The Road Less Stupid

I’m no bookworm, but The Road Less Stupid is so good that I’m dedicating this post to it.

The book is about achieving success not by doing great things, but by avoiding dumb mistakes. It’s a business book, but you can apply it to just about any facet of life. I’m not the CEO of a business, but I am the CEO of me and how I spend my time.

As I read the book, I found myself curling pages and highlighting paragraphs. Here are some of my favorite takeaways from the book.

Be careful who you take advice from. Are they really an expert, or just someone with an opinion and a publisher?

Simplistic formulas and general answers do more harm than good. No one has all the answers or can predict the future, including me. However we shouldn’t ignore everything either. We need to do some independent thinking for a change.

My takeaway: Easy to say, hard to practice. With few exceptions, I’ve found the loudest voices aren’t the ones doing the actual work. Some of the most talented folks I know are relatively unknown.

(Yes, I realize the irony in publishing this. Decide for yourself!)

Anyone who says customers are #1 has lost their mind. Employees are #1.

Employees are the source of all all value creation and creating a good culture is how to keep them engaged. It’s most important to create a culture that keeps employees engaged, happy, and feeling psychologically safe. Without that there will be nothing to sell to customers.

My takeaway: Employee culture is something I try to feel out when interviewing at different companies, prodding to see if something feels off. People before profits, else it’s not a place for me.

You can’t be important everywhere, so be important where it counts

If you work with engineers (or are one yourself), you’ve likely heard of the triangle of death. Time, cost, and quality. Engineers will tell you to pick two. But even this is wrong. Spectacularly successful companies and people attempt to excel at only one, maintain parity at a second, and completely ignore the third.

Pick one, not two.

My takeaway: I love this modern take on a old saying. Even when my team picks two, it feels like we’re cutting corners. I need to spend more time thinking about this one and how I can influence the outcomes I’m hoping for.

Don’t measure the goal, measure what needs to happen to achieve the goal.

Stepping on a bathroom scale is a KPI. Diet and exercise are the critical drivers. Measure and manage the diet and exercise, and there will probably be very little reason to step on the scales.

My takeaway: This is another one that seems obvious but is harder to practice. Take this newsletter you’re reading. My goal is to send a new issue every 2-3 weeks, but that’s not a helpful metric to measure. It’s more helpful to track my commitment to write for 15min a day. If I do that, I’ll have no problem sending enough newsletters.

Have a board of directors

A board of directors is neither a cheerleader nor a critic. Their job is to poke, ask questions, and prod as they look for icebergs, unexamined assumptions, and wishful thinking.

My takeaway: Many businesses can have a board of directors, but individuals can to! In both cases, the goal is to surround yourself with people who are unbiased and will ask you direct, sometimes uncomfortable questions that force you to look at things from different angles.

I’m working on create my personal board of directors by joining Sidebar and networking with folks on platforms like ADPList. Another way is to build a voltron of folks that you can lean on and go to for specific things. Network just enough to find a small group of people who we can trust and lean on.

The Road Less Stupid

The Road Less Stupid is my favorite book of the year so far and I’d strongly recommend it. It’s chapters are just a few pages and are self-contained, meaning you can jump around and skip chapters if you want. Each one challenges you to ask yourself uncomfortable questions and spend time thinking about the answers.

Now go think! You will thank me later.

🇺🇸 A quick word on politics

I’ll make this as short and non-controversial as possible: I’m voting for the candidate mostly likely to defeat Trump. And I’ll be doing that for one reason: the climate.

Regardless of how you feel about politics, I implore you to regard the climate as a serious issue. Perhaps THE issue of our lifetime.

There are so many other issues on the ballot: immigration, guns, reproductive rights, the economy, Ai, the list goes on. But we won’t be around to solve any of them if we don’t solve our climate issues first.

We simply cannot endure another damaging Trump tenure.

He he’s promised to double-down on this stance on the campaign trail.

So my vote goes to prevent that from happening. It’s as simple as that. Our country should not be run as a business.

Our survival > capitalism

Even if you don’t change your vote, I’d encourage you to spend some time thinking about it.

🧶 Stray Links

The Paris Olympics might be the lowest-carbon iteration of the games in the modern era, though the travel-related emissions needed to bring athletes and fans to Paris remains a problem.

My favorite Figma Config2024 talk so far is Joyce Croft's talk on emotional intelligence. Because design is more about working with people than working with tools.

Judd Anton urges leaders to Say the Quiet Part Loud, addressing uncomfortable truths that can build trust and transparency within their teams, rather than allowing silence to breed distrust and misunderstanding.

One of my favorite newsletters Dense Discovery hit 300 issues. What a milestone!

The Disappointment Frontier says that effective management often involves "disappointing people at a rate they can absorb.” This is something I’m learning and plan on exploring this in a future issue.

🏛️ From the Archives

A favorite article (or book) I periodically re-read.

I’m currently re-reading Making Numbers Count with a co-worker to improve my data literacy and visualization skills.

It’s filled with great examples of number makeovers, as well as impressive before and after examples that present dry numbers in a compelling, understandable way. It will instantly improve any demo or presentation!

Thanks for reading and I hope my mention of politics doesn’t make you rage-unsubscribe ✌️

- Ted
@tedgoas