Jeff Bezos has a video where he provides some of the best blueprint tips for you to follow in the leadership of your startup to get the upper edge on the competition:
1. You don't choose a passion, a passion chooses you. It's very hard to make meaningful change on something you are not naturally passionate about. Your energy, focus, and resilience will be much higher, and you will be much more likely to succeed. A passion is a gift. Use it. (If you love something you are passion and if you followed my follow your efforts and people will start to pay you for what you're good at you tend to find that your passion and what people want to pay you for our intertwined because you are likely to be very good at something that you have a passion for).
2. Take pride in your effort, not your talents. Your talents are a gift, you didn't do anything to earn them. You should take pride in what you do with them. True excellence comes from combining gifts with dedication and effort. (Working & studying hard/practicing consistently). Read the book Relentless and Grit to learn about how those who find pride accelerate.
3. Good leaders are right a lot. This is one I think about everyday. "Being right a lot" has nothing to do with intelligence, it's a skill that requires discipline, humility, & comfortability with looking like an idiot. Here's how anyone can get good at "being right a lot"
3.1 To be right a lot, you have to listen a lot. Most of being right a lot is about gathering as much data as possible. Good leaders listen. They develop the ability to ask good questions and to challenge bias. They seek out people with different perspectives. (Its important to know what you don't and understand that you don't know everything but you can hire smarter people around you who can help guide and advise).
This is the most important one. People may say you're a fool/don't know what you're doing. These people are wrong. Changing your mind is good & the only way to find truth. To do it consistently, you must get rid of any internal need for people to think you're smart. (Confirmation on the forecasting note above).
3.3 To be right a lot, you must seek out info that challenge your most deeply held beliefs. We like to consume evidence that confirms our beliefs, but you HAVE to seek out data that disconfirms your beliefs. You must find methods and ways to get this data often & consistently. (If you've read about traders and hedge funds who take this thesis to disprove themselves and figure out what the gaps and holes are in their strategy. Same beliefs are upheld in a startup.)
4. Be stubborn on vision, and flexible on details You have to be constantly experimenting. Avoid sunk cost bias at all cost. Be willing to pivot all of your work to something new when you encounter new data. The startup graveyard is filled with companies rigid on details.
5. Without failure, there is no invention. You must be willing to fail, publicly & embarrassingly. You must be proud of your failure & seek to grow the size of your failures with the size of your successes. This is the hardest one to execute in SV's "crushing it" culture. (Be fallible and know that failures are learning opportunities to strengthen you long term).
Hat tip and thank you to Garret Scott
