I recently read an older post by Morgan Housel, of Collaborative Fund, titled What I Believe. In his words, he lists the “ten things that guide almost everything I think about in business and investing.”
Ray Dalio popularized the idea of principles, but the idea predates him. Most successful leaders operate – consciously or unconsciously – on a set of principles that dictates the course of their professional lives. Not all principles are created equal, though. Last year, I realized I had been operating for most of my life on one primary principle: Work really hard and the rest will work itself out. It’s a principle with many advocates. But following it, I felt my mental state grew increasingly cluttered, inconsistent, and really tightly wound. I was an entanglement of threads that grew increasingly knotted.
By all objective measures, I had achieved what I set out to do. But not without leaving a trail of wreckage wherever I went, not least of which upon myself. My energy burn rate felt astronomically high as I frenetically followed whatever next step I was told would lead to success. This can’t be sustainable, I thought. Spoiler: It’s not.
And so a few months ago, I decided I had been acting out a principle I didn’t even believe in. I didn’t intentionally replace it, but I became very deliberate about the work I pursued and why. It was only after reading Housel’s article, that I felt compelled to pen them. As it turned out, I had simply inverted most of the prior notions I was working with.
- Intrinsic Value > Economics. Everything I’ve done with a singular focus on economics has fallen short. Everything I’ve pursued because I believed in the intrinsic value has exceeded expectations. Assessing a business based on unit economics is especially popular today. But a durable competitive advantage comes from the value it creates for its stakeholders. If you get that right, the unit economics will follow. Economics is not always an accurate reflection of intrinsic value. The same can be said of a career.
- Cause > Effect. The best results happen when the outcome is secondary to the reason you pursued it to begin with. The worst failures happen when the lack of inner drive prevents you from getting to the outcome. You live with a mission or the “why” every single day. An effect is an ephemeral thing that comes and goes. Statistically speaking, you’re much better off aligning yourself to a cause than an effect.
- Yielding > Controlling. To yield to others and unforeseen events makes you more open-minded. Control makes you closed-minded. A common piece of advice is to forget about what you can’t control and focus on what you can. I found the issue wasn’t what we can’t control, but that we spend too much time trying to control anything at all. By trying to control, you end up being controlled. A hard-charging behavior of control usually ends up charging through a cement wall, when there was an open path right next to it all along.
- Giving > Getting. The world puts a lot of pressure on businesses and people to get, but very little to give. We think: What can you do for me, rather than what can I do for you? But giving generates a much higher ROI than getting. The companies that have the most loyal customer base are usually the ones that give the most. The best bosses are always the most generous. Giving is too often defined in financial terms, but small gestures, like kindness generate outsized outcomes. What you put into the world, always comes back, even if not right away.
- A Team > An Individual. If a team congeals well, it will always outperform an individual. Most teams, though, never mix well enough because most people can’t get over themselves. A true team is one where no one ever feels superior or inferior to anyone else. And not just in practice, but in thought, too. People identify so closely with the role and title they have in an organization, they often conflate the two. I find this to be especially true of modern management. A senior person views themselves as superior to anyone junior and vice versa even though I’ve learned as much from those junior to me as seniors.
In my experience, I’ve only ever found one source of edge: When these five concepts all align, it’s particularly tough to beat. There’s an alignment between people, what they’re doing, and how they’re doing it. It just works. You see it in business, in sports, and in your personal life.
The common theme, though, is really to get out of your own head and out of your own way. So many people, myself included, waste too much time defining their self-worth from an egocentric viewpoint, identifying too closely with their job, their salary, their status, or other social constructs. When in reality, professional success circles back a lot more quickly when we can transcend that mindset.