📚 Roger's Highlights

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A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .

Not long ago, it dawned on me that impostor syndrome is a paradox: Others believe in you You don’t believe in yourself Yet you believe yourself instead of them If you doubt yourself, shouldn’t you also doubt your low opinion of yourself? I now believe that impostor syndrome is a sign of hidden potential. It feels like other people are overestimating you, but it’s more likely that you’re underestimating yourself. They’ve recognized a capacity for growth that you can’t see yet. When multiple people believe in you, it might be time to believe them. Many people dream of achieving goals. They measure their progress by the status they acquire and the accolades they collect. But the gains that count the most are the hardest to count. The most meaningful growth is not building our careers—it’s building our character. Success is more than reaching our goals—it’s living our values. There’s no higher value than aspiring to be better tomorrow than we are today. There’s no greater accomplishment than unleashing our hidden potential.

Hidden Potential

Adam Grant

Option one would be the skills-forward path—that is, using the existing skills and assets of the company to drive business opportunities. Leaders at most companies would likely be praised for choosing this path. The danger is that while they stand atop this local optimum, someone else will figure out how to scale a higher peak they couldn’t see at the time due to risk aversion. In the case of Prime we chose the second path. This realization caused us to take some bold steps that we knew would likely be misunderstood by Wall Street investors and analysts and take years to pay off. But if it worked, we’d earn even more customer trust and set a new standard for e-commerce. Jeff insisted on this path, which resulted in Amazon Prime. Now, this may be one of those moments when you’re thinking, “But we don’t have a Jeff.” The good news is that you don’t need a Jeff to make this type of decision. You only need to ruthlessly stick to the simple-to-understand (but sometimes hard-to-follow) principles and process that insist on customer obsession, encourage thinking long term, value innovation, and stay connected to the details. None of us, including Jeff, knew exactly what we would end up building; it’s more like we stuck with the process and surrendered to where it was taking us. Prime was a perfect example of the multicausal, nonlinear way in which business initiatives both major and minor got decided on and executed at Amazon. Correspondingly, we can’t tell a linear story of how we came up with Prime because there isn’t one. Instead, this chapter will reflect that there were a lot of little tributaries that emptied into the river of Prime.

Working Backwards

Colin Bryar and Bill Carr

You want your team to push hard, to feel as if they will come up short without total effort. But total effort doesn’t mean total anxiety. I believe optimum creativity and high performance—a sales presentation, for example, or a complex pass play from Joe Montana to Jerry Rice—are most likely to succeed when the individual or group has an attitude that is seemingly a paradox; specifically, both relaxed and intense. That’s when things really happen.

The Score Takes Care of Itself

Bill Walsh, Steve Jamison, Craig Walsh

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