71–80 of 230 posts
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" it's a lot easier to get up at 5am, shake hands firmly, and dress for success" Let's not be superfluous. Being a CEO is hard, even the 5 am rising and 'hand shaking' parts.
>>Being a CEO is hard Not necessarily. It completely depends on the company and the industry.
-leading a company
-dealing with finances
-constantly making important decisions
As a hard job.
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>>Being a CEO is hard Not necessarily. It completely depends on the company and the industry.
Well, regardless of the industry. Most people would consider the tasks of: -leading a company -dealing with finances -constantly making important decisions As a hard job.
Not that the CEO should be completely out of the loop (she has to sign off, after all).
But if a CEO is dealing with nitty, gritty details if finances there's a severe delegation issue at best and a detail obsessed control-freak at worst.
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Interesting perspective. Is it your belief that people read these as how-to or self-help books? I enjoy reading them the same way I enjoy learning from my co-worker's habits. I take what matters to me and throw away the rest. I'm always trying to improve how I do my current job. It's not enough to have an open mind about work habits / techniques, one has to actively seek out new information. Also it's usually an inte…
Biographies can be interesting, but books that extrapolate directives from case studies of winners are totally useless. If 8 of the top 10 CEOs do x, you can be sure it will be reported in that kind of book, even if 999 of the bottom 1000 failed business leaders do the same thing. There are tons of these books, and the only lesson they teach is how often people fall for the trap of survivorship bias.
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Early rising isn't so much what time you wake up as it is waking up early enough so you have time to yourself before you have to go into the office or start your day job. The important thing is your first few hours after waking go to your most important goals.
> The important thing is your first few hours after waking go to your most important goals. Why? I find I'm often more productive at the end of the day than the beginning. And more productive late at night than early in the morning. I find the obsession with waking up early very strange (and often counter-productive).
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> spot an extreme growth opportunity, bet everything on it, and be correct. > Or be born into money. No amount of self-help is going to tilt the scale towards that. While there are undoubtedly success stories which resemble both of these caricatures, I think they're in the minority. I can't say I'm hobnobbing with the Forbes billionaires list but I have personal relationships with many people who built successful bus…
I’ll add - “they had the privilege of being able to focus their attention and not be harmed for it”.
Where does the "harm" you talk about come from? Usually it's because there are other responsibilities you're engaged with. If you literally give everything else up to focus on one thing, these barbs aren't in your life. I'm talking forgoing rent to crash with family/friends, eating ramen, selling/getting rid of your things, live on credit cards, etc, and have a 24/7 focus that keeps you going.
You'd be surprised how much that frees you from the immediate "harm" you describe, but you also have nothing to fall back on, because you pretty much have nothing else anymore than your pursuit, and can be amassing enormous debt (financial and otherwise). It's a huge amortized, pushed-forward harm in the hopes that the gamble pays off. For many, it doesn't.
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> spot an extreme growth opportunity, bet everything on it, and be correct. Or be born into money. No amount of self-help is going to tilt the scale towards that.
> spot an extreme growth opportunity, bet everything on it, and be correct. > Or be born into money. No amount of self-help is going to tilt the scale towards that. While there are undoubtedly success stories which resemble both of these caricatures, I think they're in the minority. I can't say I'm hobnobbing with the Forbes billionaires list but I have personal relationships with many people who built successful bus…
Having the resources to take risks is the number one factor to succeeding, I think. Being able to identify good opportunities comes after that.
At one time I thought highly successful people would be more like each other than less successful people. I believed it even more when it was explained as the Anna Karenina principle. But my experience hasn't borne it out. There are many things you can point to as advantages or "best practices" but in the end it all seems to dissolve into our penchant for telling stories. One guy is successful because he was born int…
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I don't think it's helpful to copy what they do as CEO. I look for what they did in their lowest paying job and how they changed as they progressed in their careers. Of course, very few autobiographies cover this.
Have you found any source for this kind of information. Sometimes I’ll look over the work histories of founders LinkedIn, but employment history is pretty superficial information.
Never understood people's infatuation with reading CEO biographies. I've read a few and never found anything in it that could relate to. May be I am not meant to be one of those people. Even if I worked hard, got in at work at 5 am every day, I don't think I could go from being a lowely team lead to cto or CEO of a multi billion dollar corporation. I don't think it just works that way. I could be very wrong, but that…
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Bo Burnham on getting into showbiz: "Don't take advice from guys like me who've gotten very lucky. Taylor Swift telling you to follow your dreams is like a lottery winner saying 'Liquidize your assets! Buy Powerball tickets! It works!'" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-JgG0ECp2U )
Ah Taylor Swift, she didn’t really win the lottery though, or if she did, she was able to start off buying a loooooot of tickets. Her father worked for Merril Lynch, from three generations of bank presidents. Her mother worked in finance. When she was 14 her father moved the family to Nashville and worked for Merril Lynch there, and invested in a record label called Big Machine to the tune of $120,000. This was the c…