"Pre mature optimization is the root of all evil for engineers, but it’s also an excuse that prevents progress in personal goals."

"You need momentum. You need progress. You need forward movement happening right now."

"The importance of morale is vastly underestimated."

"Company founding stories are almost always non-malicious lies."

"Sam was already 44(!) when he opened the first Walmart and had been running his own retail stores for over 15 years."

"Like most overnight successes, it was about 20 years in the making."

"I’ve always thought of problems as challenges, and this one wasn’t any different… I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time."

"Sam said “it didn’t matter much because I had big plans.”"

"The lesson here is that there will be mistakes and problems on any path to success. As a recent book title says, those obstacles are the way itself."

"less afraid of being wrong than anyone I’ve ever known…Once he sees he’s wrong, he just shakes it off and heads in another direction."

"You think “oh I need a great idea” when the reality is the idea is nothing and your psychology & persistence is everything."

"Even the great Sam Walton couldn’t find investors to start the 1st Walmart, on the back of a near-perfect record in retail."

"If you want to learn from entrepreneurs, look at the start not the finish."

"Said another way, happiness isn’t a stock, but a flow."

"What makes you happy isn’t accomplishing the goal, but the movement towards it."

"“Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy.”"

"What separates people who do great things vs the normals isn’t some intrinsic property, but that the greats make a little progress every day."

"And this gives the extra benefit of making your current state irrelevant. Which is fantastic because 1) now you don’t worry about how “far behind” you might feel, and 2) whatever anyone else’s state might be is irrelevant."

"it forces you to think about what’s specific to you instead of comparing your pile of stuff to someone else’s pile."

"Getting all those people aligned and moving in the same direction becomes far more important (read: valuable) than “knowing the right answer.”"

"Communication, diplomacy, alignment all become more important vs the technical skills required to do the work itself."

"Knowing what to do becomes like 10% of the solution. Getting people aligned and rowing in the right direction is the other 90%."

"That could lead to a culture of fear where people are afraid to talk about what’s broken."

"The point is to recognize that identifying a problem is only ~10% of the value, and that fraction gets a lot smaller as the size of your organization grows."

"The bigger the org, and the bigger the problem, the less the value comes from knowing the solution, and much less so from knowing how to do it yourself."