Keys take aways from “Be Slightly Evil”

• The more universal truths you uncover about the world, the less the number of moral opinions you will need
• In life, you will eventually be forced to decide between being somebody or doing something
• The unreasonable person adapts surrounding conditions to himself
• The straight path in your head turns to spaghetti in the real world vice versa
• The straight and narrow path grounded in truth seeking is the faster road to meaningful destinations
• Power handed to the untrained mind leads inevitably to mental damage
• The ability to see reality as it really is, in minimally deluded ways, leads inevitably to the earning of authority
• A CEO’s job is to interpret external realities for a company, A.G. Lafley
  • survive a lack of incoming empathy
  • generate a positive atmosphere and empathy for others under your “information protection” umbrella
  • A startup team of two is better than solo entrepreneurs due to the sharing of “information parenthood”
• Idealism believes in change and creates believers who don’t change whereas the opposite is true
  • The idealist goes into Zen Retreat and remains unchanged after he is done
  • The realist starts a business and is forced to change
• Path to freedom
  • Integrating the self (addiction) and the shadow (aversions) to cover your whole personality
  • Myer Briggs cognitive function
    • first four functions represent your self
    • last four functions represent your shadow – usually triggered by stress
• Status
  • If status doesn’t matter to you, it becomes available to you as a tool to control those whom status does matter
  • consciously cultivate away this felt need
• The easiest way to figure out someone is to look at the information they choose to consume
• Handling information
  • Truth telling
    • requires you to calmly separate your feelings from facts and tell yourself the truth before you tell others
    • cursing and candor both reflect an inability to bear the stress of being otherwise
  • Cold blooded listening
    • listen for the data behind heated words
    • don’t take what you hear  about your personality as worth responding to
    • freely draw your own conclusion about the data received
  • Dissemination
    • the larger the group the fewer the key beliefs allowed to be conveyed
    • at the level of human civilization use extremely simple but very fertile fill-in-the-blanks messaging
• Handling negotiation
  • most work is done away from the actual negotiating table
  • Discovery pre-work conversation to tease out what people know and the trust relationship
  • the more there is that mutually greed upon, the less there is to negotiate
  • ignore sunk cost
• Choose to be effective instead of being liked
• On money
  • aim to be anti-fragile
  • even millionaires are stuck in the psychology that the money is transient
  • salary men are stuck in the illusion that the pay check will extend indefinitely into the future

References

• The fighter who changed the art of war, Boyd
• 48 Laws of Power
• The Alchemist, Paul Coelho
• The Redemptive Self, McAdam
• The origins of political order, Francis Fukuyama
• Yes, Minister
• Glengarry Glen Ross