Pitch ideas constantly to everyone in your network to rapidly iterate and get feedback. Flex your idea generation muscles. Most ideas will go nowhere, but put your ego aside. Through volume some ideas will eventually resonate at the right time and with the right person. You only need one winning idea.

Relentlessly Pitching Ideas to Rapidly Iterate

See uncertainty and failures as input to redirect efforts, not reasons to quit. Comfort with uncertainty enables agility. View setbacks as resonant signals of where to improve.

Embracing Uncertainty

Look for ways to add value to other people’s lives without directly expecting anything in return. Help people in small ways whenever you can. Generosity, service, and goodwill towards others often create unexpected abundance directly or indirectly. Adding value builds relationships and goodwill that enrich life beyond money.

Adding Value for Others to Create Abundance

You have a choice. You can be a victim or you can be rich.

Ruthlessly eliminate ideas, activities, information, media sources, and people that do not truly serve your goals or enrich your life at this time. Be extremely rigorous about protecting your focus, energy levels, and positive mindset. Say no to most things. Stay laser focused only on executing priorities rather than indulging every curiosity.

Relentlessly Focusing by Tuning Out Distractions

Honestly identify and challenge self-limiting beliefs you carry like “I’m not creative enough” or “I could never do that” that undermine your potential. Actively alter your inner narrative to open yourself up to possibilities versus shutting them down. Our habitual self-talk shapes our possible actions. Give yourself unconditional permission to think freely outside your normal box.

Overcoming Limiting Beliefs About Yourself

Develop the radical mindset of relying on yourself over institutions for success. Build skills, offer value, and generate options proactively versus waiting to be chosen. Take ownership of your decisions and path.

Choose Yourself Mindset

<ul><li>Develop wide-ranging skills and competencies by saying "yes" to new experiences and opportunities to learn outside your comfort zone. </li><li>Diverse interests and capabilities make you anti-fragile to handle a chaotic world. </li><li>Be a perpetual learner, adopting a beginner's mindset. Pursue mastery across multiple disciplines.</li></ul>

Building Wide-Ranging Skill Sets

<ul><li>Exercise your idea generation muscle constantly by making it a habit to brainstorm new ideas every single day. </li><li>Creativity is like a muscle that thrives when used regularly. </li><li>Many ideas will lead nowhere, but volume ultimately leads to promising new opportunities. </li><li>Capture every idea without censorship initially. Let judgments come only after. </li><li>Note concepts in a journal to clarify thinking. Ideas are the seeds of change.</li></ul>

Exercising Your Idea Generation Muscle

<ul><li>Avoid negative people who drain energy.</li><li>Be with inspirational doers taking ownership.</li><li>Environment influences mindset.</li><li>Community reinforces boldness.</li></ul>

Surrounding Yourself with Doers

In Choose Yourself, James Altucher advocates taking control of your career and life trajectory rather than waiting for institutions and systems to choose you. He provides principles for self-reliance, entrepreneurship, and creating opportunity on your own terms.

The world is changing. Markets have crashed. Jobs have disappeared. Industries have been disrupted and are being remade before our eyes. Everything we aspired to for "security," everything we thought was "safe," no longer is: College. Employment. Retirement. Government. It's all crumbling down. In every part of society, the middlemen are being pushed out of the picture. No longer is someone coming to hire you, to invest in your company, to sign you, to pick you. It's on you to make the most important decision in your life: Choose Yourself. New tools and economic forces have emerged to make it possible for individuals to create art, make millions of dollars and change the world without "help." More and more opportunities are rising out of the ashes of the broken system to generate real inward success (personal happiness and health) and outward success (fulfilling work and wealth). This book will teach you to do just that. With dozens of case studies, interviews and examples-including the author, investor and entrepreneur James Altucher's own heartbreaking and inspiring story-Choose Yourself illuminates your personal path to building a bright, new world out of the wreckage of the old.

career

Career

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

books

Books

James Altucher

Choose Yourself

If only creativity was all about deliberate practice. We could all just practice our way to creative acclaim. But in reality, it's impossible for creators to know completely whether their new idea or product will be well received.Only someone with almost infinite wisdom could figure out that the time is most ripe to conceive an experiment rather than a theory, to write a poem rather than a play, to paint a portrait rather than a landscape, or to compose a symphony rather than an opera.

Creativity Is Often Blind

The idea that it takes 10 years to become a world-class expert in any domain is not a rule. Many composers took less than 10 years and even more took longer than 10 years. <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200811/confessions-late-bloomer">Creativity doesn't have an expiration date.</a> Creativity seems to happen when it's ready to happen.

The "10-Year Rule" Is Not a Rule

While expertise is characterized by consistency and reliability, creativity is characterized by many false starts and lots and lots of trial-and-error. If creativity was merely a function of deliberate practice, you would expect that with increasing deliberate practice would come increasing creativity. But that's not what you find when you look at the career trajectories of creators.

Creative People Often Have Messy Processes

Creative products must be surprising in that the original and meaningful creative product must be surprising not only to oneself, but to everyone. This is exactly how the <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10400419.2012.676974">United States Patent Office</a> evaluates new applications. Original and meaningful ideas that could have been created by any expert in the field are considered "obvious" and are therefore unpatentable. Creative products-- such as the discoveries of <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/aca/6/3/243/">Galileo</a> and Leeuwenhoek-- are surprising to everyone, novices and experts alike.

Original, Meaningful and Surprising For Everyone

When creators put something novel out into the world, the reactions are typically either acclaim or rejection-- not nearly as useful feedback as making a foul shot to audience applause or checking your weight on a scale to see if you're making progress toward your weight goals.The standards for artistic and scientific products are constantly changing. What may be considered a "revolutionary" best-selling book at one moment in time, may be considered utter drivel by future generations. This surely makes it hard to deliberately practice your way to a revolution!

Creators Rarely Receive Helpful Feedback

If we define talent as simply the rate at which a person acquires expertise, then talent undeniably matters for creativity. Some people clearly get more bang for the buck out of a given training regimen. This may be an inconvenient truth, but it does counter the idea that creativity is only about deliberate practice. Expertise acquisition appears to be the least interesting aspect of creativity as creators tend to be in a hurry to learn what exists so that they can go beyond what exists.

Talent Is Relevant to Creative Accomplishment

<a href="http://humancond.org/_media/papers/bouchard04_genetic_influence_psychological_traits.pdf">Modern behavioral genetics</a> has discovered that virtually every single psychological trait-- including the inclination and willingness to practice-- is influenced by innate genetic endowment. This doesn't mean that genes determine our behavior. It just means that genes are relevant influences on our behavior, including our creative behaviors. This doesn't mean that environmental factors are unimportant

Genes Are Relevant

While the deliberate practice approach tends to focus on highly specialized training and purposeful techniques designed for improvement within a specific field, creative experts tend to have broader interests and greater versatility compared to their less creative expert colleagues. Rather than a dogged single pursuit of a single research question, the most creative scientists throughout history engaged in "networks of enterprise", where they pursued a large number of loosely related projects.

The Polymath: Creative People Have Broad Interests

The deliberate practice approach assumes that performance is a linear function of practice. While this may be true for many well-defined domains of human achievement, this doesn't appear to be the case for creativity. The relationship between knowledge and creativity is best characterized by an “inverted U-shaped” curve: Some knowledge is good, but <a href="https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=jlGZAgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA157&dq=+Expertise+and+intelligent+thinking:+When+is+it+worse+to+know+better%3F+&ots=itjU5mwQnX&sig=9GCfhmL_lnCJ4j22YvnYXyqWSdQ#v=onepage&q=Expertise%20and%20intelligent%20thinking%3A%20When%20is%20it%20worse%20to%20know%20better%3F&f=false">too much knowledge can impair flexibility</a>. In fact, in some fields such as creative writing, there is an <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Greatness-Who-Makes-History-Why/dp/0898622018">optimal amount of formal schooling</a>, after which further schooling decreases the likelihood of writing highly creative fiction.

Too Much Expertise Can Be Detrimental to Creative Greatness

Not only does the speed of expertise acquisition matter, but so do a whole host of other traits. People differ from one another in a multitude of ways. This includes general and specific cognitive abilities (IQ, spatial ability, verbal reasoning, etc.), personality dispositions, interests, and values. Nevertheless, there do appear to be some traits that are conducive to creativity across domains.

Personality Is Relevant

If creativity were all about deliberate practice, then outsiders who lack the requisite expertise shouldn't be very creative. But many highly innovative individuals were outsiders to the field in which they contributed.These individuals didn't deliberately practice down an already existing path; they created their own.

Outsiders Often Have a Creative Advantage

While creativity often draws on a deep knowledge base, creative products, by definition, are much more than expert products. This is because creativity must be <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10400419.2012.676974">original, meaningful, and surprising</a>. Original in the sense that the creator is rewarded for transcending expertise, and going beyond the standard repertoire. Meaningful in the sense that the creator must satisfy some utility function, or provide a new interpretation. This constantly raises the bar of what is considered useful, and puts immense pressure on creators to find new meanings.

Creativity: The Definition

The deliberate practice approach is focused on using deliberate problem solving to learn an existing set of rules within a domain. Creative people are not just good at solving problems, however. They are also good at finding problems.

Sometimes the Creator Needs to Create a New Path for Others to Deliberately Practice

Environmental experiences substantially affect creativity-- including socioeconomic origins, and the sociocultural, political, and economic context in which one is raised. These environmental factors are most likely larger compared to genetic factors. Another hugely important environmental factor for creativity is the <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/j.2162-6057.1979.tb00211.x/abstract">availability of role models</a> in one's childhood and adolescent years.

Environmental Experiences Also Matter

creativity

Creativity

Creativity Is Much More Than 10,000 Hours of Deliberate Practice

Tuckman’s model explains the different stages that teams go through until they transform into high-performance teams. The model helps you understand your teams and have a better knowledge of how to help and support them.

Developing teams with Tuckman’s model

<ul><li>Childhood. Children need lots of accompaniment and support.</li><li>Adolescence is a period of change and conflict in the physical area as well as attitude and behaviour. The need to find an identity is also highlighted.</li><li>Young adulthood. Young adults work to become independent from their parents. They take responsibility for themselves and make their own decisions.</li><li>Middle adulthood. People have gained experience and are better prepared to handle the stresses of life.</li><li>Late adulthood. It’s a stage of acceptance of a more leisurely and relaxed life.</li></ul>

Comparing Tuckman’s model to the periods of human development

Different members start losing shyness and begin to express their characteristics and points of view. Conflicts are healthy, but the team need to work on them. The Role of the Leader The leader will coach the team, encouraging the participation of the different workers but within the boundaries of a climate of dialogue and assertiveness. Management 3.0<ul><li>Diversity Index: Understands the importance of diversity.</li><li>Feedback Wrap: Creates a healthy culture through constructive feedback.</li><li>Happiness Door: A tool for teams to express their opinions.</li><li>Value Stories: Guides the team to find team values.</li></ul>

Second Stage: Storming

This a high-performance team, capable of carrying out their tasks with a great degree of autonomy and an excellent level of effectiveness <h4>The Role of the Leader</h4>Delegating tasks and responsibilities, and transferring trust and respect. Management 3.0 practices<ul><li>Change Management Game: How the team will face the changes they are involved in.</li><li>Delegation Poker: Agree with the team on how tasks and responsibilities will be delegated.</li><li>Kudos: Congratulate and recognize everyone’s good job.</li><li>Niko-Niko Calendar: Visualize how everyone is and their mood.</li></ul>

Fourth Stage: Performing

The team is just formed, so the team members don't know each other and don't have a clear understanding of the purpose and vision of the team. The Role of the Leader in the Forming StageThe key is to guide the team, develop working agreements, and set the direction to follow. Management 3.0 comes in during the forming stage<ul><li>Personal Maps: Increase trust and connections with the team.</li><li>Work profile: Think about job titles not as a specific role but as the value they add.</li><li>Identity symbols: Give a sense of belonging to the team by defining their name and image.</li></ul>

First Stage: Forming

Conflict gives way to understanding and cohesion. The Role of the LeaderGood harmony allows the leader to take a step back and act as a facilitator. Management 3.0 practices<ul><li>Celebration Grid: Talk about the different experiments and what the team learned about them.</li><li>Moving Motivators: Understand individual and team intrinsic motivators.</li><li>Team Competency Matrix: Find the competency gaps the team needs to reach their goals.</li><li>Team Decision Matrix: Help the team consider how they will make their daily decisions.</li><li>Steps to Happiness: Connects the work with the team's happiness.</li></ul>

Third Stage: Norming

<ol><li>Forming stage. It is similar to the childhood stage. Teams just formed and don't know each other, not have an understanding of the purpose of the team.</li><li>Storming. This stage is similar to the adolescence stage. Teams will consolidate interpersonal relationships.</li><li>Norming is similar to young adulthood. Understanding and cohesion form.</li><li>Performing is similar to the stage of middle adulthood. This is when the team are high-performing.</li><li>Adjourning, compared to late adulthood, is the stage when high-performance teams reached their missions and must disband.</li></ol>

Tuckmna's stages of team development

High-performance teams must disband because they have fully fulfilled their mission. <h4>The Role of the Leader</h4>Celebrate the team’s achievements to reinforce the professionals’ sense of pride and satisfaction and instil motivation for future assignments. Management 3.0 toolsKudos: Take a moment to recognize and thank the different team members for their actions.

Fifth Stage: Adjourning

A model for analysing your teams and detecting different behaviours and patterns.

What is the Tuckman model referring to, what are the various stages of team development? Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing explained

teamwork

Teamwork

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Tuckman model: Stages of team development

Running a startup, you only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. You need two kinds of friends in your life: <ul><li>One you can call when something good happens, and they’ll be excited for you.</li><li>One you can call when things go horribly wrong.</li></ul> Treat the people who leave fairly, or the people who stay will never trust you again.

I Will Survive

<ul>
<li>Hire for strength rather than lack of weakness.</li>
<li>Have clear expectations of who you are hiring with a realization that there is something seriously wrong with every employee in your company (including you). Nobody is perfect.</li>
<li>Involve multiple people in brainstorming but make the final decision solo. Consensus-based decisions tend to sway the process away from strength and towards weakness.</li>
</ul>

The Three Keys Of Hiring

It is crucial to create a good work environment. It’s important that the people who spend most of their waking life at work have a good environment to exist in while there. Being a good company doesn’t matter when things go well, but it can be the difference between life and death when things go wrong. When things go well, there are many reasons to stay at a company: <ul><li>Your career grows as the company grows, attractive jobs naturally open up</li><li>You’ll be impressing your friends and family. </li><li>Your résumé gets stronger by working at a blue-chip company.</li></ul>

Take Care of People, Products, and Profits

Being a big company executive is very different from being a small company executive.  Big company executives are driven by interruptions, while startup executives know that nothing happens unless they make it happen. A big company executive has an incredible number of incoming demands on his time, whereas in a small company without a massive push, the company will stay at rest.

Big Company, Small Company

There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.
Learn to separate facts from perception. Especially when the “facts” seem to dictate a certain outcome, look for alternative narratives and explanations coming from radically different perspectives. Even one alternative, plausible scenario can breathe life back into you and your workforce.

First Hand Knowledge

There are no rules in business. Things may seem to be going well, but they can change in an instant. You need accountability and creativity to succeed in business. Accountability is the key for effort, promises and results. The hard things will always be hard; courage and grit are the keys to success.

There Are No Rules

When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer, and you cannot pay attention to the odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; the task is the same.

When Things Fall Apart

A startup should focus on what needs to be right rather than worrying about what is wrong. One of the most difficult challenges is keeping your mind in check. You need to be able to move aggressively and decisively without acting insane. To calm your nerves, find someone you can talk to who understands what you’re going through. Put your ideas, challenges, and fears on paper for a better focus on where you are going and not what you are trying to avoid. There is a fine Line Between Fear and Courage — People who watch you judge you on what you do, not how you feel.

Losing The Way

Sometimes the only way to survive is to purposely go out and fall on your face, so you can learn fast and know what is needed. Whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project.
Figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job. The innovator can take into account everything that’s possible, often going against what she knows to be true. This requires a combination of knowledge, skill, and courage.

This Time With Feeling

<ul><li>Hire people with the right kind of ambition; otherwise, your company would turn into the political equivalent of the U.S Senate. </li><li>Maintain strict policies and processes on organizational design, performance evaluations, promotions, and compensation</li><li>Promote experienced employees by measuring results against objectives, management skills, innovation, and their ability to work well with others.</li><li>Ensure one-on-one meetings between employees and managers. These are an excellent platform for employees to discuss their as yet unheard brilliant ideas, pressing issues, and chronic frustrations.</li></ul>

The Growing Concern: How To Minimize Politics

The ability to focus and make the best move when there seems to be no good moves is crucial. When things get unbearably difficult, and the struggle begins.
<ul>
<li>Do not put it all on only your shoulders.</li>
<li>CEOs Should Tell It Like It Is and ensure informal information and ideas are flowing freely in your company.</li>
<li>You will have to lay people off at some point. Hence, get your head right by focusing on the future of the company rather than the past.</li>
</ul>

The Secret Of A Successful CEO

“Hard Things” gives an insider’s perspective on what it’s like to lead and scale a startup.

Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup—practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in. Filled with his trademark humor and straight talk, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz's personal and often humbling experiences.

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

business

Business

startup

Startups

Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup—practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog.While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in.Filled with his trademark humor and straight talk, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz's personal and often humbling experiences.

Ben Horowitz is the cofounder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that invests in entrepreneurs building the next generation of leading technology companies. The firm's investments include Airbnb, GitHub, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Previously, he was cofounder and CEO of Opsware, formerly Loudcloud, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. Horowitz writes about his experiences and insights from his career as a computer science student, software engineer, cofounder, CEO, and investor in a blog that is read by nearly 10 million people. He has also been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Fortune, the Economist, and Bloomberg.

Ben Horowitz

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

In an extensive research, it was found that the more promotion-focused respondents were, the less impure they felt about networking; the more prevention-focused they were, the more they experienced that “ick” factor.

Making Networking Less Uncomfortable

Further statistical analysis confirmed that it was the greater feelings of impurity that led people in the prevention group to network less than people in the promotion group. In other words, if you can shake off the dirty feeling, you’re more likely to shake new hands.

Research Into Practice

<ul><li>Researchers examined how encouraging a promotion or prevention focus might influence people’s responses to networking. </li><li>They looked at two different kinds of networking: spontaneous, unintentional networking and intentional, concerted glad-handing.</li></ul> Results of various related studies showed that promotion focus results in fewer feelings of impurity, but a prevention focus has you reaching for a hand sanitizer.

A Prevention Focus: Networking Feels Like Dirty Work

<ul><li>Research offers a simple way to help reluctant networkers overcome their discomfort.</li><li>The more you view networking through that promotion-focused lens, the easier it will feel, and the more likely you’ll be to actually do it.</li><li>Remind yourself that networking isn’t just selfish.</li><li>By expanding your own professional network, you may be able to help employees or colleagues find their next opportunities.</li></ul>

Washing Your Hands of Networking Discomfort

“Think about networking as an opportunity rather than a burden. That’s the biggest hurdle you need to overcome.”

The professional benefits of networking are well-documented. But if the very thought makes you squirm with discomfort, you aren’t alone.
Networking makes people feel morally impure, especially workers lower on the professional food chain who see engaging in networking as selfish. Still, failure to network has real consequences for workplace performance.
New research suggests that, for those who loathe happy-hour meetups and employee get-togethers, a change in attitude could be the ticket to a bigger network and more productive career.

Networking Professionally

If you’re avoiding networking opportunities, you’re likely hurting your career. A simple shift in mindset could get you back in the game.

Choose Yourself

Creativity Is Much More Than 10,000 Hours of Deliberate Practice

Tuckman model: Stages of team development

It's time to
Read like a Pro.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

CURATED BY

Choose Yourself

Creativity Is Much More Than 10,000 Hours of Deliberate Practice

Tuckman model: Stages of team development

It's time to Read like a Pro.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

CURATED BY

It's time to
Read like a Pro.