A company without a story is usually a company without a strategy.

Alphabets apparently arose only once in human history: among speakers of Semitic languages, in the area from modern Syria to the Sinai, during the second millennium B.C. All of the hundreds of historical and now existing alphabets were ultimately derived from that ancestral Semitic alphabet.

There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked because pain is not a contest.

Research demonstrates that givers sink to the bottom of the success ladder

We were sort of like the cactus. We ate irregularly, and when we did, we'd gorge ourselves.

Recognize that it is far better to find a few smart people and give them the best technology than to have a greater number of ordinary people who are less well equipped. Great people and great technology both enhance productivity. Put them together in a well-designed machine and they improve it exponentially.

Most im portant, teams working in this system begin to measure their productivity according to validated learning, not in terms of the production of new features.

A mindset that can be paranoid and optimistic at the same time is hard to maintain, because seeing things as black or white takes less effort than accepting nuance. But you need short-term paranoia to keep you alive long enough to exploit long-term optimism.

All decisions are objective until the first line of the code is written. And then they are emotional.

The Law of Compensation (Chapter 5) Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them.