I will talk mainly about science because that is what I have studied. But so far as I know, and I've been told by others, much of what I say applies to many fields. Outstanding work is characterized very much the same way in most fields, but I will confine myself to science.

I spoke earlier about planting acorns so that oaks will grow. You can't always know exactly where to be, but you can keep active in places where something might happen. And even if you believe that great science is a matter of luck, you can stand on a mountain top where lightning strikes; you don't have to hide in the valley where you're safe.

Most great scientists know many important problems. They have something between 10 and 20 important problems for which they are looking for an attack. And when they see a new idea come up, one hears them say ``Well that bears on this problem.'' They drop all the other things and get after it.

The great scientists, when an opportunity opens up, get after it and they pursue it. They drop all other things. They get rid of other things and they get after an idea because they had already thought the thing through. Their minds are prepared; they see the opportunity and they go after it. Now of course lots of times it doesn't work out, but you don't have to hit many of them to do some great science. It's kind of easy. One of the chief tricks is to live a long time!

He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder.

You should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it, so they will indeed say, ``Yes, I've stood on so and so's shoulders and I saw further.'' The essence of science is cumulative. By changing a problem slightly you can often do great work rather than merely good work. Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class.

by altering the problem, by looking at the thing differently, you can make a great deal of difference in your final productivity because you can either do it in such a fashion that people can indeed build on what you've done, or you can do it in such a fashion that the next person has to essentially duplicate again what you've done. It isn't just a matter of the job, it's the way you write the report, the way you write the paper, the whole attitude. It's just as easy to do a broad, general job as one very special case. And it's much more satisfying and rewarding!

it is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it. `Selling' to a scientist is an awkward thing to do. It's very ugly; you shouldn't have to do it. The world is supposed to be waiting, and when you do something great, they should rush out and welcome it. But the fact is everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well that they will set aside what they are doing, look at what you've done, read it, and come back and say, ``Yes, that was good.'' I suggest that when you open a journal, as you turn the pages, you ask why you read some articles and not others. You had better write your report so when it is published in the Physical Review, or wherever else you want it, as the readers are turning the pages they won't just turn your pages but they will stop and read yours. If they don't stop and read it, you won't get credit.

I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.

He had his personality defect of wanting total control and was not willing to recognize that you need the support of the system. You find this happening again and again; good scientists will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system and take advantage of all the system has to offer. It has a lot, if you learn how to use it. It takes patience, but you can learn how to use the system pretty well, and you can learn how to get around it. After all, if you want a decision `No', you just go to your boss and get a `No' easy. If you want to do something, don't ask, do it. Present him with an accomplished fact. Don't give him a chance to tell you `No'. But if you want a `No', it's easy to get a `No'.

Amusement, yes, anger, no. Anger is misdirected. You should follow and cooperate rather than struggle against the system all the time.

I found out many times, like a cornered rat in a real trap, I was surprisingly capable. I have found that it paid to say, ``Oh yes, I'll get the answer for you Tuesday,'' not having any idea how to do it. By Sunday night I was really hard thinking on how I was going to deliver by Tuesday. I often put my pride on the line and sometimes I failed, but as I said, like a cornered rat I'm surprised how often I did a good job. I think you need to learn to use yourself. I think you need to know how to convert a situation from one view to another which would increase the chance of success.

I do go in to strictly talk to somebody and say, ``Look, I think there has to be something here. Here's what I think I see ...'' and then begin talking back and forth. But you want to pick capable people. To use another analogy, you know the idea called the `critical mass.' If you have enough stuff you have critical mass. There is also the idea I used to call `sound absorbers'. When you get too many sound absorbers, you give out an idea and they merely say, ``Yes, yes, yes.'' What you want to do is get that critical mass in action; ``Yes, that reminds me of so and so,'' or, ``Have you thought about that or this?'' When you talk to other people, you want to get rid of those sound absorbers who are nice people but merely say, ``Oh yes,'' and to find those who will stimulate you right back.

I believed, in my early days, that you should spend at least as much time in the polish and presentation as you did in the original research. Now at least 50% of the time must go for the presentation. It's a big, big number.

Luck favors a prepared mind; luck favors a prepared person. It is not guaranteed; I don't guarantee success as being absolutely certain. I'd say luck changes the odds, but there is some definite control on the part of the individual.

If you read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one. So yes, you need to keep up. You need to keep up more to find out what the problems are than to read to find the solutions. The reading is necessary to know what is going on and what is possible. But reading to get the solutions does not seem to be the way to do great research. So I'll give you two answers. You read; but it is not the amount, it is the way you read that counts.

your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day. If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there's the answer.

You can't directly control where your thoughts drift. If you're controlling them, they're not drifting. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want to think about.

barring emergencies you have a good deal of indirect control over what becomes the top idea in your mind.

Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I've found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't deserve space in my head.

just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it's not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.

people mix up two very different types of pivots and that it’s important to differentiate which path you’re on: Ideation pivots: This is when an early-stage startup changes its idea before having a fully formed product or meaningful traction. These pivots are easy to make, normally happen quickly after launch, and the new idea is often completely unrelated to the previous one. For example, Brex went from VR headsets to business banking, Retool went from Venmo for the U.K. to a no-code internal tools app, and Okta went from reliability monitoring to identity management all in under three months. YouTube changed direction from a dating site to a video streaming platform in less than a week. Hard pivots: This is when a company with a live product and real users/customers changes direction. In these cases, you are truly “pivoting”—keeping one element of the previous idea and doubling down on it. For example, Instagram stripped down its check-in app and went all in on its photo-sharing feature, Slack on its internal chat tool, and Loom on its screen recording feature. Occasionally a pivot is a mix of the two (i.e. you’re pivoting multiple times over 1+ years), but generally, when you’re following the advice below, make sure you’re clear on which category you’re in.

When looking at the data, a few interesting trends emerged: Ideation pivots generally happen within three months of launching your original idea. Note, a launch at this stage is typically just telling a bunch of your friends and colleagues about it. Hard pivots generally happen within two years after launch, and most around the one-year mark. I suspect the small number of companies that took longer regret not changing course earlier.

ou should have a hard conversation with your co-founder around the three-month mark, and depending on how it’s going (see below), either re-commit or change the idea. Then schedule a yearly check-in. If things are clicking, full speed ahead. If things feel meh, at least spend a few days talking about other potential directions.

Brex: “We applied to YC with this VR idea, which, looking back, it was pretty bad, but at the time we thought it was great. And within YC, we were like, ‘Yeah, we don’t even know where to start to build this.’” —Henrique Dubugras, co-founder and CEO

People pay you for doing what they want, not what you want. But there's an obvious exception: when you both want the same thing. For example, if you love football, and you're good enough at it, you can get paid a lot to play it.

it's clear that Bill Gates truly loved running a software company. He didn't just love programming, which a lot of people do. He loved writing software for customers. That is a very strange taste indeed, but if you have it, you can make a lot by indulging it.

If you want to make a really huge amount of money — hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars — it turns out to be very useful to work on what interests you the most. The reason is not the extra motivation you get from doing this, but that the way to make a really large amount of money is to start a startup, and working on what interests you is an excellent way to discover startup ideas.

Many if not most of the biggest startups began as projects the founders were doing for fun. Apple, Google, and Facebook all began that way. Why is this pattern so common? Because the best ideas tend to be such outliers that you'd overlook them if you were consciously looking for ways to make money.

there's something like a midwit peak for making money. If you don't need to make much, you can work on whatever you're most interested in; if you want to become moderately rich, you can't usually afford to; but if you want to become super rich, and you're young and good at technology, working on what you're most interested in becomes a good idea again.

When you have trouble choosing between following your interests and making money, it's never because you have complete knowledge of yourself and of the types of work you're choosing between, and the options are perfectly balanced. When you can't decide which path to take, it's almost always due to ignorance. In fact you're usually suffering from three kinds of ignorance simultaneously: you don't know what makes you happy, what the various kinds of work are really like, or how well you could do them

Don't wait till the end of college to figure out what to work on. Don't even wait for internships during college. You don't necessarily need a job doing x in order to work on x; often you can just start doing it in some form yourself. And since figuring out what to work on is a problem that could take years to solve, the sooner you start, the better.

You'll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people?

If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well it pays, you'll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you're genuinely interested in, you'll be surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring

The less sure you are about what to do, the more important it is to choose options that give you more options in the future. I call this "staying upwind." If you're unsure whether to major in math or economics, for example, choose math; math is upwind of economics in the sense that it will be easier to switch later from math to economics than from economics to math

The root of great work is a sort of ambitious curiosity, and you can't manufacture that.

I was so used to hearing from teachers and family that if I just didn’t procrastinate and worked all the time, I could do anything! I had all this potential I wasn’t living up to! And that’s true, as far as it goes, but that’s like saying if Usain Bolt just kept going he could be the fastest marathon runner in the world. Why does he stop at the end of the race??

Now, I’ve found that I do need to work on not procrastinating. Not because the product is better, even, but because it’s better for my mental health and physical health to not have a full, sweating, panicked breakdown over every task even if the task itself turns out excellently. It’s a shitty way to live! You feel bad ALL the time! And I don’t deserve to live like that anymore.

I don’t have an ocean of productivity and accomplishments inside of me that I could easily, effortlessly access if I just sat down 8 hours a day and worked. There’s no fucking way. That’s not real. It’s an illusion. It’s fine not to live up to an illusion.

Forget trying to decide what your life’s destiny is. That’s too grand. Instead, just figure out what you should do in the next 2 years.

Try to define yourself by what you love and embrace, rather than what you hate and refuse.

Where you live—what city, what country—has more impact on your well being than any other factor. Where you live is one of the few things in your life you can choose and change.

Once a month take a different route home, enter your house by a different door, and sit in a different chair at dinner. No ruts.

Every now and then throw a memorable party. The price will be steep, but long afterwards you will remember the party, whereas you won’t remember how much is in your checking account.

Most arguments are not really about the argument, so most arguments can’t be won by arguing.

invent your own definition of success. Shoot your arrows first and then paint a bull’s eye around where they land. You’re the winner!

There should be at least one thing in your life you enjoy despite being no good at it. This is your play time, which will keep you young. Never apologize for it.

You have 5 minutes to act on a new idea before it disappears from your mind.

The patience you need for big things, is developed by your patience with the little things.

When you are stuck or overwhelmed, focus on the smallest possible thing that moves your project forward.

For steady satisfaction, work on improving your worst days, rather than your best days.

Your decisions will become wiser when you consider these three words: “…and then what?” for each choice.

If possible, every room should be constructed to provide light from two sides.  Rooms with light from only one side are used less often, so when you have a choice, go with light from two sides.

There is a profound difference between thinking less of yourself (not useful), and thinking of yourself less (better).

Always ask yourself: what would change my mind?

Becoming one-of-a-kind is not a solo job. Paradoxically you need everyone else in the world to help make you unique.

If you need emergency help from a bystander, command them what to do. By giving them an assignment, you transform them from bewildered bystander to a responsible assistant.

The most common mistake we make is to do a great job on an unimportant task.

Don’t work for a company you would not invest money in, because when you are working you are investing the most valuable thing you have: your time.

Fail forward. Failing is not a disgrace if you keep failing better.

Do not cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.

For small tasks the best way to get ready is to do it immediately.

What others want from you is mostly to be seen. Let others know you see them.

When you try something new, don’t think of it as a matter of success / failure, but as success / learning to succeed.

use your honesty as a gift not as a weapon. Your honesty should benefit others.

A good sign that you are doing the kind of work you should be doing is that you enjoy the tedious parts that other people find tortuous.

Celebrating the success of others costs you nothing, and increases the happiness of everyone, including you.

To tell a good story, you must reveal a surprise; otherwise it is just a report.

a long horizon allows you to compound small advances into quite large achievements.

Often ideas are rejected because of the tone of voice they are wrapped in. Humility covers many blemishes.

When you are right, you are learning nothing.

Very small things accumulate until they define your larger life. Carefully choose your everyday things.

If you are impressed with someone’s work, you should tell them, but even better, tell their boss.

Humility is mostly about being very honest about how much you owe to luck.

I think a lot of folks feel like you should be doing these certain things like writing the great American novel or reading the 100 Greatest Movies of All-Time when in actuality these are achievements that have no real guarantee of happiness. Unless you are truly enjoying those journeys, there is no reason to set upon them.

I don't think there is anything wrong with having hopes and dreams, but I do feel that maybe we allow those things to be excuses for not living a content life. I also think at times we hold onto old dreams that no longer serve us, instead of focusing on something new and more applicable to your current situation.

adulthood wasn't full of Ferraris and mansions, and I found out rather quickly that I wasn't going to save anyone, because I was struggling to save myself.

resist the urge to add immediate value. Instead we have to hold space for a more vulnerable, honest and open relationship with our client - to allow them to open up more fully and to work on things that are useful, even if not in scope.

While giving advice can help you be seen as knowledgeable, it doesn’t necessarily build trust.

“You should…” It’s a simple sounding phrase but it gets you in trouble more often than not. It’s problematic for two reasons: it assumes a control of client resources and it’s too prescriptive in form

We typically don’t have a complete view of everything that the company is working on, we don’t have a detailed understanding of how long things actually take or the full range of dependencies required for them.

Example: working with a client where I wanted to re-design a landing page on their site to improve it. Unfortunately I was under-estimating the number of people who need to be involved since the landing pages were still owned by the product team and are technically part of the same codebase as the full tech product. So a “small” change required detailed security scrutiny and QA before going live. Making “simple” changes was not in fact simple at all here.

Example: working with the NYTimes cooking team I suggested that they should re-tag their content. This kind of “you should…” recommendation seemed straightforward but neglected the political considerations - the team had just spent 6-figures on re-tagging all their recipes - so to ask for further budget to re-do a task they had just done would lose them face internally. A “straightforward” change that actually carried a bunch of political baggage.

Some other types of complexity that you might be under-estimating with regards resource allocation: Regulation/compliance complexity - which either prevents you even doing your recommendation or makes it slower. Technical complexity - while something might be technically easy, doing it with the client’s existing technology might be hard. Data complexity - a simple seeming request on the surface (make a landing page for every neighborhood) might actually depend on a robust, maintained data set that doesn’t yet exist. Maintenance complexity - even if the initial request to create something or do something is not resource intensive, it might come with an implicit agreement to continue to maintain it - expanding the resources allocated. Production complexity - where what you’re proposing isn’t that expensive or resource intensive to do, but the client (for whatever reason) has a higher quality threshold, making the recommendation more expensive/slower/harder than you anticipated. Narrative complexity - where what you’re recommending seems reasonable but either the company has tried it before, or a competitor has tried it before or there’s a general sense that “this doesn’t work”. Which can make your recommendation extremely hard to actually get done.

When we say “You should…” we’re essentially offering a problem diagnosis AND a solution at the same time. The consequence of this is that we’re essentially asking the client to accept or reject both together.

most of your work would be more effective at actually changing clients if you stopped to clearly separate the diagnosis from the solution.

if you’re asking “You should…” to the client, stop and examine if you’ve properly defined the situation and provided evidence for the problem, to help the client deeply internalize the problem and win over the necessary stakeholders before you propose any kind of solution.

A good mental exercise to ensure you’re doing the work here is to ask yourself: what happens if the client takes no action? What is the consequence of the current trajectory, or the null case of no investment?

By showing what’s possible, clients are able to feel more invested in designing the solution with you, rather than just being told what to do.

clients deeply appreciate you clearly separating out expert opinion and judgment from evidence-based analysis.

A good process for the advisor to follow is: Give them their options Give them an education about their options (including enough discussion for them to consider each option in depth) Give them a recommendation Let them choose

Taking a collaborative stance with your client is powerful. There are many aspects of consulting that are almost combative by nature - like pointing out problems the client has (that the client was complicit in creating!).

I find in my own work that senior executives are often blocked by some inability to see what’s actually going on - and that telling them is useless! Instead you need to help them see it for themselves.

Because of their distance from the day to day work, senior executives are especially prone to replacing some version of reality with a compressed narrative. And when this compressed narrative is wrong in some key way you need to return to first principles to show them (not tell them!).

Your sense of “what’s going on” with a client is intermediated by your point of contact and it turns out that your client is an unreliable narrator.

When a client comes to you asking for a “content strategy” or support “hiring a VP marketing” it all seems so straightforward, rational and well defined. But as you unpack the layers of the onion you begin to realize why it’s been so hard for the client to help themselves. And that’s when the emotional and political complexity of the problem starts to come into view.

if the work is done effectively, it requires that the consultant be both involved enough in the dynamics so as to experience their impact and detached enough so as to analyze what is transpiring. These demands make imperative the use of oneself as tool.

always work on the next most useful thing. This mantra helps remind me that consulting isn’t about being right, it’s about being useful.

I delivered what I think is good quality work with a deeply researched and evidence-based 66-page strategy for producing content and…. Nothing happened? They were happy enough with the work product but it didn’t lead to any material change in their strategy or an ongoing consulting relationship. In hindsight the key mistake here was not asking myself enough what the next most useful thing was. I think if I’d been more honest about what would add value and show momentum for the client it would have been either a) condensed one or two slide summary of the content opportunity for their fundraising deck and/or b) supporting their VP marketing recruitment effort.

Either you’re telling the client “draw some circles” and the client is frustrated the advice is too basic and high level. Or you’re telling the client to “draw the rest of the fucking owl” and are ignoring the detailed reality of the situation and the limitations of teams, resources and capabilities.

Or worse, the client asked you for help drawing owls but what they’re really doing is painting a woodland scene…

Think about this image next time a client comes to you for help drawing owls - your first response shouldn’t be “Oh, that’s easy, first you draw some circles”, it should be “Show me how your owls look today. What do you think is holding you back from drawing better owls? And why is drawing owls important to you right now?”

Remember - it’s about adopting a collaborative, trusted stance with clients. And that might require resisting your initial urge to give advice. Instead you need to listen to the full emotional and political situation and then work with the client to re-examine reality in new and surprising ways. Always work on the next most useful thing. And that doesn’t always involve doing what the client asked for.

A simple four step process: Take a deep breath to chill out. They’re trying to help you. Don’t make them regret it. Thank them for the feedback and really mean it, because giving it to you was probably scary and took courage. Only ask questions. Make ZERO statements. Anything you say will almost definitely be defensive, and your job is to be curious. Thank them again and tell them you promise to take it seriously and use it to grow.

The same applies to writing. For example, when one topic doesn’t seem to fit a narrative structure, it often feels like a problem I need to “get out of the way”. It’s much better to wonder: “Hm, why do I have this strong instinct that this point’s related? Is there some more powerful unifying theme waiting to be identified here?”

Often I need to improve the framing, to find one which better expresses what I’m deeply excited about. If I can’t find a problem statement which captures my curiosity, it’s best to drop the project for now.

I’m much less likely to flinch away when I’m feeling intensely curious, when I truly want to understand something, when it’s a landscape to explore rather than a destination to reach. Happily, curiosity can be cultivated. And curiosity is much more likely than task-orientation to lead me to interesting ideas.

Savor the subtle insights which really do occur regularly in research. Think of it like cultivating a much more sensitive palate.

“Why is this so hard? Because you’re utterly habituated to steady progress—to completing things, to producing, to solving. When progress is subtle or slow, when there’s no clear way to proceed, you flinch away. You redirect your attention to something safer, to something you can do. You jump to implementation prematurely; you feel a compulsion to do more background reading; you obsess over tractable but peripheral details. These are all displacement behaviors, ways of not sitting with the problem. Though each instance seems insignificant, the cumulative effect is that your stare rarely rests on the fog long enough to penetrate it. Weeks pass, with apparent motion, yet you’re just spinning in place. You return to the surface with each glance away. You must learn to remain in the depths.”

Depth of concentration is cumulative, and precious. An extra hour or two of depth is enormously valuable. I reliably get more done—and with more depth—in that 6-7 hour morning block than I’d previously done in 9-10 hours throughout the day.This feels wonderful. By 2PM, I’ve done my important work for the day. I know that no more depth-y work is likely, and that I’ll only frustrate myself if I try—so I free myself from that pressureI notice that some part of me feels ashamed to say that I’m “done” working at 2PM. This is probably because in my previous roles, I really could solve problems and get more done by simply throwing more hours at the work. That’s just obviously not true in my present work, as I’ve learned through much frustration. Reading memoirs of writers, artists, and scientists, I see that 2-4 hours per day seems to be the norm for a primary creative working block. Separately, and I don’t want to harp on this because I want this essay to be about quality, not quantity, but: I think most people are laughably misled about how much time they truly work. In a median morning block, I complete the equivalent of 1225-minute pomodoros. When I worked at large companies, getting 8 done before 6PM was a rarity—even though I’d assiduously arrange my calendar to maximize deep work!. I take meetings; I exercise; I meditate; I go on long walks. I’ll often do shallower initial reads of papers and books in the afternoon, or handle administrative tasks. Sometimes I’ll do easy programming work. It’s all “bonus time”, nothing obligatory. My life got several hours more slack when I adopted this schedule, and yet my output improved. Wonderful!

no internet on my phone before I sit down at my desk. I don’t want anyone else’s thoughts in my head before I start thinking my own.

If I spend a working interval flailing, never sinking below the surface, the temptation is to double-down, to “make up for it”. But the right move for me is usually to go sit in a different room with only my notebook, and to spend the next working interval writing or sketching by hand about the problem.

Administrative tasks are a constant temptation for me: aha, a task I can complete! How tantalizing! But these tasks are rarely important. So I explicitly prohibit myself from doing any kind of administrative work for most of the morning. In the last hour or two, if I notice myself getting weary and unfocused, I’ll sometimes switch gears into administrative work as a way to “rescue” that time.

I’ve noticed that unhealthy afternoon/evening activities can easily harm the next morning’s focus, by habituating me to immediate gratification.

most of the benefit just seems to come from regularly reflecting on what I’m trying and what’s happening as a result. It’s really about developing a rich mental model of what focus and perseverance feel like, and what factors seem to support or harm those states of mind.

Sometimes I just need to execute; and then traditional productivity advice helps enormously. But deep insight is generally the bottleneck to my work, and producing it usually involves the sort of practices I’ve described here.

I do a pretty good job of channeling my procrastination into adjacent creative tasks which, in the end, influence, shape, and improve the chunks of work I do complete. And that looks like productivity from the outside. But trust me, from the inside, it usually just feels like avoidance and procrastination. But I’ve learned to accept that’s the cost of doing the kind of work I feel good at, so I let it be what it is.

The particularly nice thing about coding is that it offers many little “wins”: I get a function working, I figure out a piece of design

“Can’t face work? Then cultivate some side projects — and channel your work-avoidance into fun opportunities to learn” and once you’re done, you’ll 1) have something productive to show for it, and 2) be much more fit, rested, and ready to tackle that project at work. In other words: rather than fight your penchant for procrastination, work with it. It’s a judo move: don’t fight your enemy, use its momentum against it for your benefit.

Look a week ahead: Towards the end of a week, I’ll start to take a look at what meetings I have the following week. For any that I’m responsible for, I’ll start pulling together some information for attendees. Sometimes this means updating the calendar invite with an agenda; other times this means starting a Google Doc for what we need to run through during the meeting, and I share it with edit rights for all attendees. Use meeting goals: If the meeting has a bunch of people in it (like, more than two), especially if those people typically have full schedules, then I’ll write down goals for the meeting. Often, I’ll put those goals in the calendar item, and I’ll mention them at the beginning of the meeting. That means that if we get off-track during our time together, I can hit pause and recenter on the goals, asking folks to continue that other conversation afterward. Find a plant: Once in awhile, it’s helpful to “seed” the meeting somehow. For example, in one meeting where there’s an “open questions” time and I want people to ask anything, I’ve asked a buddy to think up a super weird one to demonstrate to others that it’s a safe space. Don’t surprise people in the meeting: Additionally, I do a lot of prep to make sure there’s no surprises in my meetings, at least none coming from me. This usually means that I let a handful of people know about a big announcement ahead of time (or had a tough conversation), usually one-on-one, so they wouldn’t be surprised in front of a lot of other people. Gain consensus 1:1 beforehand, if possible: My goal with any decision-making meeting is to already have a sense, going in, of what issues people have, what their opinion is, and what they might need to come to agreement. I do as much legwork in advance as possible, so that the whole group is ready to make that decision more quickly in the room.

Few things bog down meetings more than an unclear process, or a lack of clarity about how people in attendance are supposed to participate. By sharing the goals of the meeting and a high-level overview of what we’re going to do there, I hope to make it clear what’s expected of folks in the room.

Setting up a form for people to add their questions to - including people in the shared physical space - so that the facilitator can run through them rather than prioritize the voices in the room

I cancel meetings if they’re unwarranted. I check-in every few months to see if a meeting’s goal still makes sense; I ask attendees how they’re feeling about the length of the meeting, how often it happens, and what we do during it. I iterate on meetings to make sure they’re still effective, or even necessary.

Let’s say you present 3 directions to a client: directions A, B, and C. These are our initial 3 branches. You have a client review, direction C is the winner, and so you iterate again. 3 more branches: C1, C2, and C3. Another review, another winner, another round of iterations: C2.1, C2.2, C2.3. Branch out, choose one, zoom in, branch out, repeat.

Sometimes, the design process requires us to zoom out. Let’s say you present those 3 creative directions, A, B, and C, but nothing lands. Back to the drawing board. You might keep pushing forward with branches D, E, F. Nothing lands. You’re forced to zoom out and realize that you’re not even on the right parent branch.

Almost all startups are fragile initially. And that's one of the biggest things inexperienced founders and investors (and reporters and know-it-alls on forums) get wrong about them. They unconsciously judge larval startups by the standards of established ones. They're like someone looking at a newborn baby and concluding "there's no way this tiny creature could ever accomplish anything." It's harmless if reporters and know-it-alls dismiss your startup. They always get things wrong. It's even ok if investors dismiss your startup; they'll change their minds when they see growth. The big danger is that you'll dismiss your startup yourself. I've seen it happen. I often have to encourage founders who don't see the full potential of what they're building. Even Bill Gates made that mistake. He returned to Harvard for the fall semester after starting Microsoft. He didn't stay long, but he wouldn't have returned at all if he'd realized Microsoft was going to be even a fraction of the size it turned out to be. [4] The question to ask about an early stage startup is not "is this company taking over the world?" but "how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?" And the right things often seem both laborious and inconsequential at the time. Microsoft can't have seemed very impressive when it was just a couple guys in Albuquerque writing Basic interpreters for a market of a few thousand hobbyists (as they were then called), but in retrospect that was the optimal path to dominating microcomputer software. And I know Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia didn't feel like they were en route to the big time as they were taking "professional" photos of their first hosts' apartments. They were just trying to survive. But in retrospect that too was the optimal path to dominating a big market.

Generalists can pursue broader themes, questions, and lenses which, across their interests give them a deep perspective from breadth.For example, a specialist is someone who is obsessed with chess and spends their waking hours practicing, playing, and studying.A generalist is someone who is obsessed with the idea of game-play, and has researched and gone deep on sports, childhood psychology, board games, and philosophy.

Embracing being a coordinate on the map for a point in time is about allowing yourself to be seen as something specific. Generalists can feel trapped by that but the truth is being specific, and being on the map for others is a way of being in service. If you never pin yourself down (just for a time) you miss the benefits of being connected or in service.