Modern Leadership

1. Influence > Authority
2. Intent / Mindset > Current Talent
3. Context > Content
4. Inception > Orders
5. Why > Who > What
6. Ears > Eyes > Mouth
7. Questions > Answers
8. Prevention > Solution
9. Presence > Multitasking
10. Self-management > People-management 

Entrepreneurial Superpowers

Here are some leadership lessons I picked up working in pre-IPO startups and FAANG in Silicon Valley. 

1. Being able to work with and manage difficult people puts you at a huge advantage
2. Fear, pride, anger, excitement cloud your ability to make sound logical decisions. Making non-emotional decisions with impartial information is a super power. 
3. Crisp and clear communication is a super power.  You cannot be crisp if you are not precise. Do not hide uncertainty and do not bury nuance. 
4. Rigor and quality are essential to building and decision making. You cant build well and make good decisions without structured thinking and mental models. 
5. Likeability is key people like to do business with people they like. Leading by fear doesn't work.
6. Develop structured thinking, operate from clear first principles, create frameworks that make it easy for those principles to come to life across teams, products and people and communicate them effectively. 
7. Every leader's main job is sales : selling your idea, vision including hiring, managing, leading.
8. Being able to change your mind based on data, facts, new opinions. Surround yourself with people who will challenge your opinions. Build a culture around youself that is inclusive and invites that feedback. The biggest challenge as you go up the ladder is that the real feedback dries up. 
9. Saying NO. You sometimes have to step over the pennies to pick up the dollars. 

Mindset : The new psychology of success

 The Book in Three Sentences

1. Skills can be cultivated through effort.
2. People with a growth mindset thrive on challenges.
3. The fixed mindset: “I can’t do it”. The growth mindset: “I can’t do it yet”.

The Five Big Ideas

1. The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.
2. “Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over”.
3. “People in a growth mindset don’t just seek challenge, they thrive on it”.
4. “The growth mindset does allow people to love what they’re doing—and to continue to love it in the face of difficulties”.
5. “Those with the growth mindset found success in doing their best, in learning and improving. And this is exactly what we find in the champions”.

Mindset Summary

• “[Children with a growth mindset] knew that human qualities, such as intellectual skills, could be cultivated through effort”.
• “Not only were [the children with a growth mindset]not discouraged by failure, they didn’t even think they were failing. They thought they were learning”.
• “What are the consequences of thinking that your intelligence or personality is something you can develop, as opposed to something that is a fixed, deep-seated trait?”
• “Robert Sternberg, the present-day guru of intelligence, writes that the major factor in whether people achieve expertise ‘is not some fixed prior ability, but purposeful engagement’.”
• “For twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life”.
• “Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over”.
• “This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way—in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments—everyone can change and grow through application and experience”.
• “Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them?”
• “The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset”.
• “The fixed mindset makes you concerned with how you’ll be judged; the growth mindset makes you concerned with improving”.
• “When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world. In one world—the world of fixed traits—success is about proving you’re smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other—the world of changing qualities—it’s about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself”.
• “Benjamin Barber, an eminent sociologist, once said, ‘I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures…. I divide the world into the learners and non-learners’.”
• “People in a growth mindset don’t just seek challenge, they thrive on it”.
• “We gave fifth graders intriguing puzzles, which they all loved. But when we made them harder, children with the fixed mindset showed a big plunge in enjoyment”.
• “For [people with a growth mindset] it’s not about immediate perfection. It’s about learning something over time: confronting a challenge and making progress”.
• “‘Becoming is better than being’. The fixed mindset does not allow people the luxury of becoming. They have to already be”.
• “People with the growth mindset know that it takes time for potential to flower”.
• “College students, after doing poorly on a test, were given a chance to look at tests of other students. Those in the growth mindset looked at the tests of people who had done far better than they had. As usual, they wanted to correct their deficiency. But students in the fixed mindset chose to look at the tests of people who had done really poorly. That was their way of feeling better about themselves”.
• “John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, says you aren’t a failure until you start to blame. What he means is that you can still be in the process of learning from your mistakes until you deny them”.
• “French executive Pierre Chevalier says, ‘We are not a nation of effort. After all, if you have savoir-faire [a mixture of know-how and cool], you do things effortlessly’.”
• “People with the growth mindset, however, believe something very different. For them, even geniuses have to work hard for their achievements”.
• “They may appreciate endowment, but they admire effort, for no matter what your ability is, effort is what ignites that ability and turns it into accomplishment”.
• “The growth mindset does allow people to love what they’re doing—and to continue to love it in the face of difficulties”.
• “Those with the growth mindset found success in doing their best, in learning and improving. And this is exactly what we find in the champions”.
• “Those with the growth mindset found setbacks motivating. They’re informative. They’re a wake-up call”.
• “People with the growth mindset in sports (as in pre-med chemistry) took charge of the processes that bring success—and that maintain it”.

Drive : The surprising truth about what motivates us

 The Book in Three Sentences

1. Much of what we know about motivation is wrong.
2. Tasks are either: (1) Algorithmic—you pretty much do the same thing over and over in a certain way, or (2) Heuristic—you have to come up with something new every time because there are no set instructions to follow.
3. The carrot and stick approach to motivation is flawed.

The Five Big Ideas

1. Researchers have found that extrinsic rewards can be effective for algorithmic tasks—those that depend on following an existing formula to its logical conclusion. But for more right-brain undertakings—those that demand flexible problem-solving, inventiveness, or conceptual understanding—contingent rewards can be dangerous.
2. Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others can sometimes have dangerous side effects.
3. We have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness.
4. Research shows that the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive—our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to live a life of purpose.
5. The new approach to motivation has three essential elements: (1) Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives; (2) Mastery—the urge to get better and better at something that matters; and (3) Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

Drive Summary

• “When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity.”—Edward Deci
• “When children didn’t expect a reward, receiving one had little impact on their intrinsic motivation. Only contingent rewards—if you do this, then you’ll get that—had the negative effect. Why? ‘If-then’ rewards require people to forfeit some of their autonomy.”
• “People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person’s motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person’s intrinsic motivation toward the activity.”—Jonmarshall Reeve
• “Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus. That’s helpful when there’s a clear path to a solution. They help us stare ahead and race faster. But “if-then” motivators are terrible for challenges like the candle problem. As this experiment shows, the rewards narrowed people’s focus and blinkered the wide view that might have allowed them to see new uses for old objects.”
• “[Teresa] Amabile and others have found that extrinsic rewards can be effective for algorithmic tasks—those that depend on following an existing formula to its logical conclusion. But for more right-brain undertakings—those that demand flexible problem-solving, inventiveness, or conceptual understanding—contingent rewards can be dangerous.”
• “Instead of increasing the number of blood donors, offering to pay people decreased the number by nearly half.”
• “Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others—sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on—can sometimes have dangerous side effects.”
• “Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization.”
• “Get people fired up with the prospect of rewards, and instead of making better decisions, as Motivation 2.0 hopes, they can actually make worse ones.”

The Seven Deadly Flaws of Carrots and Sticks

1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation
2. They can diminish performance
3. They can crush creativity
4. They can crowd out good behavior
5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior.
6. They can become addictive
7. They can foster short-term thinking

• “The Sawyer Effect: practices that can either turn play into work or turn work into play.”
• “The essential requirement: Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete.”
• “First, consider nontangible rewards.”
• “Praise and positive feedback are much less corrosive than cash and trophies.”
• “Second, provide useful information.”
• “Give people meaningful information about their work.”
• “In brief, for creative, right- brain, heuristic tasks, you’re on shaky ground offering ‘if- then’ rewards. You’re better off using ‘now that’ rewards. And you’re best off if your ‘now that’ rewards provide praise, feedback, and useful information.”
• “[Self-determination theory] argues that we have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness.”
• “Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.”
• “In the midst of play, many people enjoyed what Csikszentmihalyi called ‘autotelic experiences’—from the Greek auto (self) and telos (goal or purpose). In an autotelic experience, the goal is self-fulfilling; the activity is its own reward.”
• “The highest, most satisfying experiences in people’s lives were when they were in flow.”
• “In flow, goals are clear. You have to reach the top of the mountain, hit the ball across the net, or mold the clay just right. Feedback is immediate. The mountaintop gets closer or farther, the ball sails in or out of bounds, the pot you’re throwing comes out smooth or uneven.”
• “Most important, in flow, the relationship between what a person had to do and what he could do was perfect. The challenge wasn’t too easy. Nor was it too difficult. It was a notch or two beyond his current abilities, which stretched the body and mind in a way that made the effort itself the most delicious reward. That balance produced a degree of focus and satisfaction that easily surpassed other, more quotidian, experiences.”
• “In flow, people lived so deeply in the moment, and felt so utterly in control, that their sense of time, place, and even self-melted away. They were autonomous, of course. But more than that, they were engaged. They were, as the poet W. H. Auden wrote, ‘forgetting themselves in a function.’”
• “The science shows that the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive—our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to live a life of purpose.”
• “At the end of each day, ask yourself whether you were better today than you were yesterday.”
• “One of the best ways to know whether you’ve mastered something is to try to teach it.”
• The new approach to motivation has three essential elements: (1) Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives; (2) Mastery—the urge to get better and better at something that matters; and (3) Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.