The next decade belongs to those willing to earn it:

When you lower standards, the "underachievers" are relieved and complacent. When you raise standards, the "champions" are excited and motivated.

"You get paid for being right first, and to be first, you can’t wait for consensus." Naval

"The larger the herd, the lower the returns." Naval

When public policy goes wrong. Pricing unintended consequences….

"Leaders don't have days off.   You need to bring a competitive stamina to practice every day to be your best. I had to work hard to prove to my teammates- I'm ready to go. When my teammates feel that, guess who else has to raise the bar - my teammates."

I think about this often. “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.” - Lombardi

"You are a story that you tell yourself." Naval

“Our hardest workers are our best players. It’s not fake. Our best players are our hardest workers. Go out and watch them practice and it’s like that everyday. That’s the standard. So if you’re not up to that standard with the effort matching what our best players do, you’re not

Championships aren’t built on speeches. They’re built on habits, repeated over time. When you talk about standards, you’re setting expectations. When you live them, you’re building culture.

5th time in history, game 7 of the MLB World Series goes beyond the 9th inning. Amazing theatre. #WorldSeries

Harsh truth...You are paid in proportion to size of the problems you solve.

Most organisations don’t lack ambition. They lack standards. Values describe intention. Standards describe reality. What you tolerate becomes culture.

Systems > Talent. Talent can make you good. It will not make you reliable. Reliability comes from systems.

Pressure doesn’t create problems. It exposes them. If your strategy collapses under pressure, it was never finished.

Brilliant moments don’t scale. Checklists scale. Routines scale. Standards scale. Build boring systems.

Most strategies aren’t wrong. They’re incomplete. If it can’t be run, it isn’t strategy.

Excellence requires constraint. To paraphrase Nick Saban: * If you want to be good, you have choices. * If you want to be excellent, you have very few. * If you want to be elite, you have almost none. Excellence is not a preference.

Plans vs Playbooks Plans describe intention. Playbooks define behaviour. Elite teams run playbooks.

Big outcomes come from small standards applied consistently. Not big gestures.