I’ve recently finished reading Diary of a CEO: 33 Laws of Business and Life, which draws from both Steven Bartlett’s entrepreneurial journey and interviews from the homonymous podcast. These are are my main takeaways:

Building high performance groups

Incentives and culture

• If you want to predict what a group of people will do over the long term, you need to look at their incentives, not their instructions.
• Companies don’t have one company culture: every manager in an organization creates a subculture underneath them.
• In a small group / startup, when the culture is strong, new joiners become like the culture. When the culture is weak, the culture becomes like the new joiners.
• In a small group / startup (and likely this can be applied to teams), create a cult-like dynamic upon its inception, but then transition it to a more sustainable structure. Key elements of a cult:
  • Provides meaning, purpose and belonging. Asserts superiority of the group.
  • Clear shared identity and commitment to ideology.
  • Leaders present themselves as infallible, confident and grandiose.
  • “Us vs Them” mentality: there is a clear adversary.

Traits of a good leader

• The factor that kills meaning the fastest is a leadership team that dismisses employee’s work or ideas, removes their sense of ownership and autonomy, and asks them to spend time on work that is cancelled, changed or disregarded before it’s been completed.
• Allow people the space to fail and succeed. The main job of a leader is to be a supportive enabler, not a critical micromanager.
• Leaders should proactively remove any obstacles, bureaucracy and sign-off processes that prevent the team to achieve daily progress, this includes identifying and providing the required resources for them to do their job. To discover these gaps, ask the teams informally or formally about these problems (via retros for example).
• Leaders need to point out, publicize and praise progress as loud, far and wide as they possibly can. Recognition reinforces behaviour, but it also acts as evidence to adjacent teams that progress is possible for them too.
• Alex Ferguson, the widely successful manager from Manchester United, didn’t care about tactics, strategies and formations. He cared about getting the best out of each individual, the team’s culture and attitude. He didn’t want them to be become complacent:
  • He had different ways of dealing with different players. He knew how to get the best out of everyone. He knew his players well, and what made them tick, like Gary Neville’s important connection with his grandparents.
  • Some players strived under Ferguson’s “hairdryer” treatment, others under a more compassionate approach, and others by being more hands off. There was not a size fits all approach. The main objective was always to have the team and club at a higher ground.
  • It is impossible to seamlessly blend into a team as a jigsaw piece, unless you comprehend the unique shape of each of your team members.

Ask who, not how

• Every CEO and founder will be judged on their ability to hire the best, and bind them into a culture that gets the best out of them. An environment where they become more than the sum of the parts.
• Your ego will insist that you do. Your potential will insist that you delegate.

Excise bad apples, promote bar raisers

• “The cost of one bad apple can be the loss of many good ones” - CEO of General Electric
  • Study found that employees were 37% more likely to commit misconduct at work when they encountered a new co-worker who had a history of misconduct themselves. Toxic employees really are contagious.
  • When a bad apple isn’t fired, it can lead to employee disengagement, other employees copying the behaviour, social withdrawal, anxiety and fear. Culminating in the deterioration of trust in the team and further disengagement from its team members.
• 3 bars framework
  • Ask yourself, or managers: “if everyone in the organization had the same cultural values, attitude, and level of talent as this employee, would the average bar be lowered, maintained, or raised?
  • Fire the ones that lower the bar, promote the bar raisers.
• “(…) not settling for B and C players, but really going for the A players”. “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do” - Steve Jobs

Dealing with discomfort

• “Hard” is the price we pay today for an “easy” tomorrow.
• When you refuse to accept an uncomfortable truth, you’re choosing to accept an uncomfortable future.
• When something is unresolved because we’ve chosen to bury our heads in the sand, it doesn’t sit dormant, waiting to be addressed; it becomes toxic, contagious and poisonous to those around us, inflicting more collateral damage with every day that it remains unaddressed.
• When seeking the truth that is causing the discomfort, listen to understand, not to look for a victory, but rather in the perspective of a partner that wants to overcome that difficulty.
• In a relationship, if you’re having the same conversation over and over again, you are having the wrong conversations. You’re avoiding the uncomfortable conversation you should be having.
• It is in talking about our disconnections that people create more connectedness with one another.
• You can predict someone’s success in any area of their life by observing how willing and capable they are at dealing with uncomfortable conversations. Your personal progression is trapped behind an uncomfortable conversation.
• As mentioned by George Vaillant, denial can be healthy, enabling individuals to cope with rather than become immobilized by anxiety, or it can be unhelpful, creating a self deception that alters reality in ways that can be dangerous.
• “People think they’re motivated by seeking pleasure; they’re wrong, they’re motivated by avoiding discomfort” - Nir Eyal

Pressure only comes to those who earn it

• “Pressure is a privilege, and champions adjust” - Billy Jean King (BJK)
• Pressure is external, stress is internal.
• How you handle pressure and its resulting stress is essential, and makes a difference between positive and negative outcomes.
• Great pressure moments often precede great privileges.
• Life without pressure is a life without purpose.
• Pressure is neither good nor bad. It’s what we do with it that matters.
• Kelly McGonigal looked at a study made for 30k American adults, and noticed that people who experienced a lot of stress during their lives had 43% increased risk of dying, but this was only true for the ones who perceived stress as harmful. The ones that did not perceive it as harmful had the lowest risk of dying, even when compared to the ones who experienced relatively little stress.
• Objective is not to get rid of pressure, it’s to change your relationship with it altogether.
• “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat” - Theodore Roosevelt

Building good habits

• Instead of fighting against a bad habit, acknowledge the cue, routine, reward habit loop. When removing any of these elements, its void will need to be replaced. Replace rather than delete.
• Cues are powerful, since they are the starting points to routines. As such, be mindful of how you set up your environment. For example, Steven Bartlett placed his DJ set in the kitchen table, in plain sight, and made sure to take only one click to start practicing, in order to reduce perceived cost of practicing it. I’ve personally done the same thing with my camera setup to shoot YouTube videos, by using a simple and predictable set up for video and microphone, which I have with highly visible in my living room, incentivizing me to do more videos.

Persistence

• “We don’t have to be smarter than the rest. We have to be more disciplined than the rest.” - Warren Buffett
• Katherine Milkman shared research that having a plan B, in any ambition, has a net negative on our chances of succeeding with a plan A.
  • The more you perceive negative emotions in the event of failure, the more driven you will be to succeed-
  • But don’t be reckless. Take risks that don’t put you in irreversible and dangerous circumstances.
• “If there be no alternative but death, the soldiers exert themselves to the utmost.” - Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Incremental wins, keeping momentum

• How much you are achieving is pretty much irrelevant to your motivation: but if you feel like you are getting somewhere, you’ll be driven to keep going.
  • When problems seem insurmountable or too hard or unknown, that’s when procrastination creeps in.
  • The key here is to break down the problem into smaller, more manageable ones. The small resulting improvements and the sense of momentum will keep you going, and these will eventually compound.

Applying time and energy effectively

• The exact same skill applied in a different industry or context can have a widely different value, as seen by a Washington Post experiment where one of the world’s greatest violinists Joshua Bell, who was able to professionaly command $1,000 a minute, barely got any attention or spare change from playing in the subway.
• Position yourself correctly, and get the skills that your industry finds to be rare and valuable, and that your competitors don’t have.

Time

• Time betting exercise
  • Imagine you, and everyone is sitting around the game of life. Each player is assigned a number of chips, each representing an hour. They don’t know how many they have. Maybe it’s one, maybe it’s 500k. You can try to predict, but you don’t really know.
  • The rule is that every hour you need to put one chip on the table, or it will just be placed automatically. You can place it on Netflix, learning a new skill, sleeping, etc. Certain actions that increase your health will increase your stock of chips.
  • Your fitness will block you from betting on certain positions. For example, if you have a serious locomotion injury, you cannot choose to run.
  • The game ends when all chips are gone. You don’t get to keep anything you earned during the game.
• Being selective about how you spend your time, and who you spend your time with, is the greatest sign of self respect.

Failure as an advantage

• Ask the questions: Why will this fail? Why is this a bad idea?
• Apply the pre-mortem process to visualize and attempt to preempt failures in your plan. This will mitigate risk and likely increase your prediction accuracy.
  • A 1989 study found that prospective hindsight—imagining that an event has already occurred—increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%.
  • Steven Bartlett’s pre-mortem method:
    • Set the stage: the objective of the exercises. It is to uncover risks, not to look for escape goats.
    • Fast forward to failure. Ask team to visualize failure as clearly as possible.
    • Brainstorm reasons for failure.
    • Ideate independently, and then share and discuss.
    • Develop contingency plans.
• Share experiment failures, so that their knowledge can be leveraged when building new experiments.
• “I have not failed, I have just found 10k ways that won’t work” - Thomas Edison