1: “To create anything of value—whether it’s a product, a company, a society, or a life,” Ron Shaich writes in his powerful book Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations, “we must push through our default settings.”
How do we do that?
“By living consciously and deliberately, by making the hard choices, and by using tools … to discover what will really matter, again and again.”… continue reading
1: Growing up, billionaire Charlie Munger learned an important lesson from his father.
His dad was a lawyer. “One of his best friends, Grant McFayden, Omaha’s Pioneer Ford dealer, was a client,” Charlie writes in Poor Charlie’s Almanack.
“He was a perfectly marvelous man, a self-made Irishman who’d run away uneducated from a farm as a youth because his father beat him,” he notes. “So he made his own … continue reading
1: Billionaire Charlie Munger was once asked: What should a young person look for in a career?
“I have three basic rules—meeting all three is nearly impossible, but you should try anyway,” he writes in Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger.
Rule #1: Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself.
Rule #2: Don’t work for anyone you don’t respect and admire.
Rule #3:… continue reading
1: It was a warm California evening in May 2021. Sahil Bloom and an old friend sat down for a drink.
“As we settled in at our table, he asked how I was doing,” Sahil writes in The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life.
“I gave him the standard response that we’ve all grown so accustomed to: ‘I’m good. Busy!'” he recalls, “with … continue reading
1: Something significant occurred 350 years ago.
When the English arrived in America, they settled in “clumps,” the historian David Hackett Fischer writes in Albion’s Seed, as referenced by David Brooks in his book How to Know a Person.
“People from eastern England tended to settle in New England,” David writes, “people from southern England went to Virginia, people from the English Midlands went to Pennsylvania, and the … continue reading
1: “Sorry I’m late. My other meeting ran over.”
How many times have we heard these words?
How many times have we said these words?
The message we are sending is: “Don’t blame me. If my previous meeting had finished earlier, I would have been on time,” Fred Kofman writes in his book The Meaning Revolution: The Power of Transcendent Leadership.
There may be truth to our statement. And … continue reading
1: Michi, Fred Kofman‘s then seven-year-old daughter, saw him packing for a business trip.
“Please, Daddy, don’t go,” she begged.
“I was tempted,” Fred recalls in his book The Meaning Revolution, “to give her a perfunctory and dismissive response like ‘I wish I could, sweetie, but Daddy has to work.'”
But that’s not what he said. Fred paused for a moment. He would be traveling to the headquarters … continue reading
1: Imagine walking through a forest.
“The diversity of trees you’ll see can be quite dazzling,” write McKinsey consultants Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra in CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest.
“Douglas fir, white pine, Aspen, red maple, and oak soar toward the sky, each individually competing with the others for sunlight and space.”
Is this true? Actually … continue reading
1: Amy, a millennial, had just graduated from college. She was hired as a telesales representative at a software firm.
Amy took the job, knowing it wasn’t a “career job.” But she needed to pay her rent, Fred Kofman writes in The Meaning Revolution.
“Her job was to cold-call people who had previously used the company’s software to sell them a new product,” Fred writes.
Her compensation? $20 per … continue reading
1: “Culture can be a hard topic to get one’s head around,” Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra write in CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest.
Perhaps the best definition comes from Marvin Bower, McKinsey & Company‘s former managing director, who said culture is “the way we do things around here.”
Which is why the world’s best … continue reading
