underscored

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Tag:leadershipClear

It's all too easy to slip into doing a softball puff piece — fawning all over your guests and treating them like gurus dispensing wisdom from a mountain. This is an even easier trap for someone like Dwarkesh, who is very young and who is primarily known for interviewing people instead of for dispensing his own thoughts. So it's extremely impressive that he consistently avoids this trap — he always manages to challenge and provoke his subjects, rather than just letting them spout their usual talking points.

Noah Smith
22h ago

The primary cause of failure in leadership is that men do not think enough. They trust to their memories and their passions, and act from them, when they ought to consult their understandings.

3d ago

He was Apple's CEO longer than my son has been alive, and a year longer than Steve Jobs. That, needless to say, is worth reflection.

4d ago

We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot.

1w ago

The best thing a company can do is to be a wonderful place to work and to create products and services that genuinely improve people's lives. Most companies optimize for the wrong thing—they optimize for quarterly earnings instead of for the long-term health of the business and the satisfaction of their customers.

1w ago

Mario shares how he uses real-time data and second-derivative thinking to make decisions, how he hires and develops A players (and the gut test that tells you who isn't one), how he runs meetings that surface the best thinking from the most junior person in the room, and why ego, complacency, and small goals quietly cap everything.

2w ago

The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate 'apparent' ordinary people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.

2w ago

I anticipated that Trump would be chaotic, dictatorial, and cruel, but I failed to anticipate how stupid he would be.

3w ago

He tries to hear out every faction: first the AI existential risk people, then the AI optimists and accelerationists like "Beff Jezos," then the "stochastic parrot" / "current harms" people like Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru, and finally the AI company CEOs (Altman, Amodei, and Hassabis were the three who agreed to be interviewed), with Yuval Noah Harari showing up from time to time to insert deepities.

4w ago

I'll be honest that building a new media brand, and continuing to work on high-quality journalism while growing a business, has been the most challenging, stressful and rewarding experience of my career so far.

1mo ago

The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate 'apparently ordinary' people to unusual effort over many years.

1mo ago

The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate 'apparently ordinary' people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.

1mo ago

The difference between a business and a cult is that a business creates value for the outside world; a cult extracts value from insiders and gives it to the leader. Most startups fail not because the idea is bad, but because the founder confused the two.

1mo ago

There is an argument that without the organizational skills and production strategy Forrest brought to the table, Fender may have not been able to make the jump from a comparatively small builder to the mammoth industry leader it became.

1mo ago

The difference between a business and a cult is that a business creates value for people who are not going to work there. A cult is just a business where you worship the CEO.

1mo ago
longreads.com
Stay Classy

Andrew was a walking category error, perceiving no difference between business and pleasure, between what was good for the country and what was excellent for him, conducting a campaign of international larceny masquerading as public service.

1mo ago

The one thing we ask is that the man who is not thinking should get out of the way of the man who is. The world wants to move forward, and if you're not moving with it, you're holding it back.

1mo ago

a small group of sufficiently talented and motivated people can change how the future plays out.

1mo ago

After two decades of working inside companies like Google, Facebook, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and supporting leaders at companies like Stripe, Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Gamma, I've come to believe that blaming people for problems that are actually structural is one of the biggest leadership traps there is.

1mo ago

If the people in that room succeed, America's next 250 years will be better than its first 250.

1mo ago

It had taken Sutskever years to be able to put his finger on Altman's pattern of behavior — how OpenAI's CEO would tell him one thing, then say another and act as if the difference was an accident. "Oh, I must have misspoken," Altman would say.

1mo ago

how OpenAI's CEO would tell him one thing, then say another and act as if the difference was an accident. "Oh, I must have misspoken," Altman would say. Sutskever felt that Altman was dishonest and causing chaos, which would be a problem for any CEO, but especially for one in charge of such potentially civilization-altering technology.

1mo ago

It had taken Sutskever years to be able to put his finger on Altman's pattern of behavior — how OpenAI's CEO would tell him one thing, then say another and act as if the difference was an accident.

1mo ago

The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.

1mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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