The 4-Step Process For Mastering Any Skill

Tim Ferriss breaks down the secrets to learning skills into a simple four part framework and two core insights.

John Kao

Anyone can sit down and pound on a piano and create new sounds, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to listen to the results. Innovation is about the process of generating something new that has value.

An Insider’s Guide to America’s Top Business Schools: The truth about student life in the nation’s premier MBA programs

Quit worrying. If you’re choosing among the 25 schools in this guide, you’re going to get a great education. These schools attract the best of the best: The professors are top-notch, and the students are superachievers. The academic programs are rigorous, and the classrooms, with few exceptions, are the glitziest around. Arming yourself with an MBA from any one of these schools will open doors … [ Read more ]

Getting a Leg Up in China

How to set up shop or sell your wares in this enormous, fast-changing market.

Patricia Seybold

Economists have been writing about the Network Effect since 1974, intrigued by the notion that, once a network is established, scarcity isn’t the source of perceived value; instead, ubiquity is. In the physical world, the more fishers who come to a lake, the fewer fish each one will catch; the lower the benefit, and hence the value, for each one. In the cyberworld, on the … [ Read more ]

Warren Buffett

When you get out of bed in the morning and think about what you want to do that day, ask yourself whether you’d like others to read about it on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper. You’ll probably do things a little differently if you keep that in mind.

Steven Levitt

So much of what we hear and what we’re taught turns out to be false on closer scrutiny. Whether it is expert advice, what you read in the paper, or what your mother told you, if it is important, take the time to figure out for yourself whether it is really true.

Jim Collins

A “stop doing” list is more important than a “to do” list.

Jim Collins

People are not your most important asset; the right people are.

Jim

Give people responsibilities, not jobs.

Barry Diller

I hate synergy, but a natural relationship is valid. Over the years, you will create more. Value will grow. “Synergy” requires discipline. Everything has to be hand-wired. There’s no scalability. If the opportunistic gene is the biggest part of you, it conflicts with this executional, rationalized, one-company approach. Synergy is too constraining.

Thomas Jefferson

He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me…Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

Arthur Ciancutti

The principle behind the Leadership Organization is that people have an innate, passionate desire to contribute. Opposing this urge to contribute is fear – fear of rejection, failure, loss, retribution, or embarrassment…Earned trust tips the balance between the urge to contribute and fear. When we work in an environment of trust, and one in which leadership models trust, we feel reinforced, validated, and supported, even … [ Read more ]

Arthur Ciancutti

Is your firm built on closure? Closure means coming to a specific agreement about what will be done, by whom, with a specific date for completion. You don’t leave anything dangling. “I’ll get you the report” isn’t closure because there is no time by which it will arrive. “I’ll do what I can” isn’t closure because there is no specific agreement for what will be … [ Read more ]

Arthur Ciancutti

Much of the frustration of everyday life can be traced to false commitments. Bounced checks, late deliveries, shoddy work, unreturned emails, laundered shirts with missing buttons, poor work performance, broken partnerships, and so on – under close examination, all of these involve issues with “commitments” that were made but not kept.

An organizational culture in which people consider their commitments carefully, and in which they absolutely … [ Read more ]

Peter Drucker

The greatest source of mistakes in top management is to ask the same questions most people ask. They all assume that there are the same “right answers” for everyone. But one does not begin with answers. One begins by asking, “What are our questions?”

The issues facing management don’t change from year to year. The answers do. The biggest skill needed to address these issues is … [ Read more ]

Peter Drucker

Today’s corporation is structured around layers of management. Most of those layers are information relays, and like any relays, they are very poor. Every transfer of information cuts the message in half. There needs to be very few layers of management in the future and those who relay the information must be very smart. But knowledge, as you know, often becomes obsolete incredibly fast.

Joe Firmage

One of the ways to describe the economic transformation witnessed in the latter part of the 20th century is as a dramatic reduction in the friction between supply and demand, catalyzed by at least four lubricants: horizontal logistics services, computer networks, transaction transparency, and the valuation of knowledge and experience.

Alvin Toffler

I don’t think the issue is too much information. More important is decision overload. We believe that every person, or organization, can only make so many competent decisions in a given amount of time. Up until the point that we change our biology, there are some fixed limits on the speed by which we individually process information. However, there are enormously powerful tools by which … [ Read more ]