2025-12-13 20:27:00
If you can’t engage with patience and focus, don’t engage at all.
A half-hearted engagement often causes more damage than no engagement. It is nearly always better to pause, reset, and return with intention than to show up distracted and reactive.
In most situations, the quality of our presence matters more than the speed of our response.
2025-12-12 20:31:00
There’s an insightful story Jack Welch often told about a formative moment early in his career at GE. He was part of a graduate program with a cohort of new hires – a mix of people who worked hard and carried their weight, and others who clearly did not.
During performance review time, he learned that everyone in the program was being given the same raise.
He was furious because he knew who in the group was doing exceptional work and who wasn’t. Everyone did. As he put it, “Kids in any class know who the best students are.”
Effort and performance aren’t as subjective as we sometimes pretend.
That moment shaped him. It became the seed for his later, legendary emphasis on meritocracy at GE – including the (controversial) forced ranking system where the bottom 10% were consistently shown the door.
Agree or disagree with the method, the underlying principle he lived by was clear: When you reward strong performance, people rise to the standard. And when you tolerate weak performance – or worse, reward it – you destroy accountability.
And when accountability disappears, the people who thrive on it leave.
In many ways, that is the beginning of the end for any high-performing team or organization.
2025-12-11 20:39:00
Over the years, I’ve made many hiring decisions. And while I’ve learned a lot about assessing fit, potential, and craft, there’s one lesson that has been etched in with scar tissue: don’t skip that reference check.
Most hirers are diligent about reference checks when hiring senior talent. But the place where corners get cut is with younger talent.
I’ve learned the hard way that this is exactly where discipline matters most.
Good reference checks – and backchannels where appropriate and possible – are invaluable. They reveal patterns, motivations, and (crucially) red flags that you simply cannot infer from a few conversations.
A little bit of work up front can save a lot of pain later.
2025-12-10 20:06:00
“My job is to be calm and collected when they’re frantic. My job is to create intensity when they’re not intense. My job is to always be opposite the moment.” | Texas A&M football coach Mike Elko
I thought this was fascinating framing of the role of a coach / leader – it resonated.
2025-12-09 20:24:00
“The best way to get what you want is to deserve what you want.” | Charlie Munger
I was reminded of this piece of Munger wisdom recently.
Resonates deeply every time.
2025-12-08 20:22:00
Dr. Peter Attia’s team shared a thoughtful retrospective on a proposed explanation they shared previously.
Two years ago, they shared results from a trial that showed GLP-1 drugs (Ozempic, Wegovy) weren’t just remarkable in combating efficacy and type II diabetes – but that they were also effective in reducing major adverse cardiovascular events (heart attacks, stokes).
Taking a simplistic Occam’s razor inspired approach, they’d suggested that the reduction in cardiovascular risk was likely due to the weight loss involved.
However, additional data released recently showed that the drugs had a separate positive impact on cardiovascular risk because there was no correlation between a patient’s weight loss and their cardiovascular risk.
Their post ended with a reflection –
Occam’s razor is a useful heuristic for problem-solving across many disciplines, but biology and medicine are rife with instances where this principle has failed. (Indeed, there’s a principle that specifically opposes Occam’s razor in the context of medicine—Hickam’s dictum, which is typically presented as the observation that “a patient can have as many diseases as they damn well please.”).
So although defaulting to the simplest explanation may make sense when all else is equal, biology is often far more complex than we predict, and therefore, we need to be ready to abandon or revise the simpler theory when presented with new information. Such is the case, it would seem, with GLP-1 drugs and cardiovascular benefits.
There were 3 things I loved about this –
