Use Checklists To Avoid Stupid Mistakes

Your analytical skills have to be honed in and this involves frequently brainstorming, preparing for worst-case scenarios and working around your own limitations.

• Brainstorm as much as you can to avoid availability bias (choosing the first solution that comes to mind rather than the best solution).
• Test as many potential solutions as you can afford to. This avoids the confirmation bias of rationalizing the one solution you...

Things constantly go wrong no matter how smart and hardworking you are. So, continuously and methodically consider ways a plan could go wrong and plan how to avoid each obstacle.

Make a list of how to fail, so you will be prepared when roadblocks come. Apply this principle by listing the wa...

Doing what everyone else does is going to bring you average results. 

Whenever you’re betting against the consensus there’s a significant probability you’re going to be wrong, so you have to be humble, seek out and understand relevant information and learn to analyze things differently. 

• Get close to people who have accomplished what you want to accomplish. 
• Learn from other fields and bring insights into your own to find unique perspectives.
• Build a lab, not an experiment. The more experiments you make the more you learn.
• Be good at pulling out the w...

Become the best in one core area by continually investing in it over time, rather than jumping from trend to trend and starting over each time.

To apply this principle to your business, identify a core customer need that will likely stay the same (even as technology and culture evolve) to w...

Elon Musk uses decision trees to make big decisions (a tool that uses a tree-like graph or model of decisions and their possible consequences, outcomes, and resources). They are particularly useful for avoiding stupid risks and big bets that aren’t likely to succeed.

Most became a billionai...

Having a powerful vision is essential for all entrepreneurs, but if you are going to excel, your stakeholders need to buy into your vision.

Storytelling is a learnable skill and can help you transmit your vision to such a degree that others feel it’s inevitable and critical. Great stories t...

• Understand the different outcomes that could happen (both positive and negative)
• Calculate the expected return or loss of each outcome
• Attach a probability to each outcome
• Understanding the magnitude of the return or loss
• Multiply the probability by the magnit...

We are wired to want to fit in socially, meaning not going against the flow. But courage is a skill that can be practiced by doing little things that cause you to feel uncomfortable and socially awkward, but with zero real negative impact.