But reality has a surprising amount of detail. Or, said another way, everything is hard1.

Since everything is hard, you can either pick problems that are easier for you than others because of your skill set or problems you’re interested in learning how to solve.

To deal with the Difficulty Delusion, where everything seems easy, instead, I like to ask myself how it’ll be hard. I use a pie chart and think of everything as 100% hard.

Here are the dimensions I like to use:

1. Uncertainty

   1. Luck-based: e.g. oil well exploration. The outcome is uncertain even if you do everything right.

   2. Delayed outcome: e.g. big strategy pivot. You’re pretty sure it’ll work, but you need years for it to play out.

   3. New skill: you’re sure it works for some people, but not sure it’ll work for you.

   4. Unproven domain: e.g. the first lightbulb. It’s a new product

2. Physicality.

   1. Personal E.g. power lifting. If you have to be able to clean 300 lbs, difficulty goes up.

   2. Natural e.g. perpetual motion machines. No one has broken the second law of thermodynamics yet

3. Skill

4. Patience

5. Lack of interest

6. Resource intensive

   1. Money

   2. Time

7. Morally difficult - not obvious issues like lying, but questions where good people could disagree. These fall on a spectrum ranging from generally seen as negative (running a casino or making cigarettes) to unpopular (speculating in the stock market or lowball house offers). Even a little bit of moral difficulty can ruin the whole thing for me.

A dimension can be zero for a given problem, for instance cold calling.

Cold calling is mostly the ability to deal with uncertainty (will they say “yes” or hangup on me?) and a bit of skill. I don’t have any moral qualms about calling people (although I know some do). It requires near zero physicality, resources, interest and patience.

The dimensions are less important than the genuine recognition that a problem will be hard.

I avoid problems where I feel any moral difficulty, high interest difficulty, or very high resource needs.

Finally, while it’s helpful to have an idea of what kind of hard problem you’re approaching, my guess is, it wouldn’t be helpful to have perfect knowledge of the difficulties even if we could get it. We may have never started anything.

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1

There is definitely a magnitude difference between different problems. Founding a marketing agency is much easier than launching a 3D animated RPG which is much easier than launching Space X.

I’ve always been embarrassed about my optimistic tendencies, but in Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl gave me a better frame. Lessons from a concentration camp seem worth listening to.

He broke down the terms nicely:

tragic - operating in the tragedies and sufferings of life

optimist - coming from the latin word optimus which roughly means, “best”.

So, in tragedies, do the best you can.

It made me think of optimization problems in calculus where you’re looking for the optimum answer. You’re always warned to avoid local optima and go for the global optimum.

But Frankl recognizes that we’re stuck with the best we can do, rather than the best that can be done.

Reading that made me think of this graph:

In each moment, the situation could be great, or could be terrible. We can make a decision anywhere along the way.

We’ve got to look for the local optimum, considering our abilities, temperaments and resources.

Maybe, if we can keep playing and choosing well, we’ll hit the global optimum! Surely there will have been a lot of grace and help from others in the process.

The reality is, there’s a ceiling on my decision quality, but there’s also a floor.

You’re not guaranteed to succeed by trying, but you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t.

First, let me give the hierarchy of reviews:

1. Used the product in everyday life for a year or more

2. Used the product in everyday life for two weeks

3. Lab tested the product (e.g. Wirecutter or Consumer Reports)

4. Talked to past customers/purchasers

5. Unique survey or test (like polling our audience. Pack Hacker polls their audience to see what they think of the backpack’s look.)

6. Meta analysis of other good reviews

7. SEO spam

There are two components to a great review:

1. Product knowledge: you’ve got to know a lot about wood stoves and be able to compare this stove to others. You need to use them on a regular basis. Preferably you already own one. You should talk about the good, the bad and the ugly.

2. Presentation: clear, outlined writing; video and photos with good lighting (that doesn’t feel too corporate) It should feel like a review and not a video from the manufacturer. You should be natural on camera and not feel too awkward or forced.

Having something to say is more important than how you say it. Knowing the product deeply and having a love for the category is the most important part. For wood stove reviews, we want to hire someone who has a wood stove and loves it.

So what does the product review look like?

In the ideal situation you’d get the product and live with it for at least two weeks. There are a few distinct points in a great review (they’ll get split out into individual pieces of content sometimes, but can get created all in one).

1. Receiving delivery

2. Unboxing

3. Installation or setup

4. First use

5. Extended use (at least two weeks)

6. Usage tests

7. Technical details

8. Customer reviews

9. FAQs

10. Manual

11. Conclusions and scores

12. Customer support

13. Purchase experience

Receiving delivery

How heavy is it? Did you need any special equipment to get it inside? How does it fit through doorways?

Video: you can shoot a candid with your iPhone. Check the lighting in the area you’ll walk through.

Photos: the box in a well lit spot! Take a candid like it was just a customer on Amazon posting a picture and a studio-level picture.

Unboxing

What’s in the box? Does it take any special tools to open? Anything to be careful of? What the parts are for.

Video: this is a fixed spot. Have a couple of cameras running from different angles. Be sure to have a lapel mic so audio quality is good as you walk around. The lighting should be consistent in the whole process.

Photos: you should be able to make a gif of the whole process by taking a picture at each milestone. Oftentimes the camera angle that’s most interesting will be over top. You’ll need shots of:

• Box before it’s opened

• A few shots as the box is opening (makes for a nice gif)

• Item out of the box

• Laying out all accessories or parts (piece by piece)

• Final shot with everything that’s in the box laid out (you can label this in a still on the blog post)

Installation or setup

Walking through the installation process. Especially call out anything required for installation that isn’t required.

Video: you’ll need two cameras. First, setup a stationary camera that could be used as a Timelapse video or b-roll. Second, include a POV camera so they can see what you or the installer is doing. Use a mic to explain the process. If an installer is putting everything together, mic them up as well and give them the POV camera. You’ll have to ask them questions and have them explain what they’re doing.

First use.

This is a fun time! You’re using the product for the first time which is always exciting. Call out any special notes for the first time use. Point out anything confusing.

Video: two cameras again! One back giving a full shot and one POV

Extended use.

To know a product you’ve got to live with it for awhile. The excitement needs to wear off. This should be a minimum of two weeks of daily use, but the longer the better. Record the content every day for x days. These are short snippets with anything new you’re learning about the product. Little issues will come up. There will be things you like or don’t like.

Video: 1. time lapse style footage that you leave running the whole usage periods 2. Point of view for commentary. These will be quick little notes. When editing the video, you’ll want to add in day numbers (day 1, 2, 3, etc)

Usage tests

As a reviewer we need specific tests to help readers and viewers make a good decision.

For example, when I was buying a snowblower I wanted to know which was the quietest, so a decibel test would be helpful for me.

Pack Hacker does a dimensions check for each backpack they review so you can know which airlines will allow the hiking backpack as a carry on and which ones won’t.

Video and photos: whatever is best for the test. For example, if you’re testing the heat output, show the readout from the calorimeter and have a little clip.

Technical details

Give fundamental information like the dimension, warranty, country of manufacture, fuel type, EPA rating, etc.

Customer reviews

There’s only but so much you can learn in a short period with the product. That’s why it’s important to call past customers and look at forums like Reddit to see what the experience is for longtime owners.

Stress to them that you have no preference in them having a positive review or a negative. You just want to know what their experience is.

Ask if you can use their name and city and record the call. Release call snippets if they’re ok with it.

Questions you can ask for wood stove interviews:

• Where do you live?

• Tell us a little bit about yourself

• What got you interested in a wood stove?

• What do you use it for?

• Why did you buy your particular model?

• What have you liked about it?

• What haven’t you liked about it?

• How easy or hard was it to setup?

• What questions did you have before you bought it?

• What do you wish you’d known before you bought it?

• Would you recommend it? (It’s ok to say no)

• If you were buying a wood stove today, which one would you buy?

Get them to send some pictures of it installed at their house. Pictures of details are great. Show how it’s aging. Show wear and tear. Show what gets dirty. We want potential customers to be able to experience this as much as possible.

FAQs

What questions can you think of that people might have for this product? What questions are mentioned in the manual? Do you see anything people are confused about in reviews or questions they asked on Amazon or your website? What does customer support get asked most frequently?

Videos and photos: if there are specific questions that are best shown with a video or photo, that’s great. If not, don’t force it.

Similar Products

How does it compare to similar products? It’s helpful to know what the top contenders are if they don’t decide to choose this product. Stress what the pros and cons are for them.

Manual

Always link back to the manufacturer’s manual. Mention anything you found helpful about the manual (or confusing).

Conclusions

Gather up all your data and start scoring. You want to have 3-5 metrics that go together to make the overall score. It’s also helpful because someone can compare the products and figure out which ones are best for them. Maybe they want a quiet blower and that’s more important to them than the overall score, or they’re looking for a beautiful wood stove and don’t care as much about the heating. An overall score is good, but you need to give a few additional dimensions.

Bonus: How it Works

If customers can understand how the product works, they’re more likely to buy. There are two parts to this:

1. Big benefit. Explain how this wood stove works to put out heat. Use 3D models or simplified diagrams to explain it. If possible, have an analogy.

2. Minor benefits or features. Pick out a few cool features and explain them using the process above.

Bonus: Customer Support

Test return or contacting customer support. Doing a little mystery shopping so you can explain the return or customer support process is helpful so customers know what will happen if anything goes wrong. Don’t just say, “you can call the retailer any time”, say “I got stuck so I called support and Susie came on. She helped me figure out I had the pieces on backward.” Best of all, record a call with customer support. Show the refund request process and troubleshooting process.

Bonus: Purchase Experience

Do a screen recording of what the purchase experience was like. Start with going to the product page, figuring out whether or not it was actually in stock, show all the checkout steps, the after purchase upsells, phone call and text confirming the order, email confirming the order. Shipping updates (how long it took to ship). Updates as we’re waiting for it to be delivered. Texts or phone calls with the freight people.

Annual Updates

After publishing your review, it’s worth coming back and giving annual updates. If there’s a new option you’d recommend, mention that. If it’s still at the top of the heap, you can say that. It’s important to keep the content regularly updated!

Closing Thoughts

These reviews are about generating content that would help the most hardcore researcher make a decision. We’re trying to write a one-stop review that dominates the word spam competition.

It will be time consuming and expensive, but for long running, hero products the value can be immense.

If each review like this costs $10,000 and each wood stove sale makes $250 in gross profit, it’ll take 40 sales to break even (just on gross profit). No product sells forever, so be sure it’s worth the effort!

Post Script: What if you can’t do this?

This is the gold standard review. It can take 40 to 200 hours to make this happen. It is not a cheap process.

If you can’t do all the steps, pick the ones that seem most important to your customers.

What if you can’t get your hands on the product and review it? Do some in depth research, ideally with customer interviews.

You need to answer the same questions as above, but you won’t have the luxury of having the product in your hands.

Customer interviews via phone calls and forums are your best option.

While talking with Jason Cohen about his excellent post on predicting the future, I came up with a little visualization.

Instead of looking at a normal curve and seeing average as the top of the mountain, let’s flip the curve and look at it as the bottom of the valley.1

Average is like a strange attractor. It pulls other states toward it. How strongly it pulls is based off how few values are around it. The less values, the harder it is to stay there.

To use Jason’s example, Tesla achieved a CAGR of 55% from 2015 to 2022 (👏). If the mean CAGR for a company their size is 5-10%, they’re going to be strongly pulled back toward that mean.

You Only Beat Average with an Edge

The most useful part of this visualization for me is how hard it feels to climb out of the Valley of the Mean. I need an edge to get me out of there. Whether it’s pure energy (e.g. a willingness to work harder) or some kind of leverage x energy (work as hard as average but do something smarter), it’s a reminder that I need something to get above average results.

But hey, glass half-full is, I need something to get me below average results too.

Small Business Highlights

"Wrong location? Move it," he says. "Wrong people? Replace 'em. Wrong industry? I don't believe it. I've got a company in the machine tools industry, and we're doing great. I'd happily go into the coal business. It's how you look at something and how it's managed that make the difference."

2006 Inc Magazine article about Ken Hendricks, “Create Jobs, Eliminate Waste, Preserve Value”

I’m not saying problem avoidance is should go out the window, but this flies in the face of the Buffett/Munger idea that of problem avoidance. From the limited info I could find, Hendricks seemed to have a knack for smashing problems. Seems like an intelligent fanatic who was an outstanding operator and a good capital allocator to boot. The real secret could be that he married an amazing business partner.

Feedback needs to be immediate. As soon as someone steps off the path or veers into dangerous territory, let them know. Ideally during the first 90 days, give people “an exorbitant amount of feedback,” Lopp says.

First Round Capital, “The Best Approach to the Worst Conversation”

[O]ne of the first things you need to recognize is that the fundamental problem in making your prices stick is that you’re competing with many people and businesses who are actually going broke.

Lawrence L. Steinmetz and William T. Brooks, How to Sell At Margins Higher than Your Competitors

It’s always amazed me to consider industries that drive prices down until NO ONE is making a profit. Construction and grocery stores come to mind. Why do we feel like profit is a bad thing?

Christian Living Highlights

In the final analysis, the act of flattery is an act of deceit. It is a lie that many are willing to believe because they excessively long for approval of others.

Lou Priolo in Pleasing People

Sales pros talk a lot about “building rapport”. I can be a bit of a people pleaser, so this quote hit me right in the kisser. Flattery is an act of deceit.

What is “greatness”? It is not something quantitative; not what we mean when we say, “The number one hundred is greater than the number ten.” Rather, it is a manner of thinking and of meeting the world. It means the strictness of man’s demands upon himself and the willingness to stand for what is important, a breadth of vision and boldness of decision, a depth of involvement, originality, and creative power.

[…]

It is not an easy thing to confront greatness. It can discourage, even paralyze, for the greatness of another makes me feel my own littleness. Goethe said that there is only one defense against great superiority, and that is love. I wonder if this is true. It may not always be possible to love. Perhaps it may be more correct to say that the defense against great superiority consists in truth and reverence, which say: “He is great, I am not. But it is good that greatness should be, even if it is not in me but in another.” Then there is an open space, and envy disappears.

Romano Guardini, Learning the Virtues

I realized why I love playing sports but am not crazy about watching them. It can be hard to come face-to-face with a level of grace I’m never going to touch. But there’s good news too. Beauty doesn’t have to be mine for me to enjoy it!

Fiction Highlights

This week I tore through Naomi Novik’s book, Spinning Silver. It’s a retelling of the fable, Rumpelstiltskin. All these highlights come from the last third of the book. The cost the characters paid made the truth they told matter more.

But I had not known that I was strong enough to do any of those things until they were over and I had done them. I had to do the work first, not knowing.

Preach sister!! While it’s helpful to count the cost, sometimes I’ve realized I’ve just got to try. Most of the time I blow it. But the winners pay for the losers anyway.

Which is a perfect segue to our next idea…

He would only shrug and look at me expectantly again, waiting for high magic: magic that came only when you made some larger version of yourself with words and promises, and then stepped inside and somehow grew to fill it.

Clarification: this isn’t about fibbing, biting off more than you can chew or bragging. It’s about the forcing function public commitment can give. Scratch that, it’s the forcing function a deep-rooted decision gives.

This doesn’t always look how I think it will. The king steps into a larger version of himself, by taking on a smaller version of himself. 🤯

“If you really wanted to court me,” I said, “you’d have to do it by my family’s laws, and you’d have to marry me the same way. Save your time!” He paused and looked at me, and his eyes kindled with light suddenly; he took a step towards me, and held out his hand, and said urgently, “And if so? Whatever they are, I will venture them, if you will give me hope.” “Oh, will you,” I said, and folded my arms, knowing that would be the end of it, of course. And I wasn’t sorry; I wouldn’t be. I wouldn’t regret any man who wouldn’t do that, no matter what else he was or offered me; that much had lived in my heart all my life, a promise between me and my people, that my children would still be Israel no matter where they lived. Even if in some sneaking corner of my mind I might have thought, once or twice, for only a moment, that it would be worth something to have a husband who’d sooner slit his own throat than ever lie to you or cheat you. But not if he didn’t value you at least as high as his pride. I wouldn’t hold myself that cheap, to marry a man who’d love me less than everything else he had, even if what he had was a winter kingdom. 

1. Small Business

2. Christian Living

3. Fiction

These are the three sections I had a laid out in the beginning of the newsletter, but found it hard to weave them together. I’ll just let you jump around where you please!

Small Business Highlights

Hiring great people is my one and only plan for growth right now. While there are a few tech companies that are outliers (h/t WhatsApp), in general an employee generates around $100k in revenue for a SMB.

Obviously, there are folks who generate a disproportionate amount of revenue (whether high or low). But when I look at the high quality of work life, it’s totally related to the people who work for me.

Bill Bonner, the founder of the controversial newsletter juggernaut, Agora Publishing, put in perspective on his 60th birthday:

You see before you a man of modest talents, but immodest achievements. For the modesty of his talents, he has only himself to blame. But for the immodesty of his achievements, he has all the people in this room to thank. And I want to take this opportunity to thank you all. You see, I have been extremely lucky. A lot of entrepreneurs are not so lucky. They are only marginally incompetent ... good enough at a variety of tasks that they are hard to shove aside. They have opinions on marketing and management. Even worse, sometimes they have unshakeable convictions and absolute confidence in their own judgment. Those poor guys are practically doomed, in my opinion. I, on the other hand, owe everything to my own incompetence. When anyone new came into the office, I practically fell over myself to get out of his way. Some will generously say that I delegated authority. But that is not true. I shirked it. You and other partners, associates and employees just picked it up off the ground where I left it.

Bill Bonner, Family Fortunes

I’ve begun filtering [most] books by whether or not their author has done the thing he’s writing about. The problem is, the most relevant stories or businesses don’t usually write much about them. You often get a biography that focuses on their birth, education, marriage, model train collection and philosophical thoughts of the world. Not bad stuff, but it means you have to tease out the numbers:

You can learn about discerning underlying logic by reading memoirs of people who were successful, and technical manuals by experts in their field. In different types of business, repeat purchase rate, churn/attrition rate, or referral rate might be a key piece of hidden logic to optimize your business around.

Sebastian Marshall, Pragma

Christian Living Highlights

The past few weeks have felt like a fight with acedia[1].

To get back in the game, I doubled-down on getting up early and spiritual reading.

In the past I’ve sometimes felt “locked in” by habits. The difference between a regular disposition and a habit may seem like splitting hairs, but helps me keep away from giving up my agency to something I’ve done over and over.

[I]f you are shaped by habits, you lose part of your freedom; but, strictly speaking, virtue is not a habit. It is an extraordinary inventive capacity that enables us to carry out excellent acts that are profoundly in conformity with God’s will. It is a stable disposition to do good.

[…]

Virtue is precisely what enables us to perform excellent actions easily and joyfully, in a stable manner, with profound interior freedom, the freedom of the children of God.

Jean-Charles Naut, The Noonday Devil

Ironically, I have tons of ideas in times of sloth. But busyness or even productivity aren’t a guarantee I’m looking into the highest good. In fact, when the distaste for spiritual goods hits, I often get scattered and shine my thoughts everywhere.

There are many, many different objects in this crazy, wonderful world for the light of our minds to light up, but if the light is weak or foggy or unreliable, all its objects will be dim, and our grasp of them weak, and our very selves dim and weak like ghosts. Our mind can be compared to the light, and everything in our world is an object to it. To improve the light itself—to clarify it and intensify it and focus it and master it—is more important than to know any of its objects (except God and yourself, the only two realities you can never escape for a single moment, in time or in eternity).

Peter Kreeft, Foreword to The Mindful Catholic

[1] Sometimes translated sloth, this is being sad about pursuing a spiritual good. Like, skipping prayer time when I know it’ll bring me a feeling of peace, or even eating ice cream when I had planned on fasting.

Fiction Highlights

I’ve grossly neglected the fiction section of this newsletter. Here are a couple standalone quotes to kick off!

Alastair Reynolds is an astrophysicist turned sci-fi writer. Boy, does he make me think! Note to self: multiply the number of small best I can take.

Blind replication—nothing smart about it, but because it’s happening simultaneously in a billion-odd places, they win over us by sheer weight of numbers.

Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space

Hard magic systems and hard science fiction are two of my favorite categories. Brandon Sanderson tops the charts in terms of a fantasy author who keeps his writing relatively free of gratuitous sexual content AND weaves a fun story.

He has some helpful rules on writing magic systems that clarified a lot in story development for me:

Sanderson’s First Law of Magics: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.

Brandon Sanderson, “Sanderson’s First Law”

“Your religion is what you do with your solitude.” In other words, the true god of your heart is what your thoughts effortlessly go to when there is nothing else demanding your attention.

Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods

As I was driving from Minnesota to Virginia I had eighteen hours to think.

I love thinking time. If there was some way to drive standing up, I’d roadtrip just to have the chance to be alone, pray and think.

But what do my thoughts say about my priorities? What do my dreams say about my worship? What do my nagging questions say about what I love?

“Your religion is what you do with your solitude”.

A piece of my heart is firmly in love with doing my work well and growing these companies.

But, I’ve made the biggest bet of my life on a much bigger end. If I say I’m a Christian, and that I believe Jesus is God who became man, does that square with how I live my life?

A man can be wrong but well-intentioned, but he can’t be hypocritical and well-intentioned.

These passages make me ask, am I putting my ultimate happiness in what I believe is true, or has my gaze steadily slipped?

Highlights from Counterfeit Gods by Timothy Keller

[I]dolatry is not simply a form of ritual worship, but a whole sensibility and pattern of life based on finite values and making created things into godlike absolutes.

Idols generate false beliefs such as “if I cannot achieve X, then my life won’t be valid” or “since I have lost or failed Y, now I can never be happy or forgiven again.”

There’s a dangerous idea in me, that if I don’t grow my companies into multi-billion dollar enterprises, I’ve wasted my life.

But that’s just not true.

Sure, I want to do a good job with my time. It takes just as much time to build a big company as a small one. Both CEOs go to work for eight hours a day. But at the same time, that idea isn’t the arbiter of my happiness or worth. I want to be on God’s plan A.

[I]n the biblical view of things, the main problem in life is sin, and the only solution is God and his grace.

[W]e can locate idols by looking at our most unyielding emotions. What makes us uncontrollably angry, anxious, or despondent? What racks us with a guilt we can’t shake? Idols control us, since we feel we must have them or life is meaningless.

Americans believed that prosperity could quench their yearning for happiness, but such a hope was illusory, because, de Tocqueville added, “the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy [the human] heart.”

"Everything that can be decentralized, will be decentralized." - Johnston’s Law

Decentralization stole my heart a long time ago. In the Catholic world, it’s called subsidiarity. Decisions should be made at the lowest level possible.

This principle has worked in lots of contexts. Investing is one.

For years, Mark Leonard at Constellation Software has been crushing it by buying hundreds of small companies and letting managers run them.

They compounded capital at >30% for a decade. They’ve seen a drop, but are still in the 20s. That means $10k at the IPO in 2006 would be ~$450k (I didn’t do the exact math).

For a long time, I thought I wanted to do something similar in ecommerce.

Then, when I saw the silver tsunami, and the big business transfer attached to it, I realized I wanted to do something similar in any sector at all!

Right now, I’m working on a pre-hiring training program to help new employees catch our DNA. In research for that, I went back to Constellation’s letters.

While Constellation stopped writing annual letters in 2018, the wisdom there is worth rediscovering.

Without further ado, here are this week’s highlights!

Source: Constellation Software President’s Letter 2017

I can think of only two really compelling reasons why a high-quality candidate would want to serve on a board and commit hundreds of hours per year to the task: 1) it is a way to invest a significant portion of your net worth and be able to watch it closely, and 2) you can learn and apply those learnings to your own career and investments.

I try to make sure that sycophants, spin-doctors, and mercenaries don’t survive in Constellation’s senior ranks. Harder, but not impossible, is helping identify and remove hidebound managers who rely upon habit and folklore to run their businesses rather than rational enquiry and experimentation.”

At some point, transition from analyst or knowledge worker into a leader of people. I find there is no magic to managing and leading. If you are smart,work harder than everyone else around you, treat people fairly, do not ask them to do anything you would not or have not done, share the credit, keep learning and keep teaching, then pretty soon you have followers. If you make sure that the team members are intelligent, energetic,and ethical people with whom you would want to work for the rest of your career, it won’t be long until you are running one of our BU’s [Business Units, i.e. company]. Whatever vertical you end up in, that specialisation, that focus, will require a multi-year effort to build a trusted network of employees, customers, other industry participants, and even competitors. (Emphasis mine)

Successful Craftsmen can be autocratic or consultative, brilliant or average intelligence, introverted or extraverted, mercurial or imperturbable. Lots of different personalities and styles work. Successful Compounders have no choice but to be (or become) more hands-off and trusting. They can be curious and driven, but they can’t be directive. They can nurture,goad and suggest, but they can’t order. No PM can personally know the customers, products, employees, and competitors sufficiently well across multiple BU’s in different geographies and verticals,to make the critical decisions required at the BU level.

Last but not least, the Constellation search criteria for board members was too good to pass up. (You can find the original on page 10)

The interesting thing about an organization is how short its life is. Even a “long-lived” organization, institution or country has a short time horizon compared with the infinite life of a soul.

Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.

C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”

The individuals in a business aren’t just necessary cogs. They’re the treasure in the chest!

But organizations still matter. They’re like the jungle gyms where we play, and through our play, get stronger. Like any jungle gym worth its salt, they’re not perfectly safe, but they give a space to be challenged and grow.

This topic has gotten more urgent with a recent round of hiring. We’ve added five new part-time folks in the past month and a half, and have two to three sales hires in the works, with another three to five SDRs to follow soon behind.

My big questions for building an organization are:

1. Seeking the transcendentals: how can we build a place where people seek truth, goodness and beauty. I feel unbelievably blessed to know God and have a chance to seek Him more. People are going to look for God in all kinds of ways, but how can I share the tips that have helped me, as a fellow practitioner who is hungry for fullness of life?

2. Profit: how can we make money while growing. Profit is important for a lot of reasons, but one of the top reasons is because it keeps us in touch with reality.

3. Experimentation: how can I encourage testing over theories? Theories are great and all, but a bundle of fast, high-payoff, low-cost bets will trounce them every time.

4. Decisions as the Lowest Level: the Catholic Church frequently mentions the principle of subsidiarity. If a local parish can make a decision, that’s better than the Bishop (regional director) making it, and far better than the pope. People on the front lines have the most information. How can we get them the best thinking tools to make the decisions well?

5. Performance-Based Comp Plans: One of my hero companies, Nucor, based a big chunk of their compensation on weekly production numbers. Like it or not, financial compensation is one of the strongest feedback loops available. How can we help folks to reap the rewards or pain of their decision? There’s no autonomy without skin in the game.

To help kick this off, I read The Intelligent Fanatics Project. Here are some of the highlights, in no particular order that might be helpful.

Intelligent Fanatics

"Patterson was a perpetual beginner. He bought NCR without knowing much of anything about manufacturing—except that he wanted to improve every business owner’s operations. From his experiences, he took what he knew to be right and paid no attention to convention."

"He surrounded himself with the greatest talent, then he unlocked their fullest potential with training and incentives. He was able to get every one of his workers to think like owners, through his profit-sharing plan."

"Price’s belief was that customers were more sensitive to the price of goods than to selection."

"The success of any business is directly correlated to its ability to motivate its people through clever systems and incentives."

"TO ALL STORES . . . If a bright, young, ambitious man joins our company and wants to make our company his career, does he do it because he likes Norm Nelson and wants to help Nom, Gordy, or Bob, or Denny? Do you men think that some little fairy sent you this man just to help you build your bonus? Do you think that this man is going to work ten hours per day, miss meals, have ungodly hours at home, just to help you build your stores? Do you think this man is going to work for low pay, year after year, just so that you can build your profit share contract into a nice fat nest egg??? No, I don’t think so. He wants to see results, just like you did when you started up the ladder." - An excerpt from one Les Schwab’s letters.

“A common theme among intelligent fanatics is that they operate their businesses with a decentralized model. Workers are given autonomy to run their operation as if it were their own business. Authority and autonomy promote a feeling of control and self-worth that is intrinsically valuable to employees.”

“The big thing that is going to hit you right between the eyes is that “WE EXPECT YOU TO RUN THE STORE.” You are on your own, and you will sink or swim according to your abilities.” - Another Les Schwab excerpt

“Les Schwab and other intelligent fanatics, however, believe that decision making is best executed at the lowest level. Store employees, not the office workers, are the individuals with perfect knowledge of the situation.”

“The company had an open book policy, and employees were able to get practically any information they wanted about the company, including total company profits, employee salaries, and so forth.”

“Planning and corporate layers dilute customer service, increasing the time needed to find a solution. Not every decision will be perfect, so Kelleher has been a big proponent of the motto ‘Ready, fire, aim.’”

“Herb Kelleher wanted employees to take risks; however, Southwest as a whole never took big financial risks.” Lance’s note: how do you avoid the deathline while still giving autonomy?

“‘Because of different personalities and experiences, we handle employees differently and I would not try to teach one set method. I would just say that we cannot tolerate obnoxious, oppressive, abusive, tyrannical despots (assholes).’” - from a letter of Chester Cadiuex, QuikTrip’s founder.

“QuikTrip interviews roughly three out of every one hundred applicants and then chooses from those three. The culture of excellence at QuikTrip is so high that some see it as a kind of cult. […] QuikTrip hires only a quarter of a percent of all applicants.” Lance’s note: feeding the hiring funnel is critical. They hire one out of every 2,500 applicants.

“Some businesses reward long-term employment with a watch or a pen, but at QuikTrip, an employee receives a sabbatical.”

“Management gives almost all information about the company—except details about where management plans to build new stores, which could be leaked to competitors.” Lance’s note: another example of open management. It does seem that having as much information as possible would help with autonomy.

“He also grew up with a respect for those “who worked with their hands as well as their heads.”"

“According to Kenneth Iverson, Nucor’s success was ultimately tied to how the company paid its people […] The basic incentive at Nucor has always been tied to production, at every level.”

“All workers are paid a lower base salary than the industry norm (generally 65% to 70% of the norm), so employees start off each day unsure whether they will earn a competitive wage.”

“The second intangible but highly motivating factor at Nucor has been the opportunity for advancement. Workers have the ability to move up the organization to higher positions.”

“Lemann was looking for “PSDs ”—those who were poor, smart, and had a deep desire to become rich. Young talent would be recruited from a wide pool, and their compensation would be heavily tied to their performance.” Lance’s Note: one of the benefits of hiring diverse people is you can find people who have a hunger to grow, succeed and give back.

“Everything has to have an owner with authority and accountability. Debate is good, but in the end, someone has to decide.”

“At QuikTrip, employees are told to always ask themselves, ‘What would your mother think about what you did today?’”

“Maintaining high profit margins while growing is a very difficult feat. What the intelligent fanatic model proposes is that the only truly sustainable competitive advantage is a company’s human capital.”

“All the successful people I ever met were fanatics about focus. Sam Walton, who built Walmart, thought only about stores day and night. He visited store after store. Even Warren Buffett, who today is my partner, is a man super focused on his formula. He acquires different businesses but always within the same formula, and that’s what works. Today our formula is to buy companies with a good name and to come up with our management system. But we can only do this when we have people available to go to the company. We cannot do what the American private equity firms do. They buy any company, send someone there, and constitute a team. We only know how to do this with our team, people within our culture. Then, focus is also essential.” - excerpt from a 3G Capital Partner, Jorge Paulo Lemann (emphasis mine)

These highlights are inspiring. But this is a bit theoretical.

To quote Gary Vee “I want to make sure that I am giving you equal amounts of clouds and dirt. I want you to understand why this is important, but I also want you to understand how and what to do in order to execute.”

My goal here is not to get stuck in the clouds, but focus in on the dirt of doing, too.

Put another way, talk is cheap. If my employees are miserable, I can dream about creating an organization where they thrive all I want, but it’s nonsense.

That said, doing poorly with a few habits made me think a lot about failure and restarting.

“[…] any habit – needs to be able to survive your worst week. Design defensively, not aggressively. Your Lights should be simple, straightforward, and enjoyable enough that you can use them to stay on-track in a “week from hell.” Don’t design for the best times when everything is going right – during those times, you’ll naturally exceed your formal goals in Lights anyways. Instead, design your Lights so that they’ll stick during bad weeks.”

Sebastian Marshall, “Pitfalls to Avoid” (For their Lights spreadsheet)

These past few weeks have brought me back to the question, how can I perform better when I’m at my worst?

Paradoxically, the worst days are when I build the most confidence.

“Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”

St. Paul the Apostle, The Letter of Saint Paul to the Romans Ch 8, Verses 26-27

It’s crazy how fragile my commitments or ideas can be. I’m always shocked when I see big predictions for the future made with confidence.

For physical or deterministic systems, that makes total sense. Predicting the position of planets a hundred years out seems tractable.

For chaotic systems, like getting a startup to grow or figuring out where my career is going to be in five years, prediction seems a little nuts. Goals are great. Prediction is tough.

But the encouraging thing is, even in my weakness God has got my back.

“Of course, just failing is not the key; the key is to be systematically learning from failures.”

Peter Sims, Little Bets

Failure is almost a point of pride in the growth hacking world. But it isn’t good in and of itself. Its only value comes from the learning I can get out of it.

Here are a few of my learnings coupled with ideas:

• Staying up late is hard for me. Sometimes it’s necessary, other times I simply make the wrong choice, but know that there’s going to be a price to pay the next day or two.

• When I’m feeling burnt out, I generally give myself a free pass. I’m not saying a free pass is bad, but it’s an important thing to recognize in myself. Maybe it’d be a good idea to build a panic button into my life. A planned routine or accountability partner that helps me process when I go into that mode.

• The times I feel like hiding in mediocrity are the times to share the most with a close friend.

• I am blessed with great friends. They care about me enough to be almost like guardrails in my life, and encourage me to come back.

Here’s to getting back on the horse!

It’s kept me thinking about hiring as leverage and what the real point of work is.

[...] the primary basis of the value of work is man himself, who is its subject. This leads immediately to a very important conclusion of an ethical nature: however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, in the first place work is "for man" and not man "for work".

[I]n the final analysis it is always man who is the purpose of the work, whatever work it is that is done by man-even if the common scale of values rates it as the merest "service", as the most monotonous even the most alienating work.

John Paul II, Laborem Exercens (emphasis added)

Since I studied engineering, I default to systems thinking. I label. I assign dollar values to the cost of hiring a replacement for a difficult employee. I try to come up with systems that generate a profit.

But, as cliche as it is, profit just isn’t enough to keep up long-term motivation. I just don’t have a whole lot of things I want to buy!

When I first read this document I was doing a year of mission in Chile. It was a lightbulb moment for me. Maybe I’m not helping cure cancer, but I can help people improve in their work.

Our cheesy, but true mission as a company is “To be a stepping stone for where our employees are being called by God”. Selfishly, I want to help my employees become the best versions of themselves. On a superficial level, because it makes them work better. But on a deeper level, because I feel like these are eternal beings that I’m going to hangout with for longer than forever.

What does this look like in practice, though?

Some of it is trying to encourage skill growth. But a lot of it is about giving them agency.

TO ALL STORES… If a bright, young, ambitious man joins our company and wants to make our company his career, does he do it because he likes Norm Nelson and wants to help Nom, Gordy, or Bob, or Denny? Do you men think that some little fairy sent you this man just to help you build your bonus? Do you think that his man is going to work ten hours per day, miss meals, have ungodly hours at home, just to help you build your stores? Do you think this man is going to work for low pay, year after year, just so that you can build your profit share contract into a nice fat nest egg??? No, I don’t think so. He wants to see results, just like you did when you started up the ladder.

Les Schwab, of Les Schwab Tire Centers (source)

Some good news/bad news for employee development and motivation:

The bad news is, you can’t give someone intrinsic motivation.

The good news is, you don’t generally need to. When I ask my employees, they’ve got something they’re working on. It might be lofty like a documentary on women businesses in poorer areas, or maybe just some financial breathing room for their family, but they’ve got something.

As an employer, or better yet, business partner, it’d be intractable for me to try and barter my way to a direct compensation model (e.g. “I’ll pay for your documentary if you bring in five sales”).

But it is possible to give them a level of control over the quantity of resources they direct toward their projects.

The two main resources are simple: time and money.

In my experience it’s not so much about the quantity of either as much as their ability to impact them.

#WeLovePerformanceComp!

A red team is a group that helps organizations to improve themselves by providing opposition to the point of view of the organization that they are helping. They are often effective in helping organizations overcome cultural bias and broaden their problem solving capabilities.

Wikipedia, “Red Teams”

The other great thing about performance compensation is, it shows what you truly value as a business. There’s a lot of lip service around red teams, but oftentimes seem like checking the block.

That said, there are some areas where red teams are phenomenal (like ethical hacking or bug reporting).

Where’s the disconnect?

My guess is it’s an incentive mismatch.

Two examples of where red teams work:

1. Military red teams. They’re trying to make the other team look bad. The spoils are tons of bragging rights and pride in being the best. Not much need for extrinsic motivation.

2. Sports. Good losers are people who don’t freak out when they lose. But no one likes losing.

3. As a Catholic Christian, I've gotten value from a militant atheist's arguments. We both want to find the truth and not sugarcoat things.

But, without a real incentive I worry it's just a formality.

"Long term thinking (or what I call step-function thinking) is all focused on “who” — “who” can help me? “who” can I model?"

Mitchell Harper, Sane

Over the past two weeks, we’ve hired and trained nine sales/marketing folks to help with outreach. The number of applicants for a job that pays $10/hour + $20/confirmed appointment with the right person, blew me away. (We had well over 1,000).

I was surprised at some of the truly excellent talent that came through at that pay level.

I’ve got a few ideas on why that might be. My pet theory is that there are big demographic groups that don’t have the confidence to value their work where it should be. For instance, we get a disproportionate amount of applicants from women and races other than caucasian.

Or maybe folks who apply for a job like this haven’t figured out how to package their abilities into a skill that commands higher wages. Maybe they’re selling themselves short.

Or maybe they just want to apply for a job that’s a slam dunk.

Any way you slice it, you’re bound to find some serious talent if the population matches a normal distribution.

We just need people closer to the top of the bell curve.

The results of this in my life have been a huge blessing.

When I look at the person who is most critical to building personal wealth currently, I almost feel silly for not focusing more on hiring.

Critical elements I’ve found are:

Setting the net as geographically wide as possible, but keeping the criteria tight and narrow.

Oftentimes, when we hear about the “who” we should connect with, we jump to the high-profile folks in our market.

But who is the person that is going to help you multiply your efforts?

The bedrock challenge for directors…remains constant: Find and retain a talented CEO – possessing integrity, for sure – who will be devoted to the company for his/her business lifetime.

Warren Buffett, 2019 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report

Everytime I quote Warren Buffett or C.S. Lewis, I feel like I’m sending you something you’ve already heard a million times, but this just felt too relevant to pass up.

Two takeaways here:

1. You might not be an investor, but there’s probably a problem you’re responsible for. How could you find and retain a talented person to help you with your marketing department, tech support or even Chinese lessons.

2. If you’re the CEO, do you match all the characteristics above? Or are you the director who should be searching for the CEO?

We should judge our neighbor favorably in every circumstance and make it become a habit of ours to overlook his faults. Just as we—almost spontaneously—give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, let us also make this an integral factor of our relations with those about us.

Therese of Lisieux

To be clear, “faults” here means “annoying/frustrating actions you’re suspicious of”.

My first reaction when I’m hit with a problem is often low-grade irritation. That usually translates to the person bringing me the bad news.

Frankly, it often doesn’t seem like the most important problem for me to solve. (That could mean I’m arrogant or just too incompetent to solve it and am trying to slough it off).

But, I’ve found that by zeroing in on their ability to handle the problem, rather than the reasons why they can’t, people usually take care of it.

In fact, It has consistently shocked me, how people take regular, positive accountability and run with it.

Unrelated Highlight

The Church does not impose on us the idea that love should be permanent. Permanence is what the heart longs for.

Christopher West, Theology of the Body for Beginners

Since I’ve been praying about getting married for a few years, this quote hits a note in my heart. Too pretty not to share.

Reversion to the mean is the iron rule of financial markets.

John C. Bogle

Mediocrity is scary. But the fact is, reversion to the mean is present in more than just financial markets. It shows up all throughout life.

Looking at my life, one of the biggest things that pulls me back to mediocrity is an unwillingness to say “no” to the things that don’t matter much, and yes to the things that do.

I'd be Millions of Dollars Richer if someone did one simple thing for me: A weekly check in where I must Show completion of my most important Project.

@garybasin via Twitter

Sometimes I wonder why I don’t do my most important work consistently.

It comes down to either a weakness of desire or a deeper longing that I want to fill quickly, in a shallow way.

In other words, either I seek after something short-term, like a new idea for using professional betters to use as investment vehicle (without knowing anything about betting, myself)…

OR I get the right long-term desire, but want to make it perfect now, like wanting my land property scraping tool to launch with five sources to scrape, rather than just one.

They’re very different problems, but most of the time, my mediocrity comes from chasing a lesser desire.

Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering, whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed.

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

How easily duped I am! There is a richness of energy and desire by focusing on the most important thing in my life. But little desires pop up, and I almost willfully get derailed.

What kind of sacrifice am I willing to go through to be infinitely happy? What price am I willing to pay?

Love consists of a commitment which limits one’s freedom—it is a giving of the self, and to give oneself means just that: to limit one’s freedom on behalf of another. Limitation of one’s freedom might seem to be something negative and unpleasant, but love makes it a positive, joyful and creative thing. Freedom exists for the sake of love.

Edward Sri, Men Women and the Mystery of Love (emphasis mine)

A week ago, Saturday, I moved in with a family with six kids. Ages two to fourteen. My mornings are mass (a Catholic church service) and breakfast with the family. My afternoons are lunch and tag with the family. My evenings are a project or play time with the family.

What a schedule change!

My freedom to things done outside of work hours has been severely limited. But this limit has given such joy!

Where do I need to put more limits to be more free?

Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).

[…] Labor means people working for you. It's the oldest and most fought-over form of leverage. Labor leverage will impress your parents, but don’t waste your life chasing it.

Naval, “How To Get Rich, Without Being Lucky”

When most Millennial entrepreneurs talk about leverage, generally, they mean capital, code or media. Labor is the red-headed stepchild of leverage.

For good reason. It’s a pain-in-the-neck to scale.

I’d posit, it’s hardest but it’s also the most robust.

Consider SOPs. McDonald’s seems to have top-notch systems. But anyone who has ever run a business would agree, those systems aren’t static. They’re fragile. The supplier changes hamburger size and the SOP has got to change too.

The SOP is scalable instantly quick. A human who can be taught to understand process scales slow, but is robust.

The ultimate cause of wealth is not land or resources or labor but the human mind

James V. Schall, S.J., On Christians and Prosperity

[…] how vast is the role of technology, that ally of work that human thought has produced, in the interaction between the subject and object of work (in the widest sense of the word). Understood in this case not as a capacity or aptitude for work, but rather as a whole set of instruments which man uses in his work, technology is undoubtedly man's ally. It facilitates his work, perfects, accelerates and augments it. It leads to an increase in the quantity of things produced by work, and in many cases improves their quality.

John Paul II, Laborem Exercens (emphasis added)

Algorithmic traders fascinate me. It’s a problem I’d put firmly in the “too hard pile”, but seems to have lots of lessons that can be ported over to other disciplines.

Let’s start with this obvious statement: traders that write code to trade seem to do well (comparing Bridgewater to Renaissance seems to back this up - but I’m just going off what I’ve heard smart people say, there).

But the problem is, as they uncover an edge, it’s swiftly eroded.

The tenure of a successful trader seems significantly longer than a successful algorithm.

People are the classic chaotic system. We’re messy. We have good days and bad days. We get bored and don’t want to work. We get excited and want to chase shiny objects. We get married and have priorities shift. We make secret decisions, that we don’t even let ourselves in on, like why we’ll buy or marry or move.

A blog post is predictable. You access the Google Doc, you get the text. A piece of software is [mostly] predictable. You input commands it outputs the result. Capital is predictable. A dollar is a dollar.

People are not. We are all over the map.

Here’s a model of predictions around a process vs person outcome:

I should’ve drawn this curve with the quality of system outcome more to the right. But an important detail is, if you add up all the outcomes under the people curve, it’s got to be greater than the system curve, if for the mere reason that people created the systems, so are always going to be a step ahead.

The key takeaway is, you know more or less what you’re going to get with the system. If the inputs are consistent, the outputs are consistent.

People on the other hand, vary. Most people do mediocre, but respectable work. A few create massive Ponzi schemes and destroy billions of dollars in wealth. A few invent cars, compose symphonies and save humanity.

Great founders maintain Zero Optionality.  Not because they are crazy risk takers.  But because they just don’t see the huge risk.  They have no back-up plans.  They see The Future.

Jason Lemkin, “If You’re Going to Do a SaaS Start-Up… You Have to Give it 24 Months”

I used to vehemently disagree with the idea of sacrificing optionality. Since markets are chaotic systems and chaotic systems are unpredictable, it seemed like a stupid idea to make a huge bet on an unpredictable system.

My experience backed this up. One year we launched ~25 products to find one that had the metrics to scale on paid media. Predicting what customers want is a tough. So, lack of backup plans seems like a willful self-delusion.

Then, I stumbled across an idea that makes me think of reducing optionality and focusing in. Maybe there are situations where the margin of safety is high enough, that the bet just makes sense to follow.

Follow logic and analysis rather than sales pitches, whims, or emotion. Assume you may have an edge only when you can make a rational affirmative case that withstands your attempts to tear it down. Don’t gamble unless you are highly confident you have the edge. As Buffett says, “Only swing at the fat pitches.”"

Edward O. Thorp, A Man for All Markets

Ed Thorpe’s book had two major lessons for me.

1. If you’re unsure about your “edge” (read: advantage), you don’t have one.

2. Focus is the key to finding an edge.

For most of my career, I wasn’t sure I had an edge, so attempted to take small bets. I don’t regret this strategy at all. Now that I’ve got an idea where I think I’ve got an edge, my goal is to test that edge as cheaply as possible. My guess is, no edge survives contact with the dealer. But focus can help you uncover something deeper.

In a competitive world, adversity is your ally. The harder it gets, the better chance you have of insulating yourself from the competition. If that adversity also causes you to quit, though, it counts for nothing.

Seth Godin, The Dip

Difficulty is the easiest moat. Assuming we can survive it. This is one I celebrate on my good days, and lament on my bad ones.

[…] which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’

cf Luke 14:28-30, The Bible NRSVCE

The dip is the only stupid place to quit. All the money, time and effort invested is guaranteed to be lost. To paraphrase blogger, Taylor Pearson, “pull a pot-roast out of the oven early and it’s the same as not putting it in at all. You can’t eat it.”

Outcomes are [nearly] always better when I count the cost. When I became a Christian in early college, I knew it was going to cost me volleyball friends and an active nightlife.

But, done right, these costly bets are asymmetric. We know the cost of taking the bet, but not the potential upside. (Sidenote: if my bet that heaven is real pays off, I’m more in the money than I could ever imagine).

When my bets haven’t worked out, the worst that happens is I’m out the money, time and energy I knew I could potentially lose. I don’t regret these times. A recent cold calling test comes to mind.

The times when I haven’t counted the cost, I’m tempted to throw good money after bad and fall into the sunk-cost fallacy.

The flipside is, I often don’t even know what the costs will be. It’s hard to count the cost of a new idea. So where’s the room to experiment? To dabble? To tinker?

If you know, let me in on the secret 😉

Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style and how it obstructs what they are trying to say.

William Zinsser, On Writing Well

This. Hits. Home.

71. To maximize opportunities, seek and master the complicated. The major solutions you find will be surprisingly simple, and the competition is minimal.

Kekich’s Credo

Our communion with Him is to become a blazing fire, a perpetual ecstasy. These strong words will sound strange and exaggerated only to those who have not tasted that the Lord is good. They may have studied and read, but they have not drunk deeply.

Thomas Dubay, The Fire Within

I’ve had moments of this, but want more! (Ok, so “moments” is mutually exclusive with the word “perpetual”… see the Zinsser quote above)

When you have two feature ideas with the same ROI, it's best to prioritize the smaller scope idea higher because it takes less time to implement.

Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook

The fundamental assumption here is, you can figure out what is more valuable to the customer. I don’t think that’s always the case…

Who can put out the fire when all the house is in flames?

St. John Bosco, The Forty Dreams of John Bosco

Exponential growth is a bear.

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