When you make a non-bottleneck do more work than the bottleneck, you are not increasing productivity. On the contrary, you are doing exactly the opposite. You are creating excess inventory, which is against the goal.

Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results.

The Five Laws are beautiful in their simplicity, but it is Mann and Burg’s powerful storytelling that elevates them from the simply motivational to the truly inspirational.

You’re in a state of self-deception when you know or want to do the right thing but don’t do it. By not acting, you betray yourself, then feel guilty or frustrated by your behavior. To justify it, you blame the other person for causing a problem. You’re deceiving yourself about your behavior and motivations.

Dependencies — A dependency between two or more parts of a system is only desirable if the dependency is clear and obvious. When it is not clear what code depends on another, even simple changes to the system will take a long time and there would be a high risk of bugs showing up after deploying to production.

Unlike most small business owners before him—and since—Ray Kroc went to work on his business, not in it.

Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.

World-class is a process, not an event.

This is true startup productivity: systematically figuring out the right things to build.

It is so much easier to see what worked than to predict what might work. We don’t need to worry about the question of what to write about because we have answered the question already – many times on a daily basis.