Successful people don’t get everything done. Successful people get the most important things done. Everyone’s todo list is infinite. The goal is not to do everything on the todo list. The goal is to do the important things.

Confront reality. If a solution is not working. Change your approach. If a project is stuck, don’t pretend its not. Communicate reality.

Productivity is anything that moves you towards your goal. Everything else is a distraction.

There are no bad teams, only bad leaders. People are only as good as the environment in which they operate.

Focus on the mission, not on yourself. Success is when the team completes the mission. Success is when the product is useful to the customer. Great leaders understand the mission is not about themselves. The company, the team, the group doesn’t exist to serve a single person. It exists to help others.

Life is poker, not chess.

To win at chess: be perfect
In chess, there is always a right answer and a wrong answer. I can compute a perfect game if I’m smart enough and I do enough calculations.

To win at poker: be consistent
In poker, where randomness is built into the game, its not about being perfect. Its about being consistent.

Poker players don’t win in a single hand. They don’t win by risking it all on a single big bet. They consistently make lots of small every day decisions correctly again and again. They don’t need to be perfect. Even if they play every hand “perfectly” they will still lose at times.

Doing the small things right is hard and requires analysis, self awareness, emotional control, practice, and experience. Its rare that a newcomer with no experience starts playing poker and immediately wins big. And even if they do, they soon lose it all.

In other words: be consistently good, not perfect.