Felix Dennis: How to get Rich Ignore 'great ideas'. Concentrate on great execution. Focus. Keep your eye on the ball marked 'The Money Is Here'. Hire talent smarter than you. Delegate. Share the annual pie Sell before you need to, or when bored. Empty your mind when negotiating. Fear nothing and no one.

  1- Incentives Law is to disincentivize future tragedy, not just to assign blame for past tragedy.

Finally,

This book gives three "right" questions, and the Eventual Innovators should put these questions on a wall in their office because they must constantly remind themselves of the need to get back to basics and confront these questions, Step 1: What is this product used for?

Founders should not grow beyond a team of six until there is true product market fit. True product market fit means one million dollars in recurring revenue for an enterprise company.   Chaos is expected in a team of six or less - they want if to be hard. 

The highest leverage point for managers is choosing tasks - there are infinite things you and your team can do - which are the high leverage tasks? Premise: as an item moves through the production process it gets more valuable.  Corollary: Detect and fix any problem in the production process at the lowest value stage possible. Thus, we should find the rotten egg as it’s being delivered from the supplier rather than permitting the customer to find it. 

Biggest takeaways - wow Change your behavior, then change your thinking (/your thinking will follow) Delegate decisions to the lowest level possible. Give control. Give responsibility. 

Framing the problem: McKinsey solves problems in a structured, hypothesis-driven manner.  A hypothesis greatly speeds up your quest for a solution by sketching out a roadmap for research and analysis.  Helps you prioritize. 

Lower the intonation of your voice at the end of sentences.   Reduce how quickly and often you nod.  Pause for 2 full seconds before you speak. (Allow yourself to take their full statement into consideration)

Body language is like the written language. You have to use context.  

Why are the laws important?   The laws will allow you to react to others not with emotion but with the desire to understand where their behavior might come from.  You will become more tolerant as you become less likely to judge and instead accept their flaws as part of human nature. 

  The moment you reach out to a VIP, two questions flash in their minds: Who are you? And what do you want?

Take responsibility and have a strong internal locus of control.   Think of the future as multiple outcomes floating loosely in the air. They have different weights—their probabilities. Think of the future in terms of probability, many things can happen, how can you make the one you want more likely to happen?

The best thing about startups? You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And the lack of sleep that comes with the job seems to enhance them both.  

Pygmalion Effect - higher expectations will lead to higher performance "What you are shouts so loudly in my ears that I cannot hear what you say" - Emerson

  "As long as you're green your growing, as soon as you're ripe you start to rot" "Work is the meat in the hamburger of life"

Ask, What are my strengths? A person can only perform from strength The only way to discover strengths is through feedback analysis: Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Afterward, compare the results with your expectations.  Put yourself where your strengths can produce results  Go to work on acquiring the skills and knowledge you need to fully realize your strengths.  Next, remedy your bad habits, the things that inhibit your effectiveness and performance.  One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve first-rate performance into excellence. 

  The secret to living is giving. Untallied generosity rules the day for the long term, don't keep score when adding value/buying lunch. 

"Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out if the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up" (P. 37)

Do not criticize or condemn.   To know all is to forgive all.