A collection of lessons and realizations that I’ve learned come across, mostly the hard way.

  • Stay in the game.

  • Have more than one source of happiness.

  • Always be closing. Generate value every day.

  • Proactively manage the relationships. What are peoples’ motivations and predilections

  • Continually strive to understand the big picture and your place in it

  • What sort of person to be:

    • Be the person who delivers.

    • The one who can be counted on to come through no matter what.

    • The one who raises others around him

    • Be the person who structures

      • Not only the one who structures problems
      • or structures solutions, but
      • also the one who structures the story.

    • Be able to inspire with the vision of your story and attract folks to your cause.

  • Leadership attributes

    • Need the ability to motivate and inspire.
    • Can’t be the expert who can always dive in on the details and answer questions.
    • By motivating/inspiring folks by giving them a common vision, you enable them to find the answers for themselves.
    • Need a reputation of success to get others to follow you
    • Need credibility so that people know you as someone who delivers

  • Show, don’t tell. When you tell, you engage people’s analytical, combative side. When you show, people reflect back and are amazed. And while trying to show, if it turns it out doesn’t work, you’ve saved a bunch of effort and face. Find the minimum viable “show”.

  • You can (and should) learn a lot of theories about leadership etc. However, they don’t really congeal in your head until you have done some of the application yourself.

  • The time integral of happiness (our well-being) is maximized by the memories and relationships we form

  • It is not enough to be right. You also need to be effective!

    • Being effective is a function of many things. Two of those are the business landscape of the company and the motivations and styles of the people you are working with. If you find that you need to change how you operate in order to be effective, then two questions to ask are, “Are the changes aligned with my morals/philosophies?” and “Will the changes I need to make be applicable to my future jobs, other companies etc. or will they work only with my current employer?” Then use the answers to these two questions to decide what to do.

  • Ideas are cheap. Execution is expensive. The ability to execute separates people, not the ability to come up with ideas.

  • Stay true to your core message/desire, not your ideas of HOW to achieve it. If the world takes our ideas and changes them—or accepts some and discards others—all we need to decide is whether the mutated versions are still core. If they are—as with “It’s the economy, stupid”—then we should humbly embrace the audience’s judgment. Ultimately, the test of our success as idea creators isn’t whether people mimic our exact words, it’s whether we achieve our goals. #insightful#​

  • Different people/orgs have different perspectives on a situation. There is not right and wrong. But you need to understand/recognize that which/whose perspective drives the outcome and be able to influence that perspective so that the outcome is the one you desire.

    • For example, maybe P- played it too cool. Like she didn’t need the job. The interviewers felt she was not enthusiastic about the mission. She got dropped.
    • I, Sagar, was aloof when talking with Big Company. Felt he needed to be given their reputation as jerks. Also, they refused to reveal ANY details of their work while others were remarkably transparent. Big Company felt that Sagar was not charming enough and dropped him.

  • Don’t grip too tightly.. it leads to increased stress with no positive impact on the outcome.

  • It’s not about being right.. its about achieving the best outcome.

  • Amateurs have a goal.. professionals have a process.

  • Ben Franklin: “If you want to persuade, appeal to interest not to reason.”

  • As long as you are learning and growing, you enjoy working with your colleagues, the office is nice and the salary is sufficient, you can tolerate some ambiguity in the big picture.

  • The person who cannot take advantage of an opportunity is no better off than the person that never sees it in the first place. Keep continuously positioning yourself to take advantage of opportunities and good luck that come along. When you tilt the odds in your favor, the world does most of the work for you.

  • Always choose growth. (When considering or evaluating between new opportunities)

  • It is not “forgive and forget” but “remember and recover (or overcome)”. Some things can not and should not be forgotten.

  • The clarity of communication is measured at the listener’s ear, not at the speaker’s mouth.

    • Too often do we believe we’ve communicated properly and only later discover that the recipient has understood something else.
    • There is a tendency to be defensive after the misunderstanding comes to light.
    • On important topics, find a way to close the loop and ensure that the recipient has understood what you want to convey.

  • If you have an executive role in an operational situation, especially a firefight, you have to always take the current moment as t=0 and think about the actions to take to make subsequent moments better.

    • This is especially true if you find yourself thinking, "How in the world could someone do this? Isn’t there even a shred of common sense or though applied?" Raging about this, no matter how justified, is a natural tendency, but it is severely counter-productive in long-lasting ways.
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