1) You get 4,000 weeks if you're lucky

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, short. You get about 150 weeks in high school, 150 weeks in college, 500 Saturdays a decade. See Paul Graham's related essay screenshot below providing a quantitative sense of how life is not only short, but the finite time periods within it are even shorter. Once you accept that you can focus on what’s possible instead of trying to do everything. 

2) Civilization is relatively recent

60 100-year-olds back to back is all of civilization. That's fewer people than you've probably seen at a single birthday party. For perspective, you are:

• 35 people removed from the pharaos and pyramids
• 20 people removed from Jesus
• 7 people removed from the Renaissance
• 5 people removed from King Henry VIII
• 2.5 people removed from the founding fathers

("We have a bias to judge history from the short perch we occupy. Our few thousand weeks feel like the hinge of the universe - they aren't")

3) Accept you can't do everything

You will always have more to do then time to do it. And the faster you move the more things are given to you to move fast on ('the faster you answer email the more email you will get').

The day will never arrive when you have everything under control, when no one is angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball. Controlling your life fully and meeting everyone’s demands and your own goals is not possible.

4) Tough choices are needed

Since we don’t have time for everything, we have to make tough choices between things. Every real-world way to live entails the loss of countless other ways of living. Practice strategic underachievement - decide in advance what to fail, what you’ll let slide to protect what matters. Identify the areas of your life that you won’t expect to excel in for some period of time - you can rebalance later (to a degree) to take a stand on what matters most to you.

5) Claim time

“After years of trying and failing to make time for her illustration work, by taming her to-do list and shuffling her schedule, Abel saw that her only viable option was to claim time instead—to just start drawing, for an hour or two, every day, and to accept the consequences, even if those included neglecting other activities she sincerely valued.” (see video metaphor - prioritize your foundational 'rocks' first)

6) Use the little moments of spare time

“The art of living is to make use of the spare time, the odd moments, that most men throw away.” (30 mins daily = 182 hours a year; the spare moments meaningfully add up)

7) De-instrumentalize time

Before the Industrial Revolution, time used to be the medium in which life unfolded, the stuff life was made of. After, once time and life had been separated it became a resource or input to be used.

Don’t be someone who is always living in the future, never enjoying the present but just looking at time as an instrument to help you get to the next point. Treat moments as ends in themselves, not just means. Rest and leisure have intrinsic value (sabbath, walks, looking around). You don’t have to be doing something for some other reason. Resting doesn’t have to be used for something else. In fact it’s the way to fully inhabit the world. 

8) Time isn't something we can ever really possess or fully control

You can have an expectation for how the evening or week or month or next chapter of your life will go, but you will almost always end up surprised.

Demand for reassurance from the future will never happen. The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically infeasible thing to get. Time just isn’t the sort of thing you get to order around like that.

9) There will be final occasions for everything

There will be a last time when you visit your childhood home, see an old friend, swim in the ocean, hug your partner, drop off your kid at school, etc. You never know in most cases when the last time will be.

Indeed there’s a sense in which every moment of life is a last time - it arrives, you’ll never get it again, and once it’s passed your remaining number of moments will be one smaller than before.

10) Your attention defines your life

What you pay attention to defines for you what reality is. It’s not just a resource. It is your life. Life is a succession of transient experiences valuable in themselves which you’ll miss if you’re completely focused on the destination to which they’ll be leading.

• “The easy thing to send money by email we viewed as an add-on and built in 3 days, mattered more than the hard problems we worked on for months that we thought would be the core of our business.”
• "Too much precision in early plans cuts the iterative loop prematurely."

• Not too long
• Memorable
• Easy to say (“If people don’t know how to say something they will do anything to avoid saying it”)
• Trademarkable + available domain
• Works well across multiple languages

• “We have given up sleep, free time, exercise, and sunshine.”
• “We worked 7-day weeks, 20 hours a day.”
• It’s been an exhilarating ramp up…but after 17 months working literally day and night, I’m simply exhausted."

• 100+ fundraising rejections
• 25,000 customer complaint emails in 1 week
• almost ran out of money several times
• competitors tried to kill them
• fraudsters almost killed them
• regulatory scrutiny
• 4+ CEO changes before IPO

• "A’s hire A’s; the first B brings the whole company down.”
• "PayPal gave employees ample freedom: the room to be everything they could be - but set high expectations for performance."

• The “PayPal Mafia” saw inexperience not as a weakness but a strength - “experience is massively overrated...inexperience led to minimizing fraud in innovative new ways that a banking veteran never would have"
• “I discovered that you just have to use common sense, and that’s actually a better guide than experts”

• Multi-thousand-dollar referral bonuses to incentivize and accelerate user referrals and sign ups
• Meaningful employee referral sign-up bonuses helped build the company employee base

• COO and first-real product manager of PayPal: "product management is as much about saying no as inventing breakthroughs — protecting scarce engineering cycles is existential."
• Early PayPal employee on importance of focus in the early days of PayPal (see video link)

• "You can build something out of nothing."
• "He thought his college classes were boring - so he started a company, hired himself as an intern, and used his internship hours for class credits."
• "Focusing on a great product was a far more effective sales tool than having a big sales force or some marketing gimmick."
• "At Google you’re a cog in a cubicle. With me, you’re an instrumental part of building something great."
• “Elon is a very gifted storyteller, and some of the stories even come true.”
• "Often times it’s better to just pick a path and do it, rather than just vacillate endlessly on the choice"
• "A lot of times, the question is harder than the answer. If you phrase the question properly, the answer is easy.”
• "Who is successful and who is not is a thin razors edge"
• "Once embedded in users’ lives, dislodging a product or service took meaningful effort."
• “If you can’t tell me the 4 ways you fucked something up before you got it right, you probably weren’t the one who did it.”

What it wasn’t:

It wasn’t charisma, because none of these CEOs had much of it. So what was it then?

Frugality

These CEOs were cheap and constantly sought to reduce costs. [One key exception – they were not frugal about compensation incentivizing performance; employees often shared in the success of the company and did remarkably well]. Tom Murphy, called by Buffett the best CEO he’s ever seen, exemplifies the frugality of these CEOs:

• Painted only the sides of his first office building that faced the street
• Passed on a company’s limo practice for executives, taking cabs – the rest of the executive suite soon followed. (When asked if he was leading by example regarding taking cabs, he responded ‘is there any other way?’)
• The most memorable example of all: When a colleague wanted to hire a secretary, Murphy declined spending the money to do so. When the colleague noted this would only cost $20,000, Murphy responded that ‘20k per year would increase as she got raises over time, and she may stay for 30 years, and other people would then also want secretaries, and how much toilet paper would she use that we would have to pay for over those 30 years?’

Steadfast Independence of Mind

A CEO very much not on the list of top CEOs was the Citigroup CEO at the banking height of the mid-2000s. He declared on his firm’s increasingly risky financial decisions that ‘as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance’. As the book reads, ‘he danced off a cliff from $240 per share to $3 per share.’ Warren Buffett, on the other hand, largely sat out the mid-2000s financial frenzy while his peers made great profits, and then when the 2008 financial crisis hit and fear peaked he deployed capital as aggressively as any time in his career. The Outsider CEOs each had examples like this, often multiple of them – achieving extraordinary results by at key junctures zigging while their peers zagged.

Getting the Key Decisions Right (or adjusting until they did)

Kay Graham, who took over the Washington Post in the early 1970s, exemplifies getting the rare key decisions right. When her husband unexpectedly left her with ownership of the Post, Graham made this string of decisions, changing the course of the paper:

• Replaced the editor in chief with Ben Bradley – about as important as any decision for a paper. He helped bring in an influx of talent, started the first national paper style section, and proved to be an exceptional fit for the role. [Also went through four COOs fairly quickly until she found the right one, again showing the importance of getting key people decisions right]
• Ignored the advice of her board who urged her to avoid meeting with Warren Buffet, relatively unknown at the time. “Figuring out he was a genius” and bringing him onto the board was one of the best decisions she ever made, informing subsequent key financial decisions.
• Chose to publish the Pentagon Papers when faced with unclear legal advice and many others urging her not (see above trait). The Pentagon Papers eventually led to Nixon’s resignation and the reputation of the Post was made, establishing it as the only journalistic peer to the New York Times.

Crocodile Patience

These CEOs could wait an entire decade or more for the right opportunity to emerge, and on the rare occasion with compelling returns, they could act with boldness and blinding speed. Case in point – Richard Smith, who made nearly zero acquisition moves for well over a decade until the right investment opportunity came up from a phone call. That same day he was on a plane to the potential acquisition’s headquarters and within a few days had made a company-altering deal equal to 40% of his company’s value. (See another example of crocodile patience here from the Warren Buffett May issue: https://qorrum.com/post/470)

Flexibility

From perhaps the top performing CEO of the last 75 years, Henry Singleton, on the importance of flexibility (all the more interesting given how significantly this diverges from most of us, but how similarly this was practiced by the most successful CEOs):

·      “I don’t reserve any day to day responsibilities for myself. I define my job in terms of having the freedom to do whatever seems to be in the best interest of the company at any specific times. I like to steer the boat each day rather than plan ahead way into the future. I know a lot of people have very strong and definite plans they’ve worked out on all kinds of things, but we’re subject to a tremendous number of outside influences, and the vast majority of them cannot be predicted. So my idea is to stay flexible.”

And 10 Quotes

• "It’s almost impossible to overpay the truly extraordinary CEO (but the species is rare)"
• "Capital allocation over operations — the true job of the CEO"
• "Their advantage relative to their peers was temperament, not intellect"
• "Charisma is overrated; analytical thinking is key"
• "Always do the math. It’s just fifth-grade arithmetic"
• "Extraordinary results came as much from the deals not done as from those completed"
• "Long periods of inactivity, punctuated by occasional large moves, produced extraordinary results"
• "It’s not easy to diverge from peers — the business world can feel like a high school cafeteria"
• "Hire the best people you can and leave them alone"
• "Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is more efficient than patching leaks"