Wisdom in fragments

When these people are under stress, they make bad decisions. They get reactive. One of the key findings in our conclusions is that the unsuccessful founders were more reactive. They weren't measured. They weren't deliberate. They didn't make decisions based on facts — their emotions carried them away.

Rich, sometimes you treat a wisp of intuition as though it were a four-lane highway. It's not that you shouldn't trust intuition — it's that you need to validate it.

The skills that get them to one point won't carry them the rest of the way. We talk about the ticking time bomb. The ticking time bomb is these very characteristics — when you're trying to scale, and things are getting more complex, and you have to work through other people — they blow up.

I mean, people ask me, 'Should I do a startup?' And I say, 'Well, how important is work-life balance to you?' And if they say anything other than 'It's not important,' I say, 'You shouldn't do it.' Because it's a killing field.

A lot of entrepreneurs don't make that switch. They cling to that brand identity of 'I'm an innovator,' still tinkering with the product while everyone else is saying, 'Hey, it's good enough — let's hire our first salesperson.'

That confidence and perseverance can sometimes lead you to keep charging ahead headfirst, when what's really needed is a pause and a course adjustment. I think that's the challenge when strengths get overused.

As an entrepreneur, you're often doing things that haven't been done before, or doing them in ways that break the mould. All sorts of people are telling you, 'No, that's not how it's done,' and you're constantly running into obstacles. Without a lot of self-confidence, you can't even get started.

What really matters is how well you know yourself — because every aspect of your leadership is expressed through your personality. I think that single trait — self-awareness — or rather, that skillset, outweighs all the others put together.

When you're in the present, looking forward, your brain sees change as scary. But from the far side, looking back, the fear fades.

Former Navy submarine captain and author of "Turn the Ship Around!

Your brain has an agenda: to make you feel good about you. So if you're the CEO, and you decided to launch a product two weeks ago, your brain assumes, 'Well, that must have been the right decision.' It starts scanning the environment for proof — cherry-picking anything that confirms you were right.

Former Navy submarine captain and author of "Turn the Ship Around!

I particularly like the six-month shift for operational decisions. But for life choices, look at Jeff Bezos. When deciding to start Amazon, he projected himself into the far future. He asked: 'When I'm 80, what will I regret more — starting the company and failing, or never starting it at all?'

Former Navy submarine captain and author of "Turn the Ship Around!

If I ask better questions, they come up with better answers.

Former Navy submarine captain and author of "Turn the Ship Around!

The industrial age was designed around one group of people making decisions, and a different group carrying them out. That mindset still lingers in our language — 'leaders' and 'followers,' 'blue collar' and 'management,' 'union' and 'executive.' It splits the world into thinkers and doers. That no longer works.

Former Navy submarine captain and author of "Turn the Ship Around!

Status hierarchies help us navigate choices which would otherwise be impossibly complex. It dramatically reduces the cognitive load we face in making decisions.

If you get just a little bit of a head start, you can end up racing far ahead. So you end up with very small differences in quality or merit that get amplified over careers or competitions, eventually becoming very large differences over time.

If you can rank oboists and there's one who's clearly the best in the world, anyone, anywhere, can access that person. So why would you listen to the third-best oboist who happens to live next door?