The Heretic is a free dispatch delivering insights into what it takes to lead into & in the unknown. For
entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated.
There is a fantastic story told by bodybuilding legend Arnold Schwarzenegger:
I’ll always remember the first time someone asked me questions in the gym. It was about their legs. They said they couldn’t grow, and they wanted to know which exercises to add to their routine to hit the thighs. First, I said, “Let’s see your squat.” And they said, “My squats are fantastic. I can squat 405.” They got the weight on their back and lowered it approximately 2 inches, and came back up. That’s when I learned that people have a habit of looking for the next big thing when they haven’t spent any time mastering the simple thing in front of them.
I have seen the same thing play out over and over again in startups and corporations around the world—people get excited, start something, mistake early progress for mastery, and move on. The startup founder mistaking the feedback from their first customers (who are all family members) as proof that they have achieved product/market fit. The executive looking at the “exponential” user growth, ignoring the fact that the absolute numbers are tiny.
If life were a video game, we would cheat our way through the first few levels and the first real boss fight, just to say we achieved mastery. But we are far from it. True mastery is found when we hone our skills over and over again until we are truly good at it. We keep refining, gathering, and incorporating feedback, understanding that it’s a process, that the journey is what makes us great, and that there will never be a moment we are “done.”
Cherish the simple, the basics, the foundations. They are what you will build your empire on.
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First things first—it has been a while. As you have undoubtedly realized, my Heretic posting schedule has slowed to a crawl. Which doesn’t mean I don’t post—I just happen to post (twice a week) on the radical Briefing. Check it out; you might like it! With this out of the way, let’s talk about GyShiDo.
GyShiDo?
Yes, GyShiDo. The Art of Getting Your Shit Done. 😁
More than a decade ago, Daniel Epstein, Will Butler, and I created—somewhat as a practical joke, but also dead serious—the GyShiDo Manifesto, after realizing that our individual superpowers were simply that we...
Are you optimizing your systems? Keeping a tight ship and making sure the trains run on time? Have your OKRs and KPIs been closely tracked?
You might want to rethink this…
Reed Hastings, the uber-successful founder of Netflix (and disruptor of the status quo in the entertainment industry—a true heretic), once remarked:
Most companies overoptimize for efficiency… The nonintuitive thing is that it is better to be managing chaotically if it’s productive and fertile. Think of the standard model as clear, efficient, sanitary, sterile. Our model is messy, chaotic, and fertile. In the long term, fertile will beat sterile.
Ah, the glamorous life of an entrepreneur. Private jets, lavish parties, changing the world in a hoodie. It’s the stuff dreams are made of, right?
Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but that’s a load of crap. The real entrepreneurial journey is less “champaign wishes and caviar dreams” and more “lukewarm coffee and cold sweats at 3am.” It’s a gritty, messy, nightmare-fueled rollercoaster. And you know what? That’s precisely how it should be.
The Myth of Overnight Success
We love a good overnight success story. Some wunderkind drops out of college, writes a...
John Lilly, my former boss and then-CEO of Mozilla, once offered a piece of advice so obvious it seems absurd: build products that don’t suck. This was back when Firefox was running circles around Internet Explorer, delivering a vastly superior web browsing experience. Simple, right?
Apparently not. In the relentless pursuit of profits, countless companies have forgotten this fundamental rule. They cut corners, skimp on quality, and prioritize short-term gains over long-term customer satisfaction. It’s a recipe for disaster.
The Slippery Slope of Suckiness
Once you start compromising on product quality, you’re on a downward trajectory that’s hard to recover...
In a world saturated with information and distractions, the ability to communicate a clear, compelling narrative is a superpower. As an entrepreneur or business leader, crafting the right story can make all the difference in winning over customers, investors, and the public.
This insight was pithily expressed by political consultant Arthur Schmidt in his advice to General Electric in the early 20th century: “Campaigns are won not by the candidate or company with the best character or product, but by the one with the simplest and most clearly told story.” Or as his colleague Comstock summarized it decades later: “Pick...
The beloved brainstorm. The darling child of corporate innovation. The magic bullet that will solve all our creative woes.
Or so we’ve been told.
Brainstorms are a colossal waste of time.
They’re the equivalent of trying to catch fish by throwing a bunch of hooks into the water and hoping something bites. It’s inefficient, ineffective, and frankly, a bit delusional.
So why do brainstorms fail so miserably? Let’s break it down:
Production Blocking: The Waiting Game
In most brainstorms, only one person can speak at a time. While others wait their turn, their ideas evaporate faster than a puddle in...
To the day a dozen years ago, Silicon Valley legend Guy Kawasaki published a blog post lamenting the all-too-common phenomenon of what he called the “bozo explosion.” A company experiences a bozo explosion when a formerly brilliant team, consisting of A-players, makes the strategic mistake of hiring their first B-player (often in the name of growth… need those warm bums in seats!) and lets those B-players hire their own people.
The problem with B-players is not that they are “less than” A-players; the issue is that B-players, usually driven by the deadly combination of fear and ego, start hiring...
Serendipity – that magical, almost mystical phenomenon that seems to lurk around corners, waiting to spring upon us when we least expect it. But what if I told you that serendipity isn’t just a happy accident but a process that can be dissected into three core characteristics?
First comes the serendipity trigger, that moment of stumbling upon something unusual or unexpected. Picture yourself walking through a forest and finding a rare flower you’ve never seen before – that’s your trigger. It’s the universe’s way of saying, “Hey, look here! There’s something worth your attention.” Kindle your curiosity, and you will...
In a world that often feels like it’s every person for themselves, a recent conversation threw me a curveball that’s been bouncing around in my head ever since: “We stand for each other’s success.” This isn’t your garden-variety corporate platitude. It’s a philosophy, a mindset shift, a radical way of redefining success not as a solitary sprint but as a collective marathon.
Let’s face it, the default mode in many professional environments is to claw your way up the ladder, sometimes at the expense of others. But what if we flipped the script? What if, instead of viewing our colleague’s...
