Coach John Wooden was the antithesis of our culture’s current focus on hacks, shortcuts, and virtue signaling. Here are seven ideas on what really constitutes a philosophy of success.

Principle #1: Focus on what you can control

As a basketball player, I wanted to be in the best possible physical condition. There was a time when I’d tell myself, I’m going to be in better condition that anyone else. As I grew older, my thinking changed to I’m going to be in the best possible condition I can be. I had learned that I only have control over myself.

My Takeaway: It’s tempting to focus on things outside your control because it relieves you of your responsibility to improve. But you have to own yourself before worrying about others.

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At the close of World War II, General Douglas MacArthur could have humiliated Japan at the surrender ceremony. Instead, he treated the Japanese delegation with respect—seating them as equals, allowing them to wear full military uniforms, and removing his own combat decorations. Rather than seeking vengeance, he focused on rebuilding Japan's future.

You face this same choice. You’re in the middle of an argument that you know you are going to win. You now have two choices. The first is complete obliteration of your opponent. Personally humiliate them and their argument.

Or you can choose the MacArthur approach and give your opponent dignity by leaving them a line of retreat. Let them down graciously, and you’ll have won the argument without creating an enemy.

In workplace discussions, I've witnessed people exploit others' mistakes for personal gain, earning a few laughs through a direct attack or snide remark, all while creating lasting resentment.

When you have the chance to go in for the kill, don’t. Give someone the option of retreat. B.H. Liddell Hart, in his book, Why Don’t We Learn from History, describes how you can reduce your opponent’s resistance by providing a line of retreat:

It is an elementary principle of strategy that, if you find your opponent in a strong position costly to force, you should leave him a line of retreat—as the quickest way of loosening his resistance. It should, equally, be a principle of policy, especially in war, to provide your opponent with a ladder by which he can climb down. 

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“A” talent doesn’t want to work for “B” talent. The book The Talent War: How Special Operations and Great Organizations Win on Talent, reveals an underlying truth of many organizations: it’s not bad companies that cause people to leave, but bad leaders. Compensation and purpose can only go so far to offset mediocre leadership.

A talent-dense company isn’t a family. In his book, No Rules Rules, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings describes the necessity of firing a good employee to get a great employee. It’s odd to think about removing a good employee, because isn’t that good enough? Not for the best companies. The bigger lesson is even broader: is comfort being prioritized over getting better? Because getting better as an organization means making tough choices, even on good people.

The goal isn’t low turnover, it’s the right turnover. From the book No Ego, How Leaders can Cut the Cost of Workplace Drama, End Entitlement, and Drive Big Results by Cy Wakeman. Many companies celebrate low team turnover. But is that really the right metric? Low turnover is great only if the people are great. Achieving the mission is the prize, which may or may not be helped by low turnover. The question is, would some turnover actually accelerate your progress?

If you’re not dying to make an offer, don’t. The hiring process can be arduous so there’s a tendency to settle for okay candidates to get closure. But that’s a mistake, because the agony of tolerating a middling performer is far greater than an extended hiring process. Don’t swap short-term hiring pain for decades of long-term management pain.

Is this person a force of nature? In his article How to be Successful, Sam Altman talks about finding people who are a “force of nature.” That is, someone with S-tier level internal drive and agency. Those that just flat-out produce at a higher level, that get things done and generate unique insights, all without having to be told to do so. Getting these people to work is never the concern, rather it’s about channeling their skills in the right direction and keeping them motivated. So ask yourself, how many colleagues fit this description?

Look at the jaggedness of the person. The hiring process usually focuses on safe, predictable accomplishments like grades, schools, and past employers. The exceptional will often have those traditional accomplishments but will then have something extra that others don’t.  They will have put their own personal touch on their accomplishments, choosing individuality and creativity over what’s safe. Iconoclastic thinkers don’t fit well into a predictable mold.

Find your “bar raisers.” In his book The Everything Store, Brad Stone highlights Amazon’s “bar raisers,” a small group that had a knack for recruiting talent and were the key to sourcing exceptional people. Remarkable talent isn’t found through resumes and traditional HR channels. Instead, it’s tracked down by a select group of colleagues that can separate the phenomenal from the fake. Fake talent can fool HR screens and average managers. Real talent knows real talent.

Almost every organization focuses on attracting good clients and recruiting valuable employees. But fewer companies focus on keeping out the bad ones. The bias is always towards more clients, more applicants, and more sales. But all clients and customers are not equal, and many find out the painful way how unprofitable and stressful it is chasing the wrong group. There might be more value in keeping out the negative rather than attracting the positive, even though every corporate initiative tends to focus on attraction, rather than repulsion.

Costco’s membership card is a great example. A typical annual fee ranges from $65-$130. On episode #189 of The Knowledge Project Podcast, Chris Davis told the story of once asking Charlie Munger, a Costco board member, why Costco didn’t drop the membership card to bring in more customers. After all, it wouldn’t take many more customers to offset the loss of membership revenue. Here’s Charlie’s insight:

…the card is an important filter: Think about who you’re keeping out [with a membership card]. Think about the cohort that won’t give you their license and their ID and get their picture taken. Or they aren’t organized enough to do it, or they can’t do the math to realize [the value]…that cohort will have a 100% of your shoplifters and a 100% of your thieves. Now, it’ll also have most of your small tickets.

…Charlie called this the intelligent loss of sales. Most people just think more is better. But more is not always better. It’s who you keep out.

Experience is a double-edged sword. While experience can lead to greater expertise, this relationship is by no means guaranteed, and often hides stagnation, if not outright decline.

The true value of experience isn't measured in years, but in one's capacity for radical intellectual humility—the willingness to constantly challenge assumptions, embrace uncertainty, and prioritize learning over ego.

This doesn’t invalidate all experience, but is a reminder to evaluate talent through a more dynamic lens: by tangible results, demonstrable skills, and compelling evidence rather than accumulated tenure.

Here are 10 ideas on how experience can mislead:

1. 30 years of experience is often 1 year of experience repeated 30 times. Just because we show up doesn’t mean we get better. Think of your coworkers 30 to 40 years into their careers. Are they really at the top of their game or just hanging on? What was the last novel skill they learned? When was the last time they challenged a corporate tradition or volunteered to cross-train in a new area? What experience cohort is more often advocating for change and innovation?

It’s just like driving a car. We’re no better at driving at age 40 than we were at 30. Ten extra years of experience. Zero skill improvement.

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Napoleon once remarked that the moment of greatest vulnerability is immediately after victory. It’s a familiar concept not only in military history, but also in business, sports, and investing. In his book, The Dichotomy of Leadership, former Navy SEAL Jock Willink describes “The Disease of Victory”:

A chief contributing factor to recklessness comes from what military historians have long referred to as “the disease of victory.” This disease takes place when a few battlefield successes produce an overconfidence in a team’s own tactical prowess while underestimating the capabilities of its enemy or competitor. This is a problem not just for combat leaders but for leaders and teams anywhere, in any arena, throughout the business world and the civilian sector.

Most environments are dynamic, continuous efforts. The game or battle is never over. There’s always another round, perhaps tomorrow, maybe next year, or a decade from now. Whether it’s the win you had last week, the successful product launch, or the decisive battlefield victory, the pursuit doesn’t end, because competitors and enemies never stop.  

There are 4 smart ways to handle a victory: 1) celebrate, but in moderation, 2) acknowledge the role of luck, 3) prepare for the opponent’s response, 4) counteract the “Success Disease”

Too many people worry about being perfect rather than being prolific.

While it feels righteous to demand nothing but perfection, it’s usually a closeted excuse not to do the work or share your ideas. It’s your ego protecting you from what’s hard. As the saying goes, perfection is the enemy of progress.

Instead of perfection, prioritize being prolific. Generate and share more ideas. Create more art. Compose more music. No matter the task, great work is achieved through repetition and quantity.

Want to be a better public speaker? Stop reading public speaking books and get out and speak. Don’t let preparation get in the way of the actual work.

Quantity is the foundation of quality. Quality is a byproduct of quantity, not independent of it. To be sure, quantity can’t be throwaway effort or just going through the motions. You have to at least try.

As Jerry Seinfeld recommends, “The way to be a better comic is to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes is to write every day.”

It’s the “writing every day” part that bothers most aspiring writers. There’s no shortcut. No hack. Real progress is hard and slow, one repetition at a time.

Like Hollywood and the music industry, the investment industry also feels the need to give out awards. But unlike those other industries, I’m not sure the investment world rewards what’s actually valuable.

Here’s what typically gets awarded:

Exciting, popular investments. Implementing a new sleeve of long-short hedge funds? How impressive! What a proactive way to manage risk yet retain the equity upside. Of course, that’s the promise, not always what gets delivered. No matter, it’s exciting and it gets an award. Nothing against hedge fund strategies, other than the fact that like many popular strategies, they are blindly anointed as superior, before delivering what they promise.

I’ve never seen a firm win an award that implemented a new, low-cost passive strategy. I mean, how old-fashioned and barbaric! Well, some of us in the industry realize that many, but not all, plans would be better off giving up the chase of active/private/complex strategies. However, many egos and organizations require the pursuit of the strategies to justify their existence. Again, the solution is easy: awards based on long-term results, not hopes and promises. Speaking of promises…

Grand proclamations, promises, and forecasts of future action. Net zero by 2050? You get an award, despite making marginal, if any, actual progress toward that goal. New sustainable/ESG strategies? Also award eligible, despite not actually having any tangible evidence to show if the strategies delivered on their promises or the risk/reward as initially advertised. Perhaps we should see how decisions play out before we grant awards.

Size. I know several under-the-radar pensions and endowment funds that put the big plans to shame by delivering better results over the long-term. But alas, that’s not enough. Size and popularity are always better in the world of awards, because the big players have their hand in just about every strategy, and by random chance, something will always be working.

Here’s a quick test of your organization’s health. When you need to find out the truth, where do you turn?

Do you get it straight from the leaders?

Or do you have to rely on gossip and rumors at the water cooler and in the hallways to figure out what’s going on? Usually these discussions begin with, “Don’t tell anyone you heard this…”

Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar said, “If there’s more truth in the hallways, you have a problem.”

No leader likes to announce bad news. No leader likes to admit a strategic or business failure. No leader likes to admit when there’s been bad behavior among employees.

But the truth will always come out. It’s only a matter of the path that truth will take and how much rumor, gossip, and wasted time will be generated along the way.

A leader has two choices. The first is a quick and decisive delivery of bad news. Yes, it will be painful and embarrassing, but I swear if there’s one thing employees want, besides perhaps getting paid more, is a leader that will call it like it is and not hide behind bullshit or company policy.

The second choice, and the choice that many leaders make, is to assume their people are just plain stupid, naïve, or gullible. Deny and cover up the bad news, and figure people will just accept it, get back to work, and move on, because if the leader says everything is ok then it must be ok. It’s management by condescension.

When people don’t get the truth, they know it, and they don’t move on. Instead, they double down on trying to find out what happened, which makes it even a bigger issue than it already was.

Few words incite resistance faster than the idea of imposed constraints or limitations.

For example, if you give someone the option of a project with no deadline and nearly unlimited budget, or a project with a tight deadline and strict budget, they’ll pick the no constraint option anytime. The appeal of boundless freedom and unlimited resources is too tempting to pass up. But if your goal is to actually deliver a project, and an innovative one at that, you’re better off embracing the constraints, not fighting them.

While freedom from deadlines and budgets is exciting, it drowns you in a sea of never-ending optionality, constant second guessing, unfocused activity and distraction.

Constraints are not the limiting factor we assume. They are powerful tools, forcing us to think differently and act with urgency. A lack of resources isn’t the failure point on a project. Excessive scope creep and ambiguous goals are the bigger issues. Constraints don’t crush productivity and creativity, they enable it.  

Legendary choreographer Twyla Tharp praises the power of constraints and cautions against unlimited resources:

Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources...remember this the next time you moan about the hand you’re dealt: No matter how limited your resources, they’re enough to get you started. Time, for example, is our most limited resource, but it is not the enemy of creativity that we think it is. The ticking clock is our friend if it gets us moving with urgency and passion. Give me a writer who thinks he has all the time in the world and I’ll show you a writer who never delivers.

An army sent off to war, even if victorious, will return a bedraggled, maimed mob of madmen. Whatever proportionality between means and ends that may have once existed on the field of battle no longer exists. Even the victors must pass through a slaughterhouse on the way to victory. - No More Heroes: Madness and Psychiatry in War

We all want to reach our goals, but are you sure you understand the price you will pay?

You’ve heard of Pyrrhic victories, based on Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus, who defeated the Romans in 279 BC but paid a terrible price in losing many of his troops. There are many areas in which the costs of winning are greater than the win itself.  

Society obsesses over victory and success but often ignores the costs of getting there. Whether it’s getting to the coveted CEO position, winning a gold medal, or being an entrepreneur, all are incredibly worthy goals, but with potentially enormous costs.

That’s not to say the cost is not worth it. For some people, the cost is absolutely worth it and they pay it with a smile on their face. But then there’s many people who never consider or don’t even know the cost it will take to achieve what they think they want. The focus is always on the benefits, never on the costs.

For many people, 20 years of experience is one year of experience repeated 20 times. - Andy Hargadon

When we seek out an experienced professional, perhaps a doctor to treat us or a mechanic to fix our car, it’s not really experience we seek. It’s skill we’re looking for. Experience just happens to be a convenient proxy we use to judge skill. And for the most part, it works for simple skills, but it’s an imperfect and often misleading signal for complex activities.

It’s an easy idea to prove. Most of us have been driving a car for 20 or 30 years. Yet, none of us are anywhere closer today than we were decades ago to driving professionally in Formula 1, despite all the hours we’ve put in behind the wheel. Sure, we improved for a couple years after getting our license. But then we got to “good enough,” hit a plateau, and have been going through the motions ever since. Experience doesn’t count when you just show up.

A lot of experience is mindless repetition. There’s no detailed training regimen. No skill is specifically targeted. Activity is done for activity’s sake, not to improve a specific attribute. There’s no feedback. It’s nearly impossible to evaluate our own performance. One reason is psychological. Our ego overestimates our ability and conveniently ignores the flaws that are obvious to an unbiased observer. We see what we want to see, which makes us look better than we really are. The other reason is physical. We physically can’t observe everything that’s going on with us, so we miss mistakes. We can’t fix what we don’t see. When we don’t get feedback on what we’re doing wrong, and when there’s no coach to help correct our mistakes, improvement is constrained.

The solution to mindless repetition is deliberate practice, an idea pioneered by K. Anders Ericsson. If you want to improve, it’s the guide you need. Deliberate practice specifically addresses your weaknesses. It’s fun to practice what you’re good at. It’s hard and unnatural to practice the things you’re bad at. Deliberate practice also slows down the skill so you can expose and correct all the little mistakes that are typically neglected. That can become tedious and mentally exhausting, which is why it’s rarely done.  

If your team doesn’t do what is expected of them, it’s often because of a difference between what you say and what you tolerate.

It’s easy to create clear rules and expectations on the front end. Making new standards is simple. But it’s the back end of this process that’s difficult and where problems arise. People care about what is enforced and tolerated, not what is said.

In his book Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, former Navy Seal Jocko Willink explains:

When leaders who epitomize extreme ownership drive their teams to achieve a higher standard of performance, they must recognize that when it comes to standards, as a leader, it’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate. When setting expectations, no matter what has been said or written, if substandard performance is accepted and no one is held accountable – if there are no consequences – that poor performance becomes the new standard. Therefore, leaders must enforce standards.

Well-intentioned standards don’t matter at all if they’re not rewarded or enforced. People quickly know the “real” rules for an organization. What gets rewarded and punished is often different than what is said. It’s this gap that creates frustrations for leaders and teams when desired behaviors don’t match actual behaviors.

Mistakes are unavoidable but covering them up is not. Mistakes are part of life. Everyone screws up. It’s not about eliminating mistakes. Instead, it’s ensuring they don’t get buried. Mistakes are valuable when they are embraced, but destructive when ignored.   

Admitting mistakes is tough. Even in the NFL, where you’d think given the high expectations that mistakes would be freely admitted, you witness mistake suppression. Michael Lombardi, author of Gridiron Genius: A Master Class in Building Teams and Winning at the Highest Level, describes the idea of “scouting blinders,” where scouts fail to admit when they’ve made a mistake on a player:

The second destructive form of bias we see all the time in NFL team building is “scouting blinders”: whenever drafted players are kept around long after it has become obvious that the evaluation that got them where they are was dead wrong. Like many crimes, the cover-up is even worse than the initial mistake.

While it’s embarrassing to admit a mistake, it’s madness to pretend like they don’t exist. Not only do the mistakes then continue unimpeded, but organizations double-down on the foolishness by continuing to invest in the same bad hires, bad projects, bad acquisitions, and bad investments.

How do we move from ignoring and covering up mistakes to embracing and facing them?

In Ozan Varol’s book, Thinking Like a Rocket Scientist, Ed Catmull, former President of Pixar, explains how we don’t always control failure, but we always control how we respond to it:

There are two parts to failure. There is the event itself, with all its attendant disappointment, confusion, and shame, and then there is our reaction to it. We don’t control the first part, but we do control the second. The goal, as Catmull puts it, should be to uncouple fear and failure—to create an environment in which making mistakes doesn’t strike terror into your employees’ hearts.

You may recall that after 9/11, Homeland Security implemented a color-coded advisory system to inform U.S. citizens on the risk of terrorist threats. There were 5 levels:

• Severe: Severe Risk of Terrorist Attacks

• High: High Risk of Terrorist Attacks

• Elevated: Significant Risk of Terrorist Attacks

• Guarded: General Risk of Terrorist Attacks

• Low: Low Risk of Terrorist Attacks

How often do you remember relying on this system? What exactly is the difference between significant and high risk? Did you ever change your behavior because of the threat level? Did you ever not go to work or not take your family to the park because the threat level was bumped up a notch?

Of course not. It was completely worthless. No one paid any attention to this except the bureaucrats paid to run it. 

As with most responses to catastrophic events, imaginary solutions are implemented quickly in response. It happens in both business and government. Citizens and clients want easy, immediate answers to complex problems. “Do something,” people demand. Well, something is done, with no benefit to anyone.

As soon as you begin any debate, your immediate priority is to figure out if the other side is willing to change their mind.

Most people don’t argue to learn. They don’t argue to further their understanding. They argue to confirm their beliefs and prove their superiority. These discussions never go anywhere, never change any minds, and never uncover new evidence. In short, they’re a complete waste of time. Avoid these arguments.  

The good news is that there’s a simple test to figure out if the other person is open to changing their mind.

Adam Grant, author of Think Again, explains:

In a heated argument, you can always stop and ask, “What evidence would change your mind?” If the answer is “nothing,” then there’s no point in continuing the debate. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it think.

Any variation of “What evidence would change your mind” will work. The exact message isn’t as important as the meaning.

Alan Jacobs, author of How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, recommends the following:

…this is true of many communities of conspiracy theorists, those who believe that the Holocaust didn’t happen, or that Lyndon Johnson was behind the Kennedy assassination. “The question is, ‘Could you show to those people a set of facts that would lead them to abandon what we consider to be their outlandish views?’…the answer to that question is no, because all people who have a story to which they are committed are able to take any set of counter-evidence and turn it back, within the perspective of the story they believe in.”

Paracelsus, a Swiss physician and philosopher born in 1493, is credited as the father of toxicology. He coined the phrase, “Only the dose makes the poison.” Geoffrey Kabat, author of Getting Risk Right, explains the concept:

The magnitude of one's exposure matters. This is true of micronutrients, such as iron, copper, selenium, and zinc, which our bodies need…but which, taken in large amounts, are highly toxic. It is also true of lifestyle and personal exposures, if to cigarette smoking and consuming alcoholic beverages, and medications, as well as pollutants in the environment. Many toxins and carcinogens exhibit a dose response relationship: that is, as the exposure increases, so too does the observed toxic or carcinogenic effect. Even compounds and foods we think of as healthy can be lethal when consumed in excess…Clearly, consumption of excessive amounts of water can lead to an electrolyte imbalance and heart failure.

This concept applies to all aspects of life. Most decisions should involve getting the “dose” right, not making absolutist, binary claims. It’s a lazy trap to judge ideas without regard to the amount, exposure, or duration.

• Investment risk is needed to growth wealth, but excessive risk leads to ruin

• Striving for greatness is great, but demanding perfection leads to paralysis

• Working out is great, but a lack of recovery leads to injury

• Regulation is necessary, but excessive regulation crushes innovation

• Meetings are necessary, but excessive meetings are not

• Management is valuable, but micromanagement is disabling

If there’s one fantasy I see repeated in both public and private equity markets, it’s the idea that companies can grow without reinvestment.

Pull up any company model from a sell-side analyst or PE shop, and you’ll see projected sales and EBITDA go up while capex and net working capital growth is flat, if not declining. I see it in almost every model. Somehow, these companies are expected to undergo a magical transition that will accelerate incremental returns on invested capital and negate the requirement for reinvestment to grow in line with sales.

It’s easy to make these assumptions. It’s an entirely different matter for a company to deliver them. They rarely do.

This doesn’t mean the company isn’t a worthwhile investment or won’t make money. But it does mean a few things.

First, investors rarely understand the business. They have a trader mentality, only worried about fast growth because fast growth sells well in the short run. The cost and investment need to fund that future growth, however, is usually neglected with the hope someone pays a nice premium before the lack of reinvestment becomes apparent.

Second, it’s a way to dress up the company and solve for the valuation that you want. Nothing drives cash flow higher than not reinvesting in the business, at least for a while. Higher cash flow means higher valuation. That is, of course, if those cash flows are sustainable, which they are not. If you underinvest today, you’ll have to make it up in the future. Most of the PE industry is built on others not realizing this fact.

The world is obsessed with optimization. There’s nothing wrong with improvement, efficiency, and effectiveness. But many times, optimization goes to far. As with anything, there’s a point where the costs of optimization exceed the benefits.

For example, corporations optimize their capital structure with substantial debt, but end up in bankruptcy when a recession hits. Investors optimize their portfolios through leverage and mean-variance analysis, but forget the inherent flaws embedded in the data and assumptions. Even individuals who optimize their health end up wasting time and money chasing useless biomarkers and other hacks.

At some point, optimization breaks down. Optimization often relies on the assumption of near perfect knowledge of the future. That’s why those optimized companies go bankrupt. They planned on one future but got another. Optimization is fragile. It’s great if the world unfolds just as you expected. It’s awful in every other scenario.

Since we don’t know the future, robustness, not optimization, should be the goal.