### Leadership Lessons 1. **You don't choose a passion, a passion chooses you.** It's very hard to make meaningful change on something you are not naturally passionate about. Your energy, focus, and resilience will be much higher, and you will be much more likely to succeed. A passion is a gift. Use it. 2. **Take pride in your effort, not your talents.** Your talents are a gift, you didn't do anything to earn them. You should take pride in what you do w/ them. True excellence comes from combining gifts with dedication and effort. (Working & studying hard/practicing consistently) 3. **Good leaders are right a lot.** This is one I think about everyday. "Being right a lot" has nothing to do with intelligence, it's a skill that requires discipline, humility, & comfortability w/ looking like an idiot. Here's how anyone can get good at "being right a lot": 1. **To be right a lot, you have to listen a lot.** Most of being right a lot is about gathering as much data as possible. Good leaders listen. They develop the ability to ask good questions and to challenge bias. They seek out people with different perspectives. 2. **To be right a lot, you must change your mind a lot.** Smart people rarely change their mind, lest they look stupid. This is dangerous. The world is complicated & sometimes you get new data. Take pride in changing your mind often, especially on your most deeply held beliefs. This is the most important one. People may say you're a fool/don't know what you're doing. These people are wrong. Changing your mind is good & the only way to find truth. To do it consistently, you must get rid of any internal need for people to think you're smart. 3. **To be right a lot, you must seek out info that challenge your most deeply held beliefs.** We like to consume evidence that confirms our beliefs, but you HAVE to seek out data that disconfirms your beliefs. You must find methods and ways to get this data often & consistently. 4. **Be stubborn on vision, and flexible on details.** You have to be constantly experimenting. Avoid sunk cost bias at all cost. Be willing to pivot all of your work to something new when you encounter new data. The startup graveyard is filled w/ companies rigid on details. 5. **Without failure, there is no invention.** You must be willing to fail, publicly & embarrassingly. You must be proud of your failure & seek to grow the size of your failures w/ the size of your successes. This is the hardest one to execute in SV's "crushing it" culture. #people