THE MILLIONAIRE FASTLANE by MJ DeMarco

• If you want to keep getting what you’re getting, keep doing what you’re doing.
• Success is a journey, and it can’t be outsourced to the Philippines in a four-hour work week.
• The message of “Get Rich Slow” is clear: Sacrifice your today, your dreams, and your life for a plan that pays dividends after most of your life has evaporated.
• The Slowlane prognosticators know something that they aren’t telling you: What they teach doesn’t work, but selling it does.
• “Get Rich Slow” demands a long life of gainful employment.
• “Get Rich Slow” is a losing game because it is codependent on Wall Street and anchored by your time.
• The real golden years of life are when you’re young, sentient, and vibrant.
• Fast wealth is created exponentially, not linearly.
• All self-made multimillionaires create their wealth by a carefully orchestrated process.
• Wealth eludes most people because they are preoccupied with events while disregarding process. Without process, there is no event.
• Speed is execution and your ability to go from idea to implementation.
• Process makes millionaires. Events are by-products of process.
• If you want to change your life, change your choices.
• Beliefs preceded choices, which precede action.
• Beliefs are powerful mechanisms that drive action, whether true or not.
• To force change, change must come from your beliefs, and your roadmap outlines those beliefs.
• You can’t medicate poor money management with more money.
• more money is not a solution to poor financial management.
• You cannot solve poor financial management with more money.
• If you don’t have health, you lack wealth.
• Some want to look rich, while others want to be rich.
• “Faux wealth” is the illusion of wealth without having it.
• Unaffordable material possessions are destructive to the wealth trinity.
• Debt and Lifestyle Servitude keeps people bound to work and unbound to relationships.
• You’re conditioned to accept normal based on society’s already corrupted definition of wealth, and because of it, normal itself is corrupted. Normal is modern-day slavery.
• Affordability is when you don’t have to think about it. If you have to think about “affordability,” you can’t afford it because affordability carries conditions and consequences.
• This self-talk is a warning that you can’t afford it.
• Instead of you owning your stuff, your stuff owns you.
• Anything destructive to freedom is destructive to the wealth trinity.
• Money, properly used, can buy freedom, which can lead to happiness.
• Happiness stems from good health, freedom, and strong interpersonal relationships, not necessarily money.
• If you think you can afford it, you can’t.
• The consequence of instant gratification is the destruction of freedom, health, and choice.
• Process creates events that others see as luck.
• Like wealth, luck is not an event but an aftereffect of process. Luck is the residue of process.
• To realize luck, engage in processes where better probabilities exist.
• Like wealth, luck is created by process, not by event.
• Luck is created by increased probabilities that are improved with the process of action.
• Moneymaking “systems” are rarely as profitable as the act of selling them to Sidewalkers.
• The Law of Victims says you can’t be a victim if you don’t relinquish power to someone capable of making you a victim.
• Stop being a victim by taking responsibility, followed by accountability.
• Immunization for victimitis occurs when you are both responsible for AND accountable to your actions and the possible poor consequences of those actions.
• We’re being methodically brainwashed to believe that we deserve everything without obedience to process, or accountability.
• The Law of Victims: You can’t be a victim if you don’t relinquish power to someone capable of making you a victim.
• Taking responsibility is the first step to taking the driver’s seat of your life. Accountability is the final.
• The driving force behind wealth under Get Rich Slow is time—time employed at the job and time invested in the markets.
• Wealth is best lived young and enjoyed while you have health, vibrancy, energy, and yes, maybe even some hair. Wealth is best lived in the prime of your life, not in its twilight after 40 years of 50-hour workweeks have pulverized your dreams into surrender.
• When you trade your life mindlessly for a paycheck, you risk being blinded to life itself as you cursively walk by it in a busy train station. Life does not begin on Friday night and end Monday morning.
• The ultimate insanity is to sell your soul Monday through Friday for the paycheck of Saturday and Sunday.
• Five days of servitude for two days of freedom is not a good trade unless you trade time into a system that can give you a better return on your time.
• The problem is, we’ve been brainwashed to accept the Slowlane roadmap as normal.
• Wealth is best experienced when you’re young, vibrant, and able, not in the twilight of your life.
• The predisposed destination of the Slowlane is mediocrity. Life isn’t great, but it isn’t so bad either.
• If you want to escape the Slowlane, find wealth and freedom fast, you’ve got to dump the job.
• Jobs suck because they’re rooted in limited leverage and limited control.
• If you’re shackled to a job, you’re engaged to a glorified exchange of your time (your life) for pieces of paper that grant you freedom. You sell your freedom to get freedom.
• I learned more as an entrepreneur in two months than I did working 10 years at dozens of dead-end jobs.
• The problem with a specialized skill set is, it narrows your useful value to a confined set of marketplace needs.
• Experience comes from what you do in life, not from what you do in a job. You don’t need a job to get experience.
• If you don’t control your income, you don’t control your financial plan.
• In a job, you sell your freedom (in the form of time) for freedom (in the form of money).
• Experience is gained in action. The environment of that action is irrelevant.
• Wealth accumulation is thwarted when you don’t control your primary income source.
• To accumulate financial wealth, you need to attract large sums of money. To attract large sums of money, you need two things: 1) Control and 2) Leverage.
• Small numbers do not make millionaires.
• Wealth creation via compound interest requires the passing of time and lots of it.
• Compound interest and a job have the same disease: the sinful and gluttonous consumption of your time while forsaking control.
• Anything that steals time and doesn’t have the power to free time is a liability.
• Slowlane wealth is improbable due to Uncontrollable Limited Leverage (ULL).
• Wealth cannot be accelerated when pegged to mathematics based on time.
• If you don’t control the variables inherent in your wealth universe, you don’t control your financial plan.
• The problem with formal education used to raise intrinsic value is that it’s ungodly expensive in time and money.
• Not all education is created equal.
• If an education entombs you under a mountain of debt and shackles you to a job for the rest of your life, is it really a good education?
• If you financed your advanced education with debt, the debt automatically becomes parasitic and traps you into forced job servitude, and that destroys freedom.
• Slowlaners attempt to manipulate intrinsic value by education.
• Parasitic debt is debt that creates indentured time and forces work.
• The Paradox of Practice asks, “Do you practice what you preach? Are you a model, an exemplification of what you teach?”
• A Paradox of Practice exists when someone promotes a moneymaking strategy but that strategy is not what made him or her rich.
• Sadly, it’s virtually impossible to get good, practical money advice, because most gurus live a Paradox of Practice.
• Economic recessions expose the Slowlane as a risky fraud with lifetime ramifications.
• Take advice from people with a proven, successful track record of their espoused discipline.
• Many money gurus often suffer from a Paradox of Practice; they teach one wealth equation while getting rich in another. They’re not rich from their own teachings.
• The Slowlane is predisposed to mediocrity because the numbers are always mediocre.
• Extreme talent is paid extremely well.
• A millionaire is not rich. Five million is the old one million.
• The Slowlane has seven dangers, five of which cannot be controlled.
• The risk of “lifestyle” is the one risk Slowlaners will try to control.
• The Slowlane is predisposed to mediocrity because its mathematical universe is mediocre.
• Slowlaners manipulate the “expense” variable because it is the one thing they can control.
• Exponential income growth and expense management creates wealth—not just by curtailing expenses.
• You can break the Slowlane equation by exploding your intrinsic value via fame or insider corporate management.
• Successful Slowlaners not famous or in corporate management end in the middle . . . middle class and middle age.
• Slowlane millionaires are stuck in the middle class.
• $5 million is the new $1 million.
• A millionaire cannot live a millionaire lifestyle without financial discipline.
• Lottery winners fall into the millionaire trap and go broke because they attempt to live a “millionaire” lifestyle, not understanding that a few million doesn’t go very far.
• The Fastlane is a business and lifestyle strategy characterized by Controllable Unlimited Leverage (CUL), hence creating an optimal environment for rapid wealth creation and extraordinary lifestyles.
• The Fastlane is about creating large sums of wealth rapidly and beyond the confines of “middle class.”
• The moment you stop learning is the moment you stop growing.
• The Slowlane is a job: your hard work traded for your employer’s cash.
• The Fastlane is about building a better system, a better contraption, a better product, or a better “something” that will leverage your work.
• The risk profile of a Fastlane strategy isn’t much different from the Slowlane, but the rewards are far greater.
• The Fastlane Roadmap is an alternative financial strategy predicated on Controllable Unlimited Leverage.
• The Fastlane roadmap is predisposed to wealth.
• The Fastlane Roadmap is capable of generating “Get Rich Quick” results, not to be confused with “Get Rich Easy.”
• Losing teams use losing playbooks.
• To win, switch teams and use the winner’s playbook.
• You’ve been conditioned to demand: to want products, to need products, to buy products, and of course, to seek out the cheapest of those products.
• The winning team is Team Producer. Reshape life’s focus on producing, not consuming.
• Producers get rich. Consumers get poor.
• To switch teams and become a producer, you need to be an entrepreneur and an innovator. You need to be a visionary and a creator. You need to give birth to a business and offer the world value.
• Producers are indigenous to the Fastlane roadmap.
• Producers are the minority as are the rich, while consumers are the majority as are the poor.
• When you succeed as a producer, you can consume anything you want.
• Fastlaners are producers, entrepreneurs, innovators, visionaries, and creators.
• A business does not make a Fastlane—some businesses are jobs in disguise.
• The Fastlane wealth equation is not bound by time and its variables are unlimited and controllable.
• If you can control the variables inherent to your wealth equation, you can get wealthy.
• To weaponize the Fastlane wealth equation, you must engage in a Fastlane business that has the potential for leverage or high speed limits.
• Asset value is simply the worth of any property you own that has marketplace value.
• The key to the Fastlane wealth equation is to have a high speed limit, or an unlimited range of values for units sold. This creates leverage. The market for your product or service determines your upper limit.
• The higher your speed limit, the higher your income potential.
• The primary wealth accelerant for the rich is asset value, defined as appreciable assets created, founded, or bought.
• Wealth creation via asset value is accelerated by each industry’s average multiplier. For every dollar in net income realized, the asset value multiplies by a factor of the multiple.
• Your industry of specialization will determine the average multiple that determines your wealth accelerant factor. If the multiple is 3, your WAF is 300%.
• Liquidation events transform appreciated assets (“paper” net worth) into money (“real” net worth) that can be transformed into another passive income stream: a money system.
• When your wealth is predicated on factors that you cannot control and that are implicitly limited, you aren’t going to make fast progress.
• Money grows on trees if you own a money tree. And, you can own one if you know how and where to get the seeds. Money trees are business systems that survive on their own.
• There are five business seedlings to money trees.
• Rental Systems Computer/Software Systems Content Systems Distribution Systems Human Resource Systems
• Real estate is one “rental system.” I consider real estate money trees as Fastlane 1.0 or Wealth 1.0. It is the old way and still very much a road to wealth.
• Appreciative assets (asset value) are cornerstones in the Fastlane wealth equation.
• Rental systems are powerful money trees because they are high on the passivity scale and survive time.
• Computers are miraculous inventions and fertile seeds to money trees. They work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and they don’t bitch about working conditions.
• Software millionaires can be “average Joes.”
• Software, when tapped into potent distribution, can be replicated to millions. It scales without significant degradation to passivity.
• When inventing any product, the invention is always half the battle. Distribution is the other.
• Human resource systems are the most expensive and complicated to run. Humans are unpredictable, expensive, and difficult to control.
• To divorce yourself from the Slowlane’s transactional relationship of “time for money,” you need to become a producer, specifically, a business owner.
• Business systems break the bond between “your time for money” because they act like surrogate operatives for your time trade.
• If you have a passive income that exceeds all your needs and lifestyle expenses including taxes, you’re retired.
• Retirement can happen at any age.
• The fruit from a money tree is passive income.
• A Fastlane objective is to create a business system that survives time, exclusive of your time.
• The 5 money-tree seedlings are rental systems, computer systems, content systems, distribution systems, and human-resource systems.
• Real estate, licenses, and patents are examples of rental systems.
• Internet and software businesses are examples of computer systems.
• Authoring books, blogging, and magazines are forms of content systems.
• Franchising, chaining, network marketing, and television marketing are examples of distribution systems.
• Human resource systems can add or subtract to passivity.
• Human resource systems are the most expensive to manage and implement.
• Savers are winners because they eventually become lenders.
• Every dollar saved is another freedom fighter in your army. If your money is fighting for you, your time is freed and you break the equation of “time for money.”
• Fastlaners think globally, not locally.
• Compound interest pays my bills. It’s my tool. It’s my passive income source. Yet, compound interest is not responsible for my wealth. This is critical. Fastlaners aren’t using compound interest to build wealth, because it’s not in their wealth equation. The heavy lifting of wealth creation is left to their Fastlane business.
• Fastlaners understand this weakness and realize that the compound interest weapon is most effective with large sums of money. For compound interest to be effective, you must bypass 30 years of mathematical ineptitude by riding the crest where it is effective.
• One saved dollar is the seed to a money tree.
• A mere 5% interest on $10 million dollars is $40,000 a month in passive income.
• A saved dollar is the best passive income instrument.
• Fastlaners (the rich) don’t use compound interest or the markets to get wealthy but to create income and preserve liquidity.
• A saved dollar is a freedom fighter added to your army.
• The rich leverage compound interest at its crest, applied against large sums of money.
• Fastlaners eventually become net lenders.
• Thinking never made anyone rich, unless that thinking manifests itself into consistent action toward application of laws that work.
• Events of wealth sell. Process does not.
• The Law of Effection states that the more lives you affect in an entity you control, in scale and/or magnitude, the richer you will become. The shortened, sanitized version is simply: Affect millions and make millions.
• Impact millions and make millions. It doesn’t get any simpler than that!
• Scale creates millionaires. Magnitude creates millionaires. Scale and magnitude creates billionaires.
• Make a giant impact a few times or make a small impact millions of times.
• The Law of Effection states that the more lives you affect or breach, both in scale or magnitude, the richer you will be.
• Scale translates to “units sold” of our profit variable within our Fastlane wealth equation. Magnitude translates to “unit profit” of our profit variable within our Fastlane wealth equation.
• The Law of Attraction is not a law, but a theory. The Law of Effection is absolute and operates exclusive of a roadmap.
• All lineages of self-made wealth trace back to the Law of Effection.
• The Law of Effection’s absoluteness comes from direct access and control (you are the athlete) versus indirect access (you are the athlete’s agent).
• To make millions you must serve millions in scale or a few in magnitude.
• If your primary income source comes from a job, your ability to pay yourself first is paralyzed because the governments are paid first!
• The best business structures for your Fastlane business are: C corporation S corporation Limited liability corporation
• For small startups, I recommend either an LLC or an S corp.
• “Pay yourself first” is fundamentally impossible in a job.
• To own your vehicle (you), start a corporation that formally divorces you from the act of business. Your corporation is the body of your surrogate.
• The recommended Fastlane business entity is a C corp, an S corp, or an LLC.
• Poor choices are the leading cause of poorness.
• If you aren’t where you want to be, the problem is your choices. Your circumstances are the symptoms of those choices.
• Lifestyle choices will make you a millionaire.
• Your choices spark the fires of future circumstances.
• The smallest choices made in your daily life create habits and lifestyle that forms process—they are the ones that can make the biggest impact.
• The leading cause of poorness is poor choices.
• The steering wheel of your life is your choices.
• You are exactly where you chose to be.
• Success is hundreds of choices that form process. Process forms lifestyle.
• Choice is the most powerful control you have in your life.
• Treasonous choices forever impact your life negatively.
• Your choices have significant horsepower, or trajectory into the future.
• The younger you are, the more potent your choices are and the more horsepower you possess.
• Over time, horsepower erodes as the consequences of old choices are thick and hard to bend.
• Choices of perception serve as the impetus to choices of action.
• The first step in making better choices starts with your choice of perception, because your actions evolve from those perceptions.
• Good choices of perception translate into good choices of action. To change your perception is to change your future actions.
• Changing your life starts with changing choices.
• Your choices of action manifest from your choices of perception.
• What you choose to perceive, or not perceive, will manifest itself to a choice of action, or inaction.
• You can change your choice of perception by aligning yourself with those who experience the perception as reality.
• Worst Case Consequence Analysis helps avoid treasonous choices.
• The Weighted Average Decision Matrix can help you make better big decisions by clarifying alternatives and their internal factors.
• The universe has no memory, only you do.
• Your past can be accelerative or treasonous. You choose the classification.
• If your eyes are transfixed to the past, you can’t become the person you need to become in the future.
• If you want to push beyond average results produced by average people, you’ll need to adopt an uncommon approach that doesn’t fall in the favor of “everyone.”
• Extraordinary wealth will require you to have extraordinary beliefs.
• The natural gravity of society is not to be exceptional, but average.
• Toxic relationships drain energy and detract from your goals to be extraordinary.
• The people in your life are like your comrades in a battle platoon. They can save you, help you, or destroy you.
• Good relationships are accelerative to your process, while bad relationships are treasonous.
• Time is the greatest asset you own, not money,
• The reality is that time is deathly scarce, while money is richly abundant.
• Money buys free time and eliminates indentured time.
• Parasitic debt is everything you owe the world.
• The average American owes more than they are worth.
• Fastlaners are frugal with time, while Slowlaners are frugal with money.
• If you want to be rich, you have to start thinking rich.
• Fastlaners regard time as the king of all assets.
• Time is deathly scarce, while money is richly abundant.
• Indentured time is time you spend to earn money. Free time is spent as you please.
• Your lifespan is made up of both free time and indentured time.
• Free time is bought and paid for by indentured time.
• Fastlaners seek to transform indentured time into free time.
• Parasitic debt eats free time and excretes it as indentured time.
• Lifestyle extravagances have two costs: the cost itself and the cost to free time.
• Parasitic debt has to be stopped at the source: instant gratification.
• When you continually inject yourself with new education, new skills, and new competencies, new roads open and things run smoothly.
• The purpose of education within the Fastlane is to amplify the power of the money tree and the business system. You’re not a cog in the wheel; you learn to build the wheel.
• The greatest travesty of the free world is the under use of knowledge.
• Quit playing Gameboy grab-ass and hit the books.
• You have the innate power to become an expert at anything not requiring physical talent.
• The acquisition and application of knowledge will make you rich.
• Books possess the greatest return for your educational dollar. Buy them, borrow them, or steal them. Just read them.
• Fastlaners start their education at graduation, if not before.
• A Fastlaner’s education serves to advance their business system and their money tree, not to raise intrinsic value.
• Fastlaner’s aren’t interested in being a cog in the wheel. They want to be the wheel.
• I don’t know how” is an excuse dismantled by discipline.
• Infinite knowledge is everywhere and it’s free. What’s missing is discipline to assimilate it.
• You can become an expert in any discipline not requiring physical skills.
• Educational recharges can occur within time blocks already allocated for other objectives.
• Organizers of expensive seminars take advantage of Sidewalkers and disenfranchised Slowlaners by marketing empty promises as “events.”
• Winners are forged at the Redline. What’s the Redline? The Redline is pure, unadulterated commitment.
• Money trees, businesses, and systems aren’t built overnight.
• There’s a profound difference between interest and commitment.
• You can have mediocre comfort now or meteoric comfort later. The Fastlaner trades short-term comforts with the foreknowledge that long-term extraordinary comfort is to be gained.
• Fear of failure is attributed to an overestimated worst-case consequence analysis.
• Minimize moronic risk and take advantage of intelligent risk.
• Timing is rarely perfect. Waiting empowers mediocrity.
• Interest is first gear. Commitment is the Redline.
• Hard work and commitment separates the winners from the losers.
• Some choose short-term mediocre comfort over long-term meteoric comfort.
• To live unlike everyone else, you have to do what everyone else won’t.
• Arm your expectations to hard work, sacrifice, and other bumps in the road. These are the land mines where the weak are removed from the road and sent back to the land of “most people.”
• Failure is natural to success. Expect it and learn from it.
• One home run could set you financially secure for your life, perhaps generations.
• Home runs can’t be hit in the dug out.
• Moronic risks have unlimited downside (long term) and limited upside (short term).
• Intelligent risks have unlimited upside (long term) and limited downside (short term.)
• There is never perfect timing and waiting for “someday” just wastes time.
• If you’re a Slowlaner, your road is your job: doctor, lawyer, engineer, salesman, hairdresser, pilot. If you’re a Fastlaner, your road is a business: Internet entrepreneur, real estate investor, author, or inventor.
• The Law of Effection says to make millions you must impact millions.
• To make millions, you must serve millions.
• Not all businesses are the right road. Few roads move at, through, or near the Law of Effection.
• The best roads and the purest Fastlanes satisfy the Five Fastlane Commandments: Need, Entry, Control, Scale, and Time.
• Businesses that solve needs win. Businesses that provide value win. Businesses that solve problems win profits.
• Never start a business just to make money. Stop chasing money and start chasing needs.
• Give first, take second.
• Money chasers are consumers who haven’t quite made the transition to producer. They want to be producers, but they selfishly think like consumers.
• Want to make big bucks? Then start attracting money instead of chasing it.
• Money isn’t attracted to selfish people. It is attracted to businesses that solve problems. It’s attracted to people who fill needs and add value. Solve needs massively and money massively attracts.
• The amount of money in your life is merely a reflection to the amount of value you have given to others.
• Make a freaking impact and start providing value!
• Unfortunately, if you LOVE doing it, bet on thousands of others loving it too.
• The motivational fuel for the Fastlane is passion, not love.
• I repeat: Passion for an end goal, a why, drives Fastlane action.
• Fastlaners work unlike everyone else so they can live unlike anyone else.
• The Commandment of Need states that businesses that solve needs win. Needs can be pain points, service gaps, unsolved problems, or emotional disconnects.
• Ninety percent of all new businesses fail because they are based on selfish internal needs, not external market needs.
• No one cares about your selfish desires for dreams or money; people only want to know what your business can do for them.
• Money chasers haven’t broken free from selfishness, and their businesses often follow their own selfish needs.
• People vote for your business with their money.
• Chase money and it will elude you. However, if you ignore it and focus on what attracts money, you will draw it to yourself.
• Help one million people and you will be a millionaire.
• For money to follow “Do what you love,” your love must solve a need and you must be exceptional at it.
• “Do what you love” sets the stage for crowded marketplaces with depressed margins.
• When you have the financial resources, you can “do what you love” and not get paid for it, nor do you have to be good at it.
• Slowlaners feed “do what you love” with “do what you hate.” Five days of hate for two days of love.
• “Doing what you love” for money can endanger your love.
• Passion for an end goal, a why, drives Fastlane success.
• Having a passionate “why” can transform work into joy.
• “Doing what you love” usually leads to the violation of the Commandment of Need.
• The right road for you is one that will converge with your dreams.
• The Commandment of Entry states that as entry barriers to any business road fall, or lessen, the effectiveness of that road declines while competition in that field subsequently strengthens.
• The Commandment of Entry states that as entry barriers fall, competition rises and the road weakens.
• Easy access roads carry more traffic. More traffic generates higher competition, and higher competition creates lower margins for the participants.
• Businesses with weak entry often lack control and operate in saturated marketplaces.
• Exceptionalism is required to overcome weak entry barriers.
• Access to a business road should be a process with a toll, not an event.
• “Everyone” consists of the general populous and is served by the mainstream media.
• If everyone were wealthy, “everybody is doing it” would work. And if everyone is wealthy, then no one is wealthy.
• “Everyone is doing it” is a signal to overbought conditions and the entrance of “dumb money.”
• business hitchhiker seeks refuge from risk and cowers within the confines of a matriarchal organization.
• When you blindly invest your life and time into someone else’s brand, you become a part of their marketing plan.
• If you don’t control your system, your money tree, and your brand, you control nothing.
• Stop climbing pyramids and start building them.
• Hitchhikers relinquish control of their business to a Fastlaner.
• There is a difference between “good” money and “big” money. Hitchhikers can make good money while Fastlaners make big money. Sometimes legendary money.
• In a driver/hitchhiker relationship, the driver always retains control and the hitchhiker is at the mercy of the driver.
• Hitchhikers are party to someone else’s Fastlane plan. Make the world your habitat of play in an organization you control.
• Network marketing has little to do with entrepreneurship but more to do with sales, networking, training, and motivation.
• Network marketing fails both the Commandments of Control and Entry, and sometimes, Need.
• Network marketers are soldiers in a Fastlaner’s army.
• Network marketing is a powerful distribution system. As a Fastlaner, seek to own one, not join one.
• Scale is about leverage and leverage is what gives the Fastlane wealth equation its power.
• Without leverage, you can’t create wealth exponentially.
• To achieve scale, magnitude or reach must increase. Magnitude is naturally increased with price or cost.
• Reach, exclusive of magnitude, also achieves scale. Reach is massive numbers. The more people you reach, the greater scale potential.
• To make millions, you must affect millions.
• There are three barricades that prevent entrepreneurs from realizing the Law of Effection: Scale, Magnitude, and Source.
• The strongest barricade to Effection is scale. If you can’t serve millions, you won’t make millions.
• The other barricade to Effection is Magnitude.
• If you can’t be the source, serve the source.
• Your total pool of customers determines your habitat. The larger the habitat, the greater the potential for wealth.
• A business can be a singles or a home-run-based business. Its strength is determined by scale, which is derived by habitat.
• The Fastlane wealth equation is disarmed when you violate the Commandment of Scale. Scale is achieved in reach (units sold) and/or magnitude (unit profit).
• The Law of Effection is the primary conduit to wealth, which can be road blocked by scale, magnitude, or source.
• Effection consequences trickle up to owners and producers. Breaking scale or magnitude indirectly in an uncontrolled entity is not a guarantee of wealth.
• To gain access to Effection, you have to break the barrier of scale or magnitude in an entity you control.
• Scale, magnitude, or source deficiencies create governors on the speed of wealth creation.
• The Commandment of Time requires that your business detach from your time.
• Jobs are time trades for income, and yes, so are some businesses. The goal of the Fastlane is a disconnection of your time from income, even if that income isn’t millions.
• A business attached to your time is a job.
• business that earns income exclusive of your time satisfies the Commandment of Time.
• To satisfy the Commandment of Time, start with a business that uses a money system seedling, or introduce one.
• Starting a business is a big decision. Treat it with cursory interest, and your business resembles a hobby. And businesses that are run like hobbies pay like hobbies.
• Thou shalt not invest in a needless business. Thou shalt not trade time for money. Thou shalt not operate on a limited scale. Thou shalt not relinquish control. Thou shalt not let a business startup be an event over process.
• The three Interstates are: Internet Innovation Intentional Iteration
• The most potent interstate is an Internet business.
• The Internet is the best Fastlane available, because it immediately obeys the Five Commandments to the Fastlane, assuming a need-based premise.
• Brokers bring buyers and sellers together and facilitate transactions.
• Innovation covers any act of creation followed by distribution. Let me repeat that: Innovation involves two acts: 1) Manufacture and 2) Distribution.
• What is the product of innovation? Virtually anything that solves a need or fulfills a desire.
• Inventing is still recognized as the default get-rich-quick method out there, and yes, it is alive and well. However, don’t be fooled. Inventing isn’t really about inventing the vehicle, the telephone, or the goofy Segway—the core activity of inventors is just taking something and improving or modifying it. Take something old and stale and make it better. Take an underexposed product, make it your own, and reintroduce it to the world. Take something unconventional and make it conventional.
• Inventing a product that solves a need is half the battle; the other half is getting your invention into the hands of millions, which involves a variety of distribution channels:
• Distribution is where the war is won. A great product is worthless if it doesn’t get into the hands of people, and that requires distribution.
• Writing a book is not a business; selling the book is.
• The best Fastlanes satisfy all five Commandments: Control, Entry, Need, Time, and Scale.
• Assuming a need-based premise, the Internet is the fastest interstate, because it overwhelmingly satisfies all Commandments.
• Innovation can be any variety of open roads: authoring, inventing, or services.
• Inventing success needs coupling with distribution.
• A singles-based business is scaled to a home-run business by intentional iteration. With iteration, scale is conquered.
• Opportunity is a solution to an inconvenience. Opportunity is simplification. Opportunity is a feeling. Opportunity is comfort. Opportunity is better service. Opportunity is fixing pain. Opportunity is putting weak companies out of business.
• Competition is a staple of business.
• Successful businesses rarely evolve from some legendary idea. Nope, successful entrepreneurs take existing concepts and make them better.
• They take poorly met needs and solve them better. Skip the big idea and go for the big execution. You don’t need an idea that has never been done before. Old ideas suffice; just take it and do it better! Execute like no one has!
• Successful businesses take existing ideas, services, and products and simply make them better, or spin them in new directions.
• Opportunity is dressed in predictable code words that illuminate its presence.
• The opportunities of open roads come in easily painted language: Discomfort, distress, inconvenience, complaints, problems, and performance gaps. You must attack these challenges and introduce solutions—offer solutions to the masses and I guarantee money will follow! Moral: Solve other people’s problems and you will solve your own money problems!
• Everyone fails on the road to success. What separates the winners from the losers is what happens when failure arises.
• Failures that drive you into new directions are often the most productive forces for invention.
• Opportunities are rarely about inventing breakthroughs, but about performance gaps, small inconveniences, and pain points.
• Competition should not impede your road. Competition is everywhere, and your objective should be to “do it better.”
• Fastlane success resides in execution, not in the idea.
• The world’s most successful entrepreneurs didn’t have a blockbuster ideas; they just took existing concepts and made them better, or exposed them to more people.
• Opportunity is exposed in your language and your thought processes, as well as other people’s language.
• Failure cracks open new roads.
• Quitting only happens when you give up on your dream.
• Freedom has a price, and that price is money.
• No matter how big or small, dreams have a price, and that price is money, responsibility, accountability, and commitment.
• Your destination is the lifestyle you desire while having the freedom to enjoy it. There are two strategies to hit your destination. The first is a money system in which you amass a lump sum large enough to earn monthly interest that will support your lifestyle needs. The second is a business system that spawns passive cash flow that supports your lifestyle AND simultaneously funds your money system.
• If your business system generates passive income, you can use it to fund your lifestyle and your money system simultaneously.
• Get started today by looking three feet in front of you, not three miles.
• The key to achieving enormous tasks is to break them down into their smallest parts.
• You can’t make $5,000 per month until you learn how to make $50 per month!
• You can’t build a financial empire if you’re ignorant of basic finance and economics. These disciplines are the building blocks to a financial empire, and without them the Sidewalk becomes a danger.
• Remember, more money doesn’t solve money problems.
• The first rule of financial literacy: “Live below your means.”
• Live below your means with the intent to expand your means.
• “Live below your means” is relevant at any income level.
• Remember, Slowlaners seek to minimize expenses while the Fastlaner seeks to maximize income and asset values.
• If you can’t critique good advice from bad you don’t have control.
• Financial advisers do not solve financial illiteracy just as more money doesn’t solve poor money management.
• The Fastlane is the means to your end because dreams cost money.
• Conquer big goals by breaking them down to their smallest component.
• Daily saving reinforces your relationship with money; it is your passive system that buys freedom and another soldier added to your army.
• A money system isn’t used to grow wealth but to grow income. Growing wealth should be left to your Fastlane road.
• You will struggle to build a financial empire if you are financially illiterate.
• “Live below your means” is relevant at any income level.
• For the Fastlaner, “Live below your means” means to expand your means.
• A financial adviser doesn’t solve financial illiteracy and literacy is insurance.
• Financial illiteracy dilutes your control, especially when evaluating the advice of a financial adviser.
• Planned obsolescence is a marketer’s expectation that whatever they’re selling you, you won’t use it. And if you don’t use it, you are unlikely to ask for your money back.
• Get-rich systems sold on TV take advantage of human nature because it is human nature to seek events and avoid process.
• Execution is getting that idea out of your mind on onto the roads of possibility.
• Entrepreneurs struggle to differentiate between idea and execution. They think ideas are worth millions, when success is never about the idea but about the execution.
• An idea is the event, while the execution is the process.
• Execution is the great divider separating winners and losers from their ideas.
• The owner of an idea is not he who imagines it, but he who executes it.
• According to entrepreneur Derek Sivers (Sivers.org) ideas are just multipliers while execution represents actual money.
• Execution takes process: effort, sacrifice, discipline, and persistence. Ideas are just events.
• Speed is the transformation of ideas to execution.
• Most people let powerful information expire and become worthless.
• Successful Fastlane businesses are run multi-dimensionally, like a game of chess. One-dimensional businesses focus on price only.
• Execution divides winners and losers from their ideas.
• In business, execution is process. Ideas are events.
• Ideas are potential speed. Execution is actual speed.
• Others share your blockbuster idea. He who thinks the idea owns nothing. He who executes the idea owns everything.
• Real money and momentum is created when an idea (potential speed) is matched with execution (accelerator pressure).
• An idea is neurological flatulence. Execution makes it smell like a rose.
• When it comes to your ideas, your plans, and your business, you NEVER know what works until you put it out to the world.
• The ultimate judge-and-jury of ideas is the world and the marketplaces that serve them.
• the world tells you which direction you should be going at all times.
• The world doesn’t care about ideas; it only reacts to them.
• Business plans are useless.
• Business plans are useless because they’re ideas jacked-up on steroids.
• Business plans are useless until they are married to execution.
• The moment you execute, the world will tell you just what I told you: Your business plan is useless.
• The best business plan in the world will always be a track record of execution.
• The world gives clues to the direction you should be moving.
• Business plans are useless because they are ideas on steroids.
• As soon as the world interacts with your ideas, your business plan is invalidated.
• The marketplace will steer you into directions that were previously unplanned for.
• The best business plan in the world is a track record of execution—it legitimizes the business plan.
• If you have a track record of execution, suddenly people will want to see your business plan.
• If you want your business to get funded, take action and create something that reflects tangible execution.
• Investors are more likely to invest in something tangible and real; not ideas dissected ad nauseam on paper.
• Complaints are the world’s whispers hinting the direction you should be moving.
• Complaints of void are when your customer continually requests something and you simply don’t have it. Complaints of void are extremely valuable, as they expose unmet needs.
• Complaints of void are goldmines of opportunity. People freely tell you exactly what they want and you don’t have to pay for it! Unmet needs are served up on a silver platter.
• Satisfaction implies expectations being met. To create raving customers, you must exceed satisfaction.
• Great customer service costs more to provide, but the benefits should outweigh the costs.
• Anywhere customer service is expected to suck, you have a business opportunity.
• Complaints are valuable insights into your customers’ minds.
• Complaints of change are difficult to decipher and often require additional data to validate or invalidate.
• Complaints of expectation expose operational problems in either your business, or in your marketing strategy.
• Complaints of void expose unmet needs, raise the value of your product or service, and expose new revenue opportunities.
• Great customer service is as simple as violating your customer’s low expectation in the positive.
• Poor service gaps are Fastlane opportunities.
• Satisfied customers can be human resource systems who promote your business for free.
• Satisfied customers have a dual residual effect: Repeat business and new business via discipleship.
• Your customer and their satisfaction hold the key to everything you selfishly want.
• Looking big but acting small sets up customer service expectation violations in the positive.
• Looking big can scare away potential competitors.
• A business partner is like being married. It either works fabulously or it ends in fiery divorce.
• When you blindly trust others to anything—business, financial investments, security—you’re vulnerable to being conned.
• You must make your trust an asset to be earned by others. Let actions speak louder than words. When you allow words to disarm your trust or BS meter, you become vulnerable to attack.
• There is only one person you can blindly trust in this world, and that is YOU.
• Providing great customer service is one thing; getting employees to deliver it is another.
• Your employees drive the public’s perception of your company.
• A business partnership is as important as a marriage.
• A good accountant and attorney will save you thousands, perhaps millions.
• Accountants and attorneys have the keys to your castle; make sure you trust them fully because they have the power to right or wrong you.
• Unmitigated trust exposes you to unmitigated risk.
• Unverified trust can lead to uncontrollable consequences.
• Your employees communicate the public’s perception of your company.
• Fanatical customer service can overcome shortcomings, but fanatical features can’t overcome poor customer service.
• Customer service philosophy is delivered from human interactions—not ambitious mission statements on a wall plaque in the CEO’s office.
• “Me-too” businesses make “me-too” incomes.
• Forget about your competition 95% of the time. The other 5% should be used to exploit their weaknesses and differentiate your business.
• Commoditization occurs when you get into business based on a false premise—“I want to own a business” or “I know how to do this, so I’ll start a business doing it.”
• If you are too busy copying or watching your competition, you’re not innovating.
• Use your competition to exploit their weaknesses.
• Marketing can convince people to buy mediocre products.
• Marketing is a game of perceptions, and whatever the perception is, that’s the reality.
• Businesses survive. Brands thrive. A brand is the best defense to commoditization.
• People are loyal to brands and relationships, not corporations or businesses.
• The first step at building a brand is to have a Unique Selling Proposition or a USP.
• Your USP is the anchor to your brand.
• The objective of a USP is to be unique when compared to the alternatives.
• The best USPs are short, clear, and powerful. Long phrases get skipped over.
• A USP is worthless if it isn’t conveyed throughout every aspect of your business.
• You must deliver on what you say.
• Polarization works because it involves an extreme viewpoint, which forces people to either love or hate you.
• Most consumer buying decisions are driven by emotions.
• If you can move your audience’s emotions and make them care, they will buy.
• The first human behavior you can count on is selfishness. People want what they want. People don’t care about you, your business, your product or your dreams; they want to help themselves and their family. It’s human nature. Therefore, our marketing messages must focus on benefits, not features. People need to be told exactly what’s in it for them.
• As consumers, we buy things to solve needs. We engage in transactions to fill voids.
• If you want to sell anything, translate features to benefits.
• Price is a brand-builder because price implies value. The more expensive your price, the higher its perceived value. The cheaper your price, the cheaper its perceived value. Price isn’t simply a number that tells someone what something costs. It conveys value and worth.
• As a marketer you have to drill into your buyer’s mind and get your brand differentiated. Own the consumer’s mind and you own the consumer.
• Marketing and branding (the queen) is the most powerful tool in your Fastlane toolbox.
• Businesses survive. Brands thrive.
• Businesses have identity crises, brands don’t. Identity crises force business owners into price commoditization.
• Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) are the keys to your brand and differentiate your company from the rest.
• People have a natural disposition to be unique and unlike everyone else.
• To succeed in marketing, your messages have to break above the advertising clutter, or noise.
• Polarization is a great above-the-noise tool if your product targets a polarized audience—usually politics, minority opinions, and even sports teams.
• Sex sells and always draws eyeballs.
• Consumers make buying decisions based on emotions before practicality.
• If you can arouse emotions in your audience, you will be more likely to convince them to buy.
• People have a natural disposition to talk about themselves. If you can incorporate interaction into your campaigns, you will have better success.
• To be unconventional means to first isolate and identify what is conventional, then doing the opposite, or interrupting that convention.
• Consumers are selfishly motivated. Always target your messages toward the predisposition of “What’s in it for me?”
• Features are translated to benefits when you switch positions from producer to consumer, identify the feature’s advantages, and extrapolate those advantages into a specific result.
• Price implicitly conveys value and worth.
• Don’t allow your own perception of price direct your brand to mediocrity.
• A scattered focus leads to scattered results.
• When you segregate your effort among assets, you build weak assets.
• To hit the top of your game, business or otherwise, you have to eat, live, and shit your thing. If you’re dabbling in 10 different things, your results will be dabbling and unimpressive. Focus on one thing and do it in the most excellent way.
• Tekel Syndrome sufferers are polygamist-opportunists who opportunity hop.
• A weak business commitment commits you to weak assets.
• Weak assets do not accelerate wealth.
• The most successful entrepreneurs lived their business and were 100% committed to it.
• Successful business monogamy can lead to successful business polygamy.
• The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
• Wealth is a Formula and a systematic process of beliefs, choices, actions, and habits that form a lifestyle. Wealth is a process, not an event.
• Invest in activities that will grant free time.
• Make decisions with time as a key decision factor.
• Wealth is accelerated by exploding income and Asset value via a business that can be systemized and eventually sold in a liquidation event.
• Exponential growth of income and asset value, not slashing expenses, creates millionaires.
• The Law of Effection states, “The more people whose lives you affect in an environment you control, the more money you will make.” Impact millions and you will make millions. When you solve needs on a massive scale, money flows into your life. Money reflects value.
• Education begins at graduation. Pledge to never stop learning. What you know now is not enough to become the person you need to be tomorrow.
• You can’t explode your income by chasing money. Stop chasing money, because it eludes those who try. Instead, focus on what attracts money, and that is a business that solves needs. Money comes from providing value.
• Automate your business and honor the Commandment of Time. Get your time detached from your business.
• To make millions, you must impact millions. To impact millions, you must be on a field capable of affecting millions!
• Excuses never made anyone rich, and we all have them. Stop being like everyone and start taking action.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

• If science is the constellation of facts, theories, and methods collected in curent texts, then scientists are the men who, successfully or not, have striven to contribute one or another element to that particular constellation. Scientific development becomes the piecemeal process by which these items have been added, singly and in combination, to the ever growing stockpile that constitutes scientific techniques and knowledge. And history of science becomes the discipline that chronicles both these successive increments and the obstacles that have inhibited their accumulation.
• Observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science.
• To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than it competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted.
• Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute. To be more successful is not, however, to be either complexity successful with a single problem or notably successful with any large number.
• On the contrary, the process of learning a theory depends upon the study of application, including practice problems-solving both with a pencil and paper and with instruments in the laboratory.
• Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data. History of science indicates that, particularly in the early developmental stages of a new paradigm, it is not even very difficult to invent such alternatives. But that invention of alternates is just what scientists seldom undertake except during the pre-paradigm stage of their science’s development and at very special occasions during its subsequent evolution.
• The transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is far from a cumulative process, one achieved by an articulation or extension of the old paradigm. Rather it is a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals, a reconstruction that changes some of the fields’ most elementary theoretical generalizations as well as many of its paradigm methods and applications.
• During the transition period there will be large but never complete overlap between the problems that can be solved by the old and by the new paradigm.
• Einstein’s theory can be accepted only with the recognition that Newton’s was wrong.
• The temptation to write history backward is both omnipresent and perennial. But scientists are more affected by the temptation to rewrite history, partly because the results of scientific research show no obvious dependence upon the historical context of the inquiry, and partly because, except during crisis and revolution, the scientist's contemporary position seems so secure.
• Probably the single most prevalent claim advanced by the proponents of a new paradigm is that they can solve the problems that have led the old one to a crisis. When it can legitimately be made, this claim is often the most effective one possible.
• One of the strongest, if still unwritten, rules of scientific life is the prohibition of appeals to head of state or to the populace at large in matters scientific.

Why Simple Wins by Lisa Bodell

• Something that’s properly simplified is:
• As minimal as possible.
• As understandable as possible.
• As repeatable as possible.
• As accessible as possible.
• Simple things reduce the number of steps, pages, features, functions, sign-offs, requirements, and other hurdles required to get something accomplished. There’s nothing extra, but at the same time, there’s enough to get the job done.
• Simple things are defined by clear, straightforward language. They are comprehensible to someone who doesn’t already have expertise in the subject at hand.
• Simple things can be scaled or replicated. They aren’t one-offs. THey aren’t customized. It should be easy for someone to do them over and over again.
• Simple things are made available and transparent to as many audiences as possible. Outsiders can make us of them with as few gatekeepers as possible.
• Complexity, then, is the lack of these four elements. It’s a process, product, communication, or procedure that isn’t as minimal, understandable, repeatable, and accessible as possible.
• While complexity is bad, it is possible to oversimplify. Organizations can make their products so simple that they’re no longer useful to consumers.
• Some pursuits truly are complicated--by necessity.
• Most people and organizations contribute to complexity unwittingly and unconsciously, and they do so in part because of various cognitive biases that affect them. Two biases in particular are worth mentioning here: our “insider mindset” and our quest for “more”.
• Over and over, we hear that we can best answer the “big questions” if we look deep within ourselves. All of this inward searching may be helpful and good and right. But in the world of business, looking inside has an important consequence: ti leads us to avoid looking outside.
• But our unending focus on what’s happening inside frequently distracts us from something that’s even more important: the customer experience. And all too often, this results in a tide of unintended complexity unleashed upon the people who buy our products and services.
• A second cognitive bias that all too often leads us unwittingly to make life more complex has to do with our demand for reporting and accountability.
• Driving the demand for reporting and accountability is a familiar cuprit: executive disconnect.
• To avoid the consequences of making a mistake, we err on the side of caution, inviting everyone to the meeting, even those who probably will add little to the conversation. We act out of fear, a desire to “cover our behinds”, to be sure “just in case”.
• A great deal of complexity is driven by something even more basic: or emotional needs.
• If emotions like fear generate complexity on the individual level, systemic complexity can emerge when many people interact fearfully or defensively with one another over time.
• Emotions like fear often lead to what we might call a “mindset of more” that tends toward increased complexity. This mindset is everywhere in the corporate world. More, we assume, is better.
• We’ve become so obsessed with the pursuit of more that we’re suspicious of anything that seems less complicated than it would ordinarily need to be. If a solution is too quick or too easy, we doubt it’ll actually work. Or we assume anyone could do it. Or that it isn’t worth as much as we paid to harness it.
• Make anything too complicated, and it won’t get the job done.
• Besides status quo thinking and fruitless initiatives, a number of other telltale signs may suggest the presence of a complexity problem:
• Too many (or too lengthy) approval processes
• Frustrated customers
• Coordination overload
• Too many rule changes
• The end of easy
• Mystery rules
• An acronym “Zoo”
• It may be that your operations are legitimately complex, or that management simply hasn’t communicated enough to explain how things work. But it may also be that these rules, processes, and procedures no longer have a good reason for existing--in other words, complexity.
• Most of us simply want to understand that the majority of our work contributes in some way to the greater good. We want to know that the work we do every day has a purpose.
• Complexity sucks the life out of your career because it forces you to break a sweat while receiving nothing good in return.
• If you get the work right, you get the culture right.
• For a large organization to be effective, it must be simple. Every organization want better performance. And simplicity is the way to get there.
• In a work environment, it isn’t just solitude that helps people become more creative; it’s also contact with a variety of people and ideas.
• The very things they put in place to drive innovation--meetings, reports, policies, procedures, task forces, and governing bodies--wind up constricting it. While some structure is important, the best approach to change and innovation usually isn’t to do more, but to do less. Get rid of the things that aren't’ working to make space for new things that are.
• Eliminating the complexity allows people to escape their routines and try new things. Although largely unseen and unspoken, simplicity is the most fundamental gateway to innovative thinking and action.
• Complexity is stressful.
• Simplicity is compelling all around--and markes reward it.
• So how do you differentiate yourself? Cut the complexity. Make it shockingly easy for the people buying your products and services to get what they want with minimum hassle. Let them experience the joy of doing in five minutes what they thought would take an hour. In other words, simplify.
• Simplicity won’t just well up naturally from lower in the organization. You have to send the right messages. It’s one of the key things leaders do, and it’s an essential skill to learn if you want to become a leader.
• A leader who tackles simplicity can potentially touch everyone and everything in the organization.
• In a complex organization, there are no silver bullets. But moving towards implicit always adds real value.
• After courage, a second characteristic possessed by leaders intent on driving simplicity down into an organization is an understanding of the value of passing things back.
• Effective simplifiers need to have an intuitive appreciation for less. They need to be able to see, in their mind’s eye, how a simpler company will be more efficient, more productive, and most importantly, more profitable. They need to embrace the wisdom of minimalism.
• Any initiative that shakes things up will trigger resistance in an organization, and simplicity is no exception. In theory, everyone likes simplicity, but for many of the reasons we’ve discussed, we all reflexively latch on to the devil we know. Further, while simplicity is great for the company as a whole, it directly challenges certain individuals and groups whose authority is rooted in the outdated, inefficient, overly complex rules, processes, and systems that need to go.
• If you’re a leader hoping to instill an ethos of simplification, you need to exemplify, empower, and reinforce the behaviors associated with simplification. If you’re not prepared to simplify your own work environment, don't direct those who work for you to strip things down.
• Six characteristics of a simplifier:
• Courage: You are not afraid to challenge the status quo.
• Minimalist Sensibility: You know the value of less.
• Results Orientation: SImplicity isn’t just about cutting costs for you.
• Focus: You don’t give up.
• Personal Engagement: You “walk the walk”.
• Decisiveness: You like to move things forward quickly.
• Simplifying effectively requires first that we determine which discrete tasks and actions aren’t adding value and second that we decide to eliminate the offenders. Once people start spending their time on valuable tasks--things that feel worthy of their time and are in support of a purpose--the culture will follow.
• Any simplification effort must break tasks down into the smallest parts possible; only then can people understand them and feel they can take action.
• Just because something is organized does not at all mean it is simple.
• Five steps to simplicity:
• Awareness
• Identification
• Prioritization
• Execution
• Habit formation
• We all begin our journey to simplification by recognizing the toll taken by complexity, not just on our organizations but on us personally.
• Once we’re aware of complexity, we then uncover areas of our work or specific tasks that create frustration obstacles for us and we decide which simplification opportunities are worth pursuing.
• After identifying opportunities for simplification, the next step is to prioritize them. We must evaluate the opportunities using a “time versus value” equation.
• Once we identify the opportunities, we must execute, piloting new ways of getting things done and making adjustments in real time.
• SImplification isn’t a “one and done” properpostion. It has to become part of the way you operate, part of how you approach everything you do.
• Is it valuable? These questions help you decide if something is necessary or worth your time.
• Is it minimal? These questions help you decide if something is streamlined or reduced to it simplest possible form.
• Is it understandable? These questions determine if communication on a topic is as clear as possible.
• Is it repeatable? These questions help you decide if something is as automated, templates, or scalable as possible.
• Is it accessible? These question shel pi determine if an information source is as readily available to its audience as possible.
• Be warned: once you’ve identified the key source of complexity in your work, you’re going to be shocked at how obvious they were. Chances are you’ve know what was wrong, but you’d never really faced up to the reality.
• Leaders should take note of any rule that appears more than once; this indicates a problem area in the business.
• Simplification needs to be ah bait and a way of looking at the challenges we face every day. It needs to be part of every moment and every decision, woven firmly into the culture of business and defining the ethos of each and every employee.
• Culter is the work we do every day.
• It’s hard to abandon a brand or sell an asset. It can feel like you’re waiving the white flag of surrender. But simplifying your portfolio can empower you to focus more effectively on what remains.
• Like master gardeners, outstanding leaders prune carefully because they know that eliminating waste will eventually yield better results.
• Remember, the key to most simplification regimens is to build some momentum--to parlay a few quick wins into something more sustainable.
• Stop hanging out with people who suck your energy, are rude, add no value, or make you feel lousy each time you interact. Say goodbye to bad clients, business partners, and team members.
• Be diligent about decluttering. Get rid of anything that doesn’t have a memory attached or that you can find online. Creating physical space helps create mental space.
• Goals create intention, and intention creates action.
• Battling complexity is never easy, but any barrier that keeps your employees from doing work that matters demands your sustained attention.
• Simplification requires leadership, resilience, tenacity, flexibility, and hard work.

Patton on Leadership by Alan Axelrod

• Successful leaders do what unsuccessful leaders simply won’t do. And in so doing, they frequently achieve the impossible.
• War is tough. Leaders have to be tough.
• Sometimes a good leader has to be larger than life.
• Patton could reduce complex tasks to their essence, then focus all of his resources on that essence. He believed in attention to detail. Put all the pieces in place, i've your people ever opportunity to succeed, and they will do so.
• Give people goals they can understand, they will meet them. Set The bar high and your people will raise themselves to meet it.
• If Patton’s leadership style might be reduced to a single formula, it would be this: Blend a commanding presence with a common touch.
• The mark of a great motivational speaker is the ability to present ideas as if they come not from him or her, but form those who listen to him or her.
• When in doubt attack.
• The first rule of commanding is to act as if you are in charge--because you are.
• The effective leaders performs the miracle of a great actor: He sets himself apart from those he commands even as he identifies with those he commands.
• Qualities of a great general:
• Tactically aggressive (loves a fight)
• Strength of character
• Steadiness of purpose
• Acceptance of responsibility
• Energy
• Good health
• In a small minority of situations, an aggressive attitude is necessary in dealing with people. Most of the time, however, “tactical aggressiveness” is an attitude toward working a problem. It describes a leadership approach that actively engages reality rather then passively waiting for favorable circumstances to shape themselves.
• In business, the aggressive leader creates favorable circumstances.
• Patton sums up the chief qualities of leadership:
• Perfection of detail
• Personal supervision
• Thorough and detailed knowledge of the business at hand
• A strong physical leadership presence
• The ability to set a personal example
• The ability to communicate--explain--orders
• The commitment to ensure that orders are correctly executed
• Errors are either filares to act or actions that provide advantage to your competition. The vaccines against error understood this wya is not caution, but daring.
• A leader is a man who can adapt principles to circumstances.
• In confronting reality, the object is not to forget or abandon principles, but to allow them to be transformed by the demands of the moment.
• Don’t confuse leadership with a popularity contest. Focus on the mission and on getting your people to focus on the mission.
• A leader leads from the front, not from behind. She takes the risks she asks others to take. She sets the example for others to follow.
• Leadership is about maintaining a delicate balance between pushing and guiding. The genuine leaders leads. He mentors. He guides. He sets examples. He mediates, and he adjudicates. He makes decisions. But, whatever else he does, he does not merely command.
• An effective manager not only knows how to delegate tasks, but knows how to delegate leadership as well.
• The primary criterion a leader should meet is the ability to get the job done, whatever it may be.
• Observer candidates for promotion in action. Evaluate the results. Focus on the individuals who habitually cut to the chase and are able to marshal people and resources to get the job done.
• Bosses come and go. Build your career on a permanent record of accomplishment.
• Most leaders become leaders because they are uncommon--and they know it. The debate as to whether leaders are born or made is bogus. The truth is that some leaders are made, but most leaders make themselves.
• If you are a senior manager, you should not attempt to transform your prima donnas into “regular guys”. You’ve got all the “regular guys” that you need. Accept your subordinate managers as prima donnas, if that’s what they are, and make the most of it. Appeal to their self-confidence. Appeal to the qualities that convince them they are special. Encourage them to be even more exceptional as leaders, innovators, and doers.
• As a leader, you cannot always afford the luxury of revealing all of your feelings, particularly if they are negative.
• As a leader, it is part of your job to appreciate the toll the difficult times may take on the people you manage. In tough times, under adverse business conditions, your subordinates are likely to assume that you are not suffering and will not suffer as much as they.
• Effective managers must conduct themselves so that it is clear that they and their subordinates have an equal stake in the fate of the organization. You don't’ want to appear more comfortable than those who work for you. If employees suspect that they will be sacrificed to you, loyalty, as well as productivity, will disintegrate almost instantly when the chips are down.
• Act like a leader and speak like a leader.
• You can be wrong, but never be in doubt when you speak. Any doubt or fear in your voice and the troops can feel it.
• Never give a command in a sitting position unless you are on a horse or on top of a tank.
• The next time you have something really important to say to a client, coworker, subordinate, or boss, even by telephone, say it standing up.
• Don’t mistake the show of leadership, no matter how necessary, for leadership itself.
• Know when to fight for resources and to hold onto the personnel and other resources you need. Corporate politics can be a bloody business indeed.
• A leader must be intelligent and possesses of sound judgement driven by common sense. However, a leader must be willing to take risks that “smarter” folk might well avoid. A leader cannot be afraid to buck the odds, when need be.
• Most of all, a leader needs to be “stupid” enough not to give in to his or her fears.
• Do more than is required of you.
• Advancement comes with habitually doing more than you are asked.
• A genuine career requires a focused commitment of life energy.
• Go forward.
• In its most profound management sense, Go Forward is a recognition that business, like all aspects of life, is dynamic, not static. To go forward is to make each move, each action, count. To go forward is to give up dwelling on the past.
• We will win because we will never lose! There can never be defeat if a man refuses to accept defeat. Wars are lost in the mind before they are lost on the ground. No nation was ever defeated until the people were willing to accept defeat.
• Success is an attitude.
• It is a winning attitude that motivates success, and it is a winning attitude that sustains success.
• Recognize the difference between strategy and tactics. Strategy is an overall, big-picture plan, which indicates a set of goals. Tactics are the means by which you intend to carry out your strategy. Tactics include objectives, which are steps toward goals.
• In any competitive enterprise, action is preferable to innaction.
• Attack the problem, attack the market, attack the competition, and you are proceeding positively. Fear will melt, and morale will rise.
• Sometimes a leader needs to shake his organization into taking a fresh look at mission and methods.
• Opportunities are easily lost while waiting for “perfect” conditions.
• An effective leader continually assesses risks versus rewards and is willing to gamble--when he is convinced that he has a sure thing.
• A large part of leadership is stubborn determination, a certain single-mindedness. If you want progress, you must rule out all the excuses that impede progress.
• All statements of mission and tactics should be simple--even in as complex an enterprise as war or business.
• Just bear in mind that, in any field, the menu of available strategies and tactics is usually rather limited and can be mastered reasonably well.
• A leader must be able to make the connection between the stock of available strategies and tactics and the best, most efficient means currently available for execution.
• It behooves any leader to know the history of his or her discipline and to read all the experts in the field, particularly experts whose knowledge is based on actual experience. The object is not to follow any example or method slavishly, but to develop a strategic and tactical vocabulary that will create solutions faster and more efficiently than having to reinvent the wheel with each problem that is encountered.
• Inventory everything that can go wrong. Do not be blindly optimistic. Face reality, and plan for reality. The name of the game is contingency. But once the contingencies have been addressed and the plans formulated, push ahead without self-doubt or fear--or, more accurately, without taking counsel of your self-doubt and fear.
• Surround yourself with people whose knowledge and judgement you trust, then make good use of them. With considerable justification, many managers hesitate to make decisions by committee. In such situations, they believe, bucks get passed, and nothing creative ever gets done, or, at least, never gets done in time.
• Effective leadership is consultative. It welcomes and actively seeks multiple perspectives on any given problem. It does not squander, but rather leverages all available brainpower.
• Leadership requires marshalling resources cooperatively toward a goal with simultaneously preserving--and encouraging--independence of thought. THe moe minds at work independently on a situation, the better. Encourage the exercise of imagination. Insist on cooperation, but welcome creative dissent. Never close yourself to suggestions and insight from others, including from the most junior members of the team.
• Effective leadership is multidimensional. That is the nature of the world we live and work in. Formulating a single plan and sticking to it, no matter what, is one-dimensional thinking. To survive and succeed in the multidimensional world, you need more than one plan.
• Whatever you do, endeavor to leave yourself in the most favorable position--and put your competition in the least favorable.
• Go forward. Move quickly. But go forward and move quickly first with all the preparation necessary to ensure an efficient and profitable result, nut just a wasteful flurry of action for the appeasement of upper management.
• Flexible response it an important quality in any organization. Circumstances are rarely static for long. Failure to respond to change--or, more important, failure to anticipate change-is usually costly and often catastrophic.
• Don’t make changes for the sake of making changes. Spend some time studying the operation. Preserve as much of the useful status quo as possible. In the absence of pressing needs, phase in your innovations over time.
• Never confuse decisive decision making with hasty guesswork.
• Determine what you need to know, determine how to obtain what you need to know, and have a good reason for wanting the information in the first place. Then, and only then, will you truly know what you know and know what you do not know, so that you can base actions, plans, and decisions on a foundation of firm fact.
• It is up to the manager to motivate his pope, and the most important ingredient in motivation is knowledge of goals, objectives, purpose.
• Do not expect blind obedience. Teamwork is always more effective than  slave work.
• The first step toward building a team is defining objectives then making those objective clear to every member of the team. Moreover, communicate those objectives so persuasively that every member of the team will feel that he or she has the same stake in attaining the objectives.
• Managers: Beware of all assumptions, and totally avoid any assumption based on an “average”.
• Information is all around us, and it is the manager’s job to collect what is useful, analyze it, and make profitable use of it. Why rely on second hand opinion when your experience is so effective a teacher?
• Encourage your staff to take care of themselves, to avoid overwork. And take your own advice in this regard.
• The best information is that which you obtain firsthand. As Patton repeatedly advised, urged, and ordered, visit the front.
• Know the limits of what you can expect from yourself and your subordinates. Be willing to push to those limites, but understand that pushing beyond them is subject to one of the few absolute laws that govern business and other human endeavor: the law of diminishing returns. Pushing beyond their limits, people work efficiently, poorly, even counterproductive or destructively.
• Never hesitate to demand the maximum, but understand that it is futile and destructive to demand more.
• INtelligent, effective action is based on knowledge.
• Effective management requires motivating everyone to know his or her job inside and out, to know what can be done and what cannot. The object is to know as much as possible and then also to be fully aware of the things it is not possible to know.
• The truth will prevail, one way or another, and usually sooner rather than later. It is better to face it now and to convince others to do the same.
• WHether or not you face it, truth will create consequences.
• Management by remote control is doomed to fail.
• It is almost impossible for a manager to remain both aloof and effective. Come down off the mountain as frequently as possible.
• An on-site presence is always called for, the object being not only to see the situation for yourself, but to be seen by the people you lead.
• The more senior the officer, the more time he has. Therefore, the senior should go forward to visit the junior rather than call the junior back to see him.
• Resist the temptation to “pull rank” and summon subordinates away from their work just so that you can stay in your office.
• The essence of a leader’s mission is not to act in accordance with a job description, but to lead, guide, correct, and encourage the human beings he works with.
• Failure is a part of business. It will happen. The worst failures, however, are those we declare without having exhausted all possibilities and alternatives. Do not be in a hurry to write off any enterprise. When something falters, intervene personally.
• It takes courage and character to engage a fathering project. It takes courage and character to be a leader.
• A good manager questions the status quo, always looking for better, more efficient ways of doing the jobs that need to be done.
• The good manager asks questions about the tools and procedures routinely employed. He or she asks the poel closest to those tools and procedures. It is on the answers to these questions, given by these people, that he or she bases assessments, opinions, and recommendations concerning tools and procedures.
• When you see a serious problem, don’t just cast blame, tackle it--even if you believe that it is someone else’s responsibility.
• An effective manager concerns himself with whatever is needed to get the job done.
• Don’t equate attention to detail with micromanagement. Identify those details  on which the big picture depends, and then make certain that you manage those details.
• Whatever the high ground is for you, make it a top priority to seize and hold it. It is the difference between controlling a market or other situation and relinquishing control to competitors.
• Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the work of leadership is difficult only for you.
• Do as much of your business as possible in the areas and markets in which you have the greatest expertise and the most intensive resources. Exploit your strengths and, to the extent that it is possible, avoid your weaknesses.
• In ware as in business, it is important to be reliable, but never simply redictable. INnovate. Look for new solutions, even if doing so involves some difficulty: “it is much better to go over difficult ground where you are not expected than it is over good ground where you are expected.”
• The effective manager immerses herself in her work and reads whatever literature is available in her field.
• Recognize opportunity, and seize it.
• Ultimately, our actions are of greater consequences than our words. In critical situations, telling people what they want to hear may provide the illusion of a solution and bring temporary relief. In the long run, however, this approach will not avert disaster.
• Say what needs to be said, then act accordingly. Temporary discomfort is better than temporary relief--if it adverts permanent catastrophe.
• You cannot resist change--successfully. Part of a manager's job is to manage change., to lead his or her organization through it productively. This often involves addressing the fears of members of your organization.
• Planning is a vital element of leadership, but so is the flexibility to adapt plans to changing circumstances. Do not abandon a plan in panic, but realize that rigid adherence to a plan that no longer fits circumstances brings disaster.
• Leadership calls for a delicate combination of preparation and spontaneity.
• When a decision has to be made, make it. There is no totally right time for anything.
• You cannot control everything. Nor can you wait for the roll of the dice to come out just right.
• Sometimes you just have to move with the numbers you have. Make this fundamental pact with reality, or reality will leave you in the dust.
• The bet is the enemy of the good. By this I mean that a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week. War is a very simple thing, and the determining characteristics are self-confidence, speed, and audacity. None of these things can never be perfect, but they can be good.
• Perfection is too expensive. It costs too much time. If you wait for the perfect plan or for the ideal circumstances, opportunities will be lost. Perfection is static. War, life, and business are dynamic and, therefore, imperfect by definition, it is incompatible with perfection.
• Momentum is one of the most valuable resources a manager has. It takes a great deal of energy to overcome inertia--to get going--so, once your organization is on the move with a project, it is your job to keep things going.
• Good tactics can save even the worst strategy. Bad tactics will destroy even the best strategy.
• Never let strategic considerations sweep you away from immediate tactical reality. Plans are nothing if they cannot be executed successfully.
• The soldier is the army. No army is better than its soldiers.
• Man is the only war machine...Always remember that man is the only machine that can win the war...It’s nice to have good equipment,...but man is the key.
• Too many managers are enamored of buildings, machinery, and other equipment. THese things are important, but they are nothing without the people to use them. Always put people first. Invest the bulk of your time, attention, and other resources on building a strong team. That is your priority.
• A good manager goes where she has to adn does what she must. If it means helping out in the front lines--working with a customer, handling a sales call, whatever--dont assume that you are too important to do what’s necessary.
• The effective manager follows Patton’s lead here and trains his or her own replacement. An effective manager is a teacher, coach, and mentor. Don’t worry, you won’t put yourself out of a job--except in an upward direction. Train subordinates to take over, and you make it possible to move up to large responsibilities.
• The priorities of a good manager are simple: He or she recognizes that the organization's most valuable assets are its people.
• A trade-off of material resources for human resources is a winning proposition. Never shortsightedly sacrifice people to save a few short-run dollars.
• An effective manage uses all resources efficiently. He does not make people work harder for the sake of doing hard work. The necessary and available work is always hard enough as it is. The effective manager uses equipment to serve people. He never puts people in the position of serving the equipment.
• Never use a subordinate as a scapegoat. Never fail to deliver on a promise made to a subordinate. Never exploit those on whom you opened, and never give them even the inking of a feeling that they are being exploited, cheated, or in any other way treated shabbily.
• Contrary to what some managers believe, loyalty is not something simply received from subordinates, like a tax or a tribute. It is always a mutual transaction. You cannot expect loyalty without demonstrating loyalty.
• The effective manager builds discipline and pride in employees, so that they fell a part of the organization on its largest scale. He or she must, however, also foster the development of teams within the larger organization, teams capable of operating in coordination with large units as well as on their own.
• He believed that the best authority on how to get a job done was the person who had to do the job.
• Managers should never resist learning even fro junior subordinates. Be the same token, a good manager sia generous mentor. All worthwhile enterprise involves teaching and learning.
• Take advantage of experience, even if it means putting a “higher ranking” employee under the wing of a veteran subordinate for a time.
• The best guide is experience, not a rule book. Use what you know works.
• Exploit the identity and pride of your firm. Encourage your employees to identity with the organization.
• Value experience above all else. Acquire it actively for yourself. Seek it out in others. In planning a project, resort to the textbooks only after you have consulted with people who have actually done and lived through the tasks you are contemplating.
• A theoretical understanding of business situations is important, but you must also develop plans to cope with reality.
• Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
• Patton saw leadership as mostly training and motivation. The object of leadership is to create people who know their jobs and who can reliably supply the how to your what.
• A leader needs to have confidence in his subordinates and, equally important, be willing and able to demonstrate his or her confidence in them. Few people want to fail. Most people want to do a good job.
• Train and prepare the members of your organization, then get out of their way as much as possible.
• Too many managers devoe the bulk of their energy to “running the business”. It is far more effective to focus on finding people who can do the “running” while the manager continually evaluates results and makes personnel-assignment adjustments accordingly.
• Treat your subordinates with respect and with interest. Both are essential. Employ public praise, but private criticism. Do not criticize a subordinate manager in front of his or her subordinates.
• It takes a wise leader to manage people--and an even wiser one to manage “truth”.
• It is the natural tendency of most people in charge to overestimate the threat they are facing. To correct this tendency, you may want consciously to understate the threat.
• Patton’s guiding principle was to go forward, to advance relentless against the enemy, and never to relinquish momentum.
• “All human being”, Patton wrote, “have an innate resistance to obedience. Discipline removes this resistance, and, by constant repetition, makes obedience habitual and unconscious”
• There is only one kind of discipline. Perfect discipline.
• In the truly important aspects of your enterprise, do not hesitate to ask for a great deal from yourself and from those you supervise. You and the others will discover new levels of performance. But you have to demand it--and expect it.
• The truth is that most of us are afraid to admit the power of inspiration. We’re afraid to believe that, ultimately, our success doesn’t depend on having better computers or milling machines than our competitors, but on being motivated by greater inspiration than they are. The idea of careers and millions of dollars in capital and profits riding on emotions is scary. But it’s also a fact.
• Patton’s greatness as a military leader--and his effectiveness as a manager of people--was his courageous willingness to recognize that his career, his life, the lives of his men, the welfare of his nation, everything, ultimately depended on his ability to be inspired by and to inspire others.
• Never neglect technology, but never forget that victory depends on maintenance of the spirit as much as it does on the maintenance of machines.
• Effective leaders never neglect and always cultivate the human touch. Make contact with your subordinates. Communicate with them on a caring, comradely, good-natured level. Demonstrate not only your confidence and pride in them, but your affection as well.
• A true leader gets inside those he leads. He does not import commands from the outside, but inspires people to draw on their own deepest inner reserves. Effective leadership is inspiration. An effective leader is a catalytic who does not force change, but enables change in others.
• Keep your focus on people, not products, not sales, not whatever it is your organization produces. In order to do whatever it does and create whatever it creates, your organization must first motivate people and keep them motivated. That is your number-one job as a manger.
• A big part of managing is knowing when to get up out of your chair and go forward to the front lines.
• “A little extra push” is often the most important tool in a manager's leadership toolbox.
• A good leader is never hashful about instilling pride in the organization. Set the bar high--higher even than you think reality warrants--and the people in your organization will raise themselves to meet it. Persuade your subordinates, colleagues, and bosses that ‘we are the best”, and the best of those people will rise to meet your appraisal.
• Fear is mostly fear of the unknown. You can manage fear in yourself and in those you lead by doing as much as possible to eliminate the unknown.
• Difficult and demanding situations make us stronger and better at what we do. Embrace difficulty as an opportunity for growth.
• Don’t go out of your way to introduce negativity into the workplace.
• Without abandoning reality, usher in new employees with as much positive truth as possible.
• Take advantage of ceremonial occasions as a stage on which to exhibit yourself as a leader. If necessary, create appropriate occasions.
• Effective leaders identify and publicly credit exceptional achievement. This is crucial to reinforcing the level of productivity and quality you want. It celebrates achievement and lifts morale, and it provides incentive to further achievement. It is an indispensible management technique.
• No management tool is more powerful than sincere personal praise delivered publicly and in a timely manner.
• Prompt positive reinforcement in the form of commemoration and celebration is essential to the morale of any organization.
• A good leader is generous with praise, and, equally important, he or she makes the praise genuine. It is always a good idea to review and announce your organization’s accomplishments.
• Take every opportunity presented to convey convincing praise. The function of primase is to encourage continued superior performance while setting the bar a little bit higher. Always end messages of congratulations or praise it a look toward the future.
• The effective manage puts the focus on the people managed, not on him- or herself.
• The problem with most praise is that it is empty, ringing hollow with vague adjectives. The most effective, persuasive praise is a precise tally of accomplishments, names, dates, figures, and effects.
• For most of us, discipline is mostly a matter of negatives: the ability to avoid temptation, to avoid laziness, to put off doing what we really want to do.
• It is important for a leader to demonstrate pride in his organization and to persuade the members of that organization to share his pride.
• Leaders must lead by example and must constantly display the qualities and values held in esteem by the organization.
• Take decisive action with a maximum effort. Halfway measures tip your hand to the competition.
• Remember that your best customers and clients are those you currently have. It is cheaper to hold on to them than it is to acquire new ones.
• A manager must ensure that her subordinates know their jobs, know the essential procedures, and know how to use essential equipment. Don’t leave any of these basics to chance.
• Keep directives a short as is compatible with their being fully understood. Don’t waste words. This uses up time, and it creates confusions.
• Managers should relentlessly and repeatedly review procedures and requirements to weed out anything that is nonessential or smacks of “make-work.” Streamline wherever possible, always stopping short of compromising quality or systems of genuinely prudent checks and balances.
• Remember, wars are won by killing people. The more we kill, the quicke we’ll get out of this war. Wars are not won by defending land. Let the enemy have any land he wants as long as we can get him into a position where we can kill him.
• All successful leaders know, above all, what they are doing. They know what the goal or goals are. They focus all activity on achieving those goals and do not allow themselves--or the people they lead-to get distracted by byproducts and side effects.
• Choose your battles. Having chosen a battle, win it. But, first, choose. An aggressive spirit of leadership is valuable, but pointless aggression is worse than useless. It is destructive of resources, of people, and of morale.
• Resist the temptation to put a layer of assistants between yourself and those you're expected to lead. Establish direct, efficient two-way communication. An open-door police is the best policy. If you cultivate an air of remoteness and unavailability, people will stop talking to you, and you will cheat yourself of the single most valuable commodity in any enterprise: information.
• A leader can be most convincing not by telling people what to think, but by marshalling the appropriate facts and arguments to guide them into thinking for himself---but in the direction desired.
• Orders must be issues early enough to permit time to disseminate them.
• Make all of your major orders or directives in person, if possible. Especially in an age of electronic communication, person-to-person contact is extremely powerful.
• Most business organizations conduct a plethora of meetings, but too few use meetings to exchange truly useful information.
• Effective manages use meetings to coordinate the organization, not merely to trade ideas or to review the past.
• Shouting is not always the best way to get an urgent message across. Lower your voice, and people will strain to listen. They’ll hang on every word. Fall silent at a critical point, and they’ll wait in suspense for your next word.
• Develop a ready facility in public speaking, especially off the cuff. Clear, well-organized, vivid, personal communication is essential to good management. Practice. Reheat your “spontaneity” until it really does seem spontaneous.
• A leader must establish identification with those he leads. He must, quite literally, speak their language. However, a leader is also an actor and must consciously act the part of a leader.
• There is no reason to waste time encoding and decoding a message if you know that the enemy cannot make use of the information before you make use of the information. It does the enemy no good to learn of your attack after you have already attacked.
• You must continually weigh security needs against the information needs of others in your organization.
• As a manager, one of your most important jobs is to provide inspiration.
• To lead, you must understand your business at its most essential--and then be able to focus all of your resources on that essence.
• An effective leader does not bribe her subordinates, but she continually demonstrates that she cares about them and respects their wants as well as their needs. Going the extra mile to make certain that employees feel adequately rewarded--not just in terms of salary, but in the amenities that contribute to the quality of work life--will produce great dividends in the form of maximum productivity, innovation, commitment to the firm, and personal loyalty to yourself. To be sure, you cannot grant all requests, and you must not squander scare resources. But stinginess costs far more than it saves.
• Maximum productivity is not the same as working continuously or working to exhaustion. Maximum productivity is working economically. It is managing time and resources efficiently.
• You cannot afford to squander precious human resources on creating the mere appearance of nonstop productivity.
• Give credit where credit is due--and overdue.
• Effective leadership is efficient leadership. It pares operations down to the simplest level that is consistent with the complexity of the job at hand. That is, the methods for getting a job done should never be more complicated than necessary and certainly no more complicated than the job itself.
• If you want a streamlined, efficient organization, begin by conveying these values in your own words and actions. Maybe you need to start by doing nothing more profound than clearing your desk.
• Set up routine and repetitive operations so that they do not require continually reinventing the wheel. Make it possible for you and your staff to conserve physical and mental energy for the truly creative tasks.
• Recognize your strengths and play to them.
• The effective leaders is not content to make the most of what happens to come her way. She devises--invents, creates--situations tailored to her strengths and the strengths of the organization she leads. This is the essence of proactive management: creating circumstances rather than merely responding to them.
• People must understand that individual action is vital, but that teamwork also requires subordinating ego to collective goals.
• The great things a man does appear to be great only after they are done. When they’re al hand, they are normal decisions and are done without knowledge of their greatness.
• Only by stretching do we grow. If you push the limits, you define new limits. And then you should push those. We are capable of producing and achieving much more than we believed possible.
• Lack of orders is no excuse for inaction.
• By definition, a leader takes the initiative and acts whenever necessary. He or she does not wait to be told what to do. The exceptional leader cultivates this proactive approach in others by establishing flexible guidelines that can serve in the absence of direct, detailed instructions.
• The lesson to learn here is not to violate your organization's rules and procedures, but to beware of following abstract theory and received wisdom slavishly. Real situations require flexibility and spontaneity Rules, rules of thumb, and sage advice from on high are all well and good--use them as guides--but be prepared to act spontaneously in the interest of the immediate “mission”.
• When higher authority is clear and available, it is the manager's job to act in accordance with higher authority. But in situations where such authority is unavailable, it is the manager’s job to take command of a situation so thoroughly that he or she can make the best independent decision. The alternative is paralysis.
• When you make a mistake, give the people you work with--including those you supervise--a shot at divinity. Admit your error. Own up. Then propose a course to correct the mistake. Never use your authority to make mistakes. Admit them. Explain them. Apologize for them. Above all else, use them. Allow people to see how you accept responsibility and how you can learn from error.
• The courageous man is the man who forces himself, in spite of his fear, to carry on. Discipline, pride, self-respect, self-confidence, and the love of glory are attributes which will make a man courageous even when he is afraid.
• Don’t deny your fears. Don’t try to run away from them. Carry on in spite of them.
• You cannot learn to avoid fear, but you can learn to recognize when you are in danger of acting in bind accordance with it. You can learn not to take counsel of fear.
• Creative risk taking is essential to success in any enterprise with stakes worth the winning. THoughtless risks are destructive, of course, but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution, which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity.
• Courage is largely habit and self-confidence.
• Moral courage is the most valuable and usually the most absent characteristic in men.
• Establish a high standard for fairness and decency and you will create a work environment of trust and support, which will empower everyone to take the intelligence risks necessary to advance any enterprise. No one sticks his neck out if he sense that it may be chopped from behind.
• No leader who rests on his or here laurels remains a leader.
• You cannot avoid failure all of the time, but you can refuse to be pinned down by it.
• True success is character, and character is measured by how high you bounce when you topple from that height and hit bottom.
• Few business people are comfortable with the idea of audacity, yet without it, little fo great merit can be accomplished. The stakes of audacity are doubtless high, because the price of failure is great. Yet the price of avoiding audacity is high as well: a long, drawn-out consignment to mediocrity.
• You cannot take your competition by surprise if you act exclusively on precedent and received wisdom. Look at the situation afresh and always consider the advantages of taking the road less traveled.
• A highly effective way to affirm your leadership is to preside over celebration and commemoration. Create special events from time to time, and always greet your subordinates and colleagues on major holidays.