“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”
― The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less
― The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less
“the most powerful engine of progress is to be found deep within the culture of the industry. It is an attitude that is easy to state, but whose wider application could revolutionize our attitude to progress: instead of denying failure, or spinning it, aviation learns from failure.”
― Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
― Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
“This, then, is what we might call “black box thinking.”* For organizations beyond aviation, it is not about creating a literal black box; rather, it is about the willingness and tenacity to investigate the lessons that often exist when we fail, but which we rarely exploit. It is about creating systems and cultures that enable organizations to learn from errors, rather than being threatened by them.”
― Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
― Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
“The secret to modern F1 is not really to do with big ticket items; it is about hundreds of thousands of small items, optimized to the nth degree. People think that things like engines are based upon high-level strategic decisions, but they are not. What is an engine except many iterations of small components? You start with a sensible design, but it is the iterative process that guides you to the best solution. Success is about creating the most effective optimization loop.”
― Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
― Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
“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.”
― Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
― Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
Tim’s 2025 Year in Books
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