants of those most zealous in improvement, so it makes sense that we are obsessed with upgrading our lives. I’m here to tell you it’s a trap! Yes it has paved the path to the wealth and prosperity of today’s world. But it has also shackled us with feelings of extreme anxiety and inadequacy. It impedes gratitude and robs us of our attention.

To explore this, we must distinguish between different types of improvement. There is improvement that substantively improves the quality of humanity’s wellbeing - medicine, electricity, health, computers, heating/cooling, plumbing, etc. All good with that. But then there is this other kind of improvement, an improvement gremlin of sorts - the thing that grabs hold of your mind and compels you to seek upgrades amongst every aspect of your existence.

I want a better house.

I want a better car.

I want more luxurious vacations.

I want a swimming pool.

We are playing a rigged game. A game we cannot win. Every time we get something that we’ve desired, it becomes our baseline. After some time, we are no longer satisfied with it. We want more. This perpetual desire creates an artificial lacking - a void in our lives that occupies our mind toward no good end.

Our economic system is fundamentally based on consumption. Advertisers spend ungodly amounts of cash to get you to buy the latest thing that you don’t need. Without consumer demand, the economy would crash. Here’s the good news though, I’m not worried about it. People say there are two guarantees in life - death and taxes. I propose a third - humans’ endless pursuit of more. So even if you are able to supress the urge to improve everything all the time, Im not worried about our consumption economy since those of us able to eschew the upgrade life will be mere grains amongst endless shores of sand.

Getting off the upgrade treadmill will make you happier. It will make you calmer. It will make you more present. Able to enjoy the gift of the moment. It will reduce your anxiety.

Here’s some tactics:

1. Practice negative visualization. Think of the things in your life that you are grateful for. Then picture yourself lose one or any of these. Close your eyes and imagine you’ve lost your eyesight, then open them and experience wonder of light and colour. This kind of joy and gratitude is available to you at any moment. For me it’s my family, their health, freedom, and safety to name a few. A helpful tool toward this practice is a meditation called “The Last Time”. I highly encourage you to take 4 minutes and give a listen.

2. Swap possessions with skills - develop hobbies that upgrade your skills. For me its tennis, music, writing, meditation, physical fitness. I can spend hours consumed with these activities. Every minute spent with these friends is one less spent pining over acquiring a supposed life improvement.

3. Make a list of what you possess and ask yourself - is it enough?

So if you prefer to enjoy the life that you have instead of the life you don’t, wake up and say no to the upgrade life.

Now, compare this with another colleague in whom you have low trust. We'll call her Misty. You're uneasy about the quality of work she will produce, which will reflect on both of you. You need to conduct more check-ins and oversight, and be more deliberate with your communication. Working with Misty is slower and more laborious than working with Rusty.

“Trust is like the air we breathe – when it’s present, nobody really notices; when it’s absent, everybody notices.” - Warren Buffet

This phenomenon is known as the Speed of Trust, as described in Stephen Covey's influential book of the same name. The central idea is simple: the more trust you have, the faster you can work, and the better your results. This principle can be applied to almost any relationship:

1. The more trust a leader has in their team, the more time the team can devote to exercising their creativity and doing valuable work. This is partly because the team spends less time being micro-managed or executing processes indicative of a low trust environment.

2. The more trust that two companies have in a business partnership, the less time their lawyers need to spend drafting their agreement.

3. The more trust I have with my spouse, the less oversight I need to ensure that important household matters are handled. I can focus more energy on my side of the bargain, and we can accomplish more together.

The equation is simple:

High Trust = Speed ↑ Cost ↓

Low Trust = Speed ↓ Cost ↑

We are in a crisis of trust. Just glance at the pocket-sized computer you call a phone to witness the political division, fake news, and fear-mongering media that all contribute to this trust crisis. Trust levels have hit an all-time low. This makes the opportunity to establish high trust relationships in your work and personal life all the more crucial.

But how do we build trust?

Trust is built with two components: character and competence.

Character means integrity, following through on commitments, communicating authentically and honestly, doing the right thing, and exhibiting high empathy and emotional intelligence. These are the building blocks of character.

Competence is the ability to accomplish tasks effectively and produce work of a high standard of quality.

So I encourage us all to reflect on how we can improve our character and competence which will result in high trust relationships and propel our work to new heights.

Who I am and Why I’m doing this

Hi 👋 I’m Ryan.

Over the last ten years I’ve led teams building a nine figure SAAS business. During this wild ride I’ve had to teach myself the core principles of marketing, product, sales, support, management and leadership.

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