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The first thing an editor does and you have all probably had this experience in school, is you submit a paper, to a TA, a draft to your friend, and the first thing that editor does is they take out a red pen, or nowadays you go online, and they start striking things. Basically eliminating things, the biggest task of an editor is to simplify, simplify, simplify and that usually means omitting things. So that's your job too, is to clarify and simplify for everybody on your team. The more you simplify, the better people will perform. People can not understand and keep track of a long complicated set of initiatives. So you have to distill it down to one, two, or three things and use a framework they can repeat, they can repeat without thinking about, they can repeat to their friends, they can repeat at night.

We have a culture of taking risks. I prefer you take a shot. I’d rather have someone who gets A, F, F, A than someone that gets B+, B+, B+, B+. I prefer people who ask for forgiveness rather than for permission. You have to be willing to put yourself out of business by trying new things, before someone else does.

A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle.

Hacking something together means deciding what to do as you're doing it, not a subordinate executing the vision of his boss. It implies the result won't be pretty, because it will be made quickly out of inadequate materials. It may work, but it won't be the sort of thing the eminent would want to put their name on. Something hacked together means something that barely solves the problem, or maybe doesn't solve the problem at all, but another you discovered en route. But that's ok, because the main value of that initial version is not the thing itself, but what it leads to. Insiders who daren't walk through the mud in their nice clothes will never make it to the solid ground on the other side.

Think about what makes you ‘imbalanced’ as a personality, & do things where this gives you an edge.

History I conquered rather than studied: that is to say, I wanted from it and retained of it only what could add to my ideas, I spurned what was of no use, and I seized upon certain conclusions that pleased me.

Final concept, contrarian, I also believe in hiring people who have egos. My general view in the world is almost anybody who's been world class at anything, in any field, has an ego. Now, that doesn't mean you can always tell from afar, but having known a lot of professional athletes, professional DJs, politicians, I've never met a successful person who doesn't have an ego. So this is a famous quote from Michael. But I generally agree with this, so I do not filter, don't recommend filtering people. You want people who want to be winners because you want to build a winning company. And the only way you build a winning company is with winning people.

This technique can be generalized to any sort of work: if you're an outsider, don't be ruled by plans. Planning is often just a weakness forced on those who delegate.

Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.

It means that you’re hooked for lifetime learning, and without lifetime learning you people are not going to do very well. You are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know. You’re going to advance in life by what you’re going to learn after you leave here…if civilization can progress only when it invents the method of invention, you can progress only when you learn the method of learning.