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People
Hiring, delegating, careers, and who ends up doing what.
- Brooks's lawAdding people to a late project makes it later.ConceptsBusiness
- Career CapitalThe stock of rare and valuable skills, relationships and proof you have accumulated.ConceptsTransitions
- Competency confusionAssuming that excellence at the thing you deliver transfers to running the business that delivers it.ConceptsBusiness
- Conway's lawOrganizations produce systems that copy their own communication structure.ConceptsBusiness
- Deep WorkSustained concentration is becoming rare as it becomes valuable, and it has to be scheduled rather than fitted around interruptions.BooksBusiness2016
- DelegationTransferring responsibility for an outcome, not just the task.ConceptsBusiness
- Deliberate PracticePractice designed to improve a specific weakness, with immediate feedback and at the edge of current ability.ConceptsBusiness
- Dunbar's numberThe rough limit on how many people someone can maintain stable relationships with, usually put near 150.ConceptsBusiness
- Golden handcuffsCompensation good enough to keep you in a job that has stopped teaching you anything.ConceptsTransitions
- Hanlon's razorNever attribute to malice what is adequately explained by carelessness, confusion or overload.ConceptsBusiness
- How to change careers without starting overMove along one axis at a time.GuidesTransitions
- How to choose between two job offersAsk which one pays well and which one teaches you something, and take the one that still teaches.GuidesTransitions
- How to get access to bigger workAsk for the scope rather than the title, and be undeniable on something small first.GuidesTransitions
- How to stop preparing and startPick the smallest version that produces a real consequence — one paying customer, one published piece, one real conversation — and do that this week.GuidesTransitions
- Locus Of ControlThe degree to which a person attributes outcomes to their own action rather than to luck, fate or other people.ConceptsTransitions
- Maslow's hierarchy of needsAbraham Maslow's 1943 proposal that human motives fall into classes — physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, self-actualization — with the lower ones generally more urgent when unmet.ConceptsMeaning
- MeditationsMarcus Aurelius's private philosophical notebooks, twelve books of Stoic reflections composed during the later years of his reign as Roman emperor.BooksPhilosophy
- MindsetWhether you believe ability is fixed or developable changes how you respond to difficulty, and beliefs about ability are shaped by how effort and results are praised.BooksBusiness2006
- Moral licensingHaving done something good makes people likelier to do something bad afterwards, as though a balance had been credited.ConceptsBusiness
- Owner dependencyThe degree to which a business needs one specific person to keep working.ConceptsBusiness
- PeakExpertise comes from practice with specific conditions — targeting weakness at the edge of ability with feedback — rather than from experience or talent.BooksBusiness2016
- Performance TheaterActivity performed to be seen working rather than to move a result.ConceptsBusiness
- Price's lawDerek de Solla Price's claim that half the output of a group comes from the square root of the number of contributors — so of a hundred people, ten produce half the work.ConceptsBusiness
- Status GamesCompetition for relative position rather than absolute outcome.ConceptsBusiness
- The AscentSeven peaks from grinding after hours to being time rich: build skill, ask for access, earn the seat, win first clients, leave, grow, then sell or automate.FrameworksBusinessWhere you are, and what this rung costs
- The deferred life planOrganizing life in two stages — do the unwanted thing now, live afterward — where the second stage is indefinitely postponed because its trigger condition keeps moving.ConceptsTransitions
- The Dunning-Kruger effectThat the skill needed to do something well is close to the skill needed to judge whether it was done well, so the least competent are the worst placed to know it.ConceptsBusiness
- The E-Myth RevisitedMost small businesses are started by technicians who are good at the work and have not learned the separate job of building a business that runs without them.BooksBusiness1995
- The Exit PipelineLeaving a job is a pipeline with four stages: idea, first dollar, repeatable dollar, and a dollar that covers rent.FrameworksBusinessWhen to actually leave
- The Handcuffs MatrixTwo questions sort any job into four outcomes: does it pay well, and does it teach you anything.FrameworksBusinessWhether to stay in this job
- The Peter principleThat people get promoted on performance in their current job until they reach one they are not good at, and then stop being promoted.ConceptsBusiness
- The principal-agent problemWhat happens when one party acts on behalf of another whose interests differ from theirs and who cannot see everything they do.ConceptsBusiness
- The Skill SorterTwo questions sort any skill: will people pay for it, and will it still matter in ten years.FrameworksBusinessWhich skill to learn next
- When to quit your jobQuit when you have a repeatable dollar and a validated lead source, not when you have saved a particular number.GuidesTransitions