The Executive Mindset

• You are rewarded for working harder and independently solving problems.
  
• You earn more credibility by knowing more and building domain expertise.
• You get more scope (and promoted!) by taking on more with a “can-do” attitude.

• You build and lead teams and systems to solve problems rather than do the work yourself.
• You ask questions of the experts to manage tradeoffs across different domains.
• You decide on the top strategic priorities to address, and deliver results through others by mobilizing and coordinating people across different functions and perspectives.

• I reflected on my 40s after a friend read this David Brooks Atlantic article about late bloomers and jokingly commented "hey, if we haven't figured out our lives by 40, it's still not over!" I transformed my life in many ways over the past ten years, and sharing that struck a chord, as it became one of my most viral posts ever, reaching 10x more people than my normal posts.
• What ingredients do you need to get the outcomes you want? Rather than focus on the results (like a cake), focus on the ingredients and process necessary to create those results (the recipe). Ingredients that often lead to success include exercise, sleeping and eating well, and connecting with other humans.
• Learning and growth comes from challenge, not comfort. An analogy is going to the gym; only by lifting challenging weights do you get stronger. When you change your focus in a difficult situation to how you can improve, you might start to welcome challenge as a way to learn and grow.
• Your team will not be a good fit for everyone. I use cultural examples from tech companies like Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon to illustrate the principles and values embedded in those companies. Effective executives make these principles and values clear and create alignment across their organizations by reinforcing who is a good fit with those values.

• I was interviewed by the site Canvas Rebel to share a few lessons from my career. It's a self promotion site (they sell plaques and posters to display your interview in your office) but I enjoyed the chance to share my stories with their audience.

• The Right Kind of Stubborn, by Paul Graham. I often don't agree with Paul Graham, especially since he doesn't seem to have examined how his privilege amplified his success before offering advice. But I appreciated his exploration of the difference between persistence during hard times (good!) and an obstinate refusal to change (bad!), and how you can tell the difference before seeing the eventual results. This is a great insight: "The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it." He observes that being persistent requires "energy, imagination, resilience, good judgement, and focus on a goal". Note that a focus on company results rather than individual success helps to create the executive mindset I describe above.
• This Is What Elite Failure Looks Like, by Oren Cass. I actually agreed with a point made in this NY Times column by a prominent conservative (former policy director for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign): "the typical American has an attachment to place, a focus on family, a commitment to making things, and would accept economic trade-offs in pursuit of those priorities." He recommends "creating productive markets" (stop optimizing for increasing shareholder value!), and a focus on "supporting communities" (over individual success). I have subscribed to Cass's substack even though I don't agree with much of what he says, as it's an exposure to how others think outside of my "liberal elite" bubble.
• On the flip side, Meg Conley points out the ways in which the conservative agenda also includes horrible positions on gun safety and women's rights (J.D. Vance wants to ban abortion completely and remove no-fault divorces so that women are at the mercy of their husbands). She observes that "The great thing about America, at least for right now, is that we don’t need violence to stop authoritarians. We just need to vote. But Vance and his ilk would like to change that." She notes that Biden is awful in many ways, and it sucks that we don't have better choices, but she observes that the Christian Nationalists "believe they need one more Trump term, one more justice on the court, to transform our country into a theocracy, where only white men are ordained to rule." Scary stuff.