Tim

“Marginal gains is not about making small changes and hoping they fly. Rather, it is about breaking down a big problem into small parts in order to rigorously establish what works and what doesn’t. Ultimately the approach emerges from a basic property of empirical evidence: to find out if something is working, you must isolate its effect. Controlled experimentation is inherently “marginal” in character.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Success is not just dependent on before-the-event reasoning, it is also about after-the-trigger adaptation.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Growth Mindset and the Secrets of High Performance

“Proper investigation achieves two things: it reveals a crucial learning opportunity, which means that the systemic problem can be fixed, leading to meaningful evolution. But it has a cultural consequence too: professionals will feel empowered to be open about honest mistakes, along with other vital information, because they know that they will not be unfairly penalized—thus driving evolution still further. In short, we have to engage with the complexity of the world if we are to learn from it; we have to resist the hardwired tendency to blame instantly, and look deeper into the factors surrounding error if we are going to figure out what really happened and thus create a culture based upon openness and honesty rather than defensiveness and back-covering.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“golden rules for career success 1 Specialize in a very small niche; develop a core skill 2 Choose a niche that you enjoy, where you can excel and stand a chance of becoming an acknowledged leader 3 Realize that knowledge is power 4 Identify your market and your core customers and serve them best 5 Identify where 20 percent of effort gives 80 percent of returns 6 Learn from the best 7 Become self-employed early in your career 8 Employ as many net value creators as possible 9 Use outside contractors for everything but your core skill 10 Exploit capital leverage”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less