As soon as a smart product or business idea becomes popular, the urge to copy it and commoditize it is the strongest force economics can unleash.

strong beliefs, weakly held,

The inability to understand how your customers experience your product almost guarantees an eventual drift between the problems a business tries to solve and the problems customers need solved.

There’s a bias called “the curse of knowledge,” which is the inability to realize that other people with less experience than you have don’t see the world through the same lens you do.

If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you’re going to double your inventiveness.

The key is creating a culture that allows you to fail often without ruin. This means not docking employees for trying things that don’t work, and not betting so much on a single idea that its failure could cripple the company.

It’s amazing how much of a competitive advantage can be found by simply having the disposition to wait longer than your competitors.

If you can wait five years when your competitors are only willing to wait two, you have an advantage that is both powerful and uncorrelated to intelligence or skill.