How Superhuman Build an Engine to Find Product Market Fit
“You can always feel when product/market fit is not happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of ‘blah,’ the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.
Marc Andreessen
And you can always feel product/market fit when it is happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they’ve heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house.”
The Never Ending Now
This essay hit me like a ton of bricks and helped me radically rethink my smartphone and social usage. Give it a shot, it may do the same for you.
“The structure of our social media feeds place us in a Never-Ending Now. It sucks us into a temporal myopia.”
David Perell
You Could Have Today. Instead You Choose Tomorrow
I’ve always found it’s better to think about what I want my ordinary life to look like most of the time. Then I try to make decisions based on the simple metric of whether they allow for more or less of that right now.
Ryan Holiday
The Surprising Power of The Long Game
“In everything you do, you’re either playing a short term or long term game. You can’t opt out and you can’t play a long-term game in everything, you need to pick what matters to you. But in everything you do time amplifies the difference between long and short-term games. The question you need to think about is when and where to play a long-term game.”
Yes, It’s All Your Fault: Active vs. Passive Mindsets
This essay highlights a principle that I’ve tried to live by in my own life for a long time. I was inspired by the character of Dick Winters in Band of Brothers and his radical “first-in last-out” style of leadership. It’s not only helpful in leadership, but it can also be helpful in taking ownership of problems in your own life and working to overcome them rather than letting them overcome you.
Five Percent Better: The Compounding of Consistent Incremental Progress
The fact that this resonates with me is likely due in part to the fact that it’s tied to a principle that I see in action at work every day. I not only believe in the professional benefits of this mindset, but also the personal.
The Moral Peril of Meritocracy
This insightful essay discusses the ultimate shortsightedness of the individualistic meritocratic ideal. Very timely words…
“The first mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self, the second is about shedding the ego and dissolving the self. If the first mountain is about acquisition, the second mountain is about contribution.”
David Brooks
Flywheel Effect: Why Positive Feedback Loops are a Meta-Competitive Advantage
The Flywheel Effect refers to positive feedback loops that build momentum, increasing the payoff of incremental effort. It’s based on old school mechanical flywheels like the one described below:
“Picture a huge, heavy flywheel — a massive metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle, about 30 feet in diameter, 2 feet thick, and weighing about 5,000 pounds. Now imagine your task is to get the flywheel rotating on the axle as fast and long as possible.
Jim Collins, Good to Great
Pushing with great effort, you get the flywheel to inch forward, moving almost imperceptibly at first. You keep pushing and, after two or three hours of persistent effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn.”
This article explains how applying an approach of incremental gains toward the pieces of your flywheel can lead to a big competitive advantage.