From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
If your strategy is to do everything, you have no strategy at all.
Our mission is to expand the economic sphere of influence of humanity off the surface of the planet and into the solar system. Currently we have a vibrant economy in space that goes out to the geostationary belt- where the communication satellites are- and it stops.
As soon as such actions are taken, I think a lot of entrepreneurs will see Greece as being the right place to invest.
You need to hire people who are smart, ideally smarter than you. There's a reason Google, Apple and their peers are filled with PhD's. The smarter your team (whether academically, or in experience) the more they will deliver.
We use these tools to do things quicker – but that never help us get on top of everything because they systematically increase the size of the 'everything' – It's a rigged game!
The world is lying to you. It tells you that in 10,000 hours you can become excellent at what you do and that your strength will never wane. That is a complete, utter, falsehood. At some point, the greatness that came to define who 'you' are will wane.
In these political times, that's more difficult, you must plant your flag somewhere, and someone will get upset. You have to be able to take that in your stride.
So not only has average pay gone down, but the job has got riskier.
The layers of compliance that appear in companies are basically what the company does to protect itself against bad judgement. They build guardrails. At Netflix, we decided to flip that around – rather than building systems to protect ourselves from bad decisions, we built systems of judgement.
One of the most powerful business skills is the ability to listen, not just act. As entrepreneurs and business leaders, if we're going to focus on what truly matters, it starts with understanding what matters.
During the crisis and immediately thereafter the focus was less on infrastructure and more on, 'I need to find a manager, any manager, who can make some damn money!'
Excellence means you do the absolute best you can in every situation that you face. It's an aesthetic concept, a performance concept, and helps you create the most perfect balance for success.