Highlights first synced by [[readwise]] [[September 2nd, 2020]]

• You don’t have to work miserable 60/80/100-hour weeks to make it work. 10–40 hours a week is plenty. (Location 144)
• Learning from mistakes is overrated (Location 163)
• What do you really learn from mistakes? You might learn what not to do again, but how valuable is that? You still don’t know what you should do next. (Location 171)
• Success gives you real ammunition. When something succeeds, you know what worked—and you can do it again. (Location 172)
• already-successful entrepreneurs are far more likely to succeed again (the success rate for their future companies is 34 percent). But entrepreneurs whose companies failed the first time had almost the same follow-on success rate as people starting a company for the first time: just 23 percent. (Location 174)
• Failure is not a prerequisite for success. (Location 174)
• Planning is guessing (Location 180)
• long-term business planning is a fantasy. (Location 181)
• Why don’t we just call plans what they really are: guesses. (Location 183)
• financial guesses, (Location 184)
• Start referring to your business plans as business guesses, (Location 184)
• strategic guesses. (Location 184)
• Plans let the past drive the future. (Location 186)
• Sometimes you need to say, “We’re going in a new direction because that’s what makes sense today.” (Location 188)
• You have the most information when you’re doing something, not before you’ve done it. (Location 190)
• That’s the worst time to make a big decision. (Location 191)
• Plans more than a few pages long just wind up as fossils in your file cabinet. (Location 194)
• Make decisions right before you do something, not far in advance. (Location 195)
• Figure out the next most important thing and do that. (Location 195)
• It’s OK to wing it. Just get on the plane and go. You can pick up a nicer shirt, shaving cream, and a toothbrush once you get there. (Location 196)
• Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier. (Location 197)
• What’s wrong with finding the right size and staying there? (Location 204)
• Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it’s stupid. (Location 222)
• Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. (Location 224)
• They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions. (Location 226)
• They even create crises. They don’t look for ways to be more efficient because they actually like working overtime. They enjoy feeling like heroes. They create problems (often unwittingly) just so they can get off on working more. (Location 227)
• You stop being able to decide what’s worth extra effort and what’s not. And you wind up just plain [[Tired]]. No one makes sharp decisions when [[Tired]]. (Location 232)
• In the end, workaholics don’t actually accomplish more than nonworkaholics. (Location 233)
• they’re wasting time fixating on inconsequential details instead of moving on to the next task. (Location 234)
• Workaholics aren’t heroes. They don’t save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done. (Location 235)
• day. If you’re solving someone else’s problem, you’re constantly stabbing in the dark. When you solve your own problem, the light comes on. (Location 268)
• this “solve your own problem” approach lets you fall in love with what you’re making. (Location 287)
• Having the idea for eBay has nothing to do with actually creating eBay. What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan. (Location 293)
• Ideas are cheap and plentiful. The original pitch idea is such a small part of a business that it’s almost negligible. The real question is how well you execute. (Location 299)
• If what we make isn’t right for everyone, that’s OK. We’re willing to lose some customers if it means that others love our products intensely. (Location 325)
• When you don’t know what you believe, everything becomes an argument. Everything is debatable. But when you stand for something, decisions are obvious. (Location 326)
• There’s a world of difference between truly standing for something and having a mission statement that says you stand for something. (Location 340)
• We didn’t advertise; we promoted by sharing our experiences online. (Location 395)
• Embrace the idea of having less mass. (Location 431)
• Mass is increased by … Long-term contracts Excess staff Permanent decisions Meetings Thick process Inventory (physical or mental) Hardware, software, and technology lock-ins Long-term road maps Office politics (Location 433)
• Limited resources force you to make do with what you’ve got. (Location 456)
• You’re better off with a kick-ass half than a half-assed whole. (Location 477)