Five for the work. Five for the life underneath it. Then a single word. Updated when I find I’m wrong.
A business is built remote from day one or it isn’t built remote at all. Every system has to assume you are not in the room. Retrofitting absence is harder than designing for it. So write everything down, hire people who can read, and refuse the temptation to be the hero who unsticks things in person.
Ten years of new platforms and acronyms, and the companies that survived solved the same problems they solved in 1995: answer the phone, show up on time, do good work, send the bill. When the hype clears, the business that still exists is the one that returned its calls.
Launch, scale, automate, delegate, then go remote. Each stage has its own problems, metrics, and kind of patience. You can’t automate what you haven’t scaled, or delegate what you haven’t systemised. Most burnout is a stage-four ambition running on a stage-two business.
The work only you can do is almost always the work you haven’t bothered to document. A finished business no longer requires its founder. Plan your own redundancy. It’s the kindest thing you can do for everyone, yourself included.
Decide the shape of the life: where you live, who you see, how many hours of your week are yours. Then let the business be the part that funds and protects it. The business is the means, not the meaning.
Balance is the first of the five. So it gets practiced, on my hands, in an underpass in Seoul, wherever the ground is flat enough. A principle you don’t practice is a decoration.
See it in the story →These came first; the operating principles grew out of them.
No part of life held so tightly it crowds the others out. Work, family, body, mind, stillness, each taking its turn. The healthiest businesses came in the healthiest years.
Default to it, with staff, customers, the slow and the difficult. The cost is lower than it feels, and the compounding return over a decade is enormous.
Don’t catastrophise on the way down; don’t over-celebrate on the way up. The same person on the worst day of the quarter and the best one.
No public version separate from the private one. Write what you believe, take the meetings you want, refuse the work that asks you to be someone else.
Two long projects at once: becoming a slightly better person every year, and helping the people nearby do the same. Both are practice, not achievement. Neither finishes.
Continuously simplify my tasks, my goals, my possessions, and how I approach things. Most plans are noisier than they need to be; most weeks have three things in them that don’t need to be there.