#77: hidden cost of success

Jun 09, 2023

👋 Welcome to the 77th issue of Out of Curiosity, a weekly newsletter promoting ideas to help get 1% better everyday.

My name is Reza, and every week, I go through nearly 100 pieces of content (from books and podcasts to newsletters and tweets), and bring you the best in this newsletter.

If you enjoyed this issue, let me know by hitting the ❤️ button ⤴

In this issue:

📚 Amp it up

🤗 On friendship

📝 Writing & working

💭 The hidden cost of success

📚 Amp it up

Frank Slootman, the Chairman and CEO of Snowflake, believes that raising expectations, urgency, and intensity is the best way for leaders to improve company performance. He shares a five-part framework that I find helpful for both personal and business growth 👇

1. Increase standards
Elevate the standards to motivate people. Instead of providing feedback, ask for their input. Encourage them to refine their work until they are excited about it. Everyone should have a passion for what they do.
2. Align people
Ensure that everyone is working in the same direction and understands the goals.
3. Sharpen focus
People tend to work on multiple tasks, which leads to not getting anything done. Prioritization is difficult, but necessary. Use "priority" as a singular term. Having too many priorities means having none.
4. Pick up the pace
Exceptional leaders speed up progress. Ask why not tomorrow when someone suggests getting back to you in a week. This requires consistent effort, using every opportunity to maximize speed.
5. Transform strategy
Although execution is more important than strategy, strategy is still critical. Consider strategy as a multiplier for the execution effort.

→ Goodreads | 208 pages

🤗 On friendship

📝 Writing & working

Prioritizing writing while working

My mantra is to just keep chipping away. Collect things in your day: on notes app, on voice memos. Ordinary things, textures, conversations, singular words. The right question isn’t whether you have enough time to write. The actual difficulty is allowing space for beauty, inspiration, and general insight. Create writing groups. Set up rituals. Make time. View writing as an internal occupation.

On developing your own taste

There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.

→ starting from nix | 5-min read

The Court of Gayumars (article) | West Asia | Khan Academy — The Court of Gayumars || Sultan Muhammad

💭 The hidden cost of success

Around ten years ago, I took a leap of faith and left my predictable engineering job to start my own company and embark on the startup rollercoaster. I haven't looked back since, and  I totally relate to this article about how crucial it is to figure out what success means to you personally.

One of the most powerful questions I use before committing to a new project or opportunity is:
Do I want the successful version of this?
When I lost my therapy job in 2020, it felt awful. But it ended up being one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. Because shortly after getting fired, I realized I didn’t want to “succeed” on the path I’d spent the last 12+ years of my life pursuing.
Success is an ever-evolving, multifaceted, complex interconnectedness of deep existential identity issues, interpersonal dynamics, and constantly reconsidering and renegotiating the balance between “enough” and “more.”

→ Corey Wilks | 6-min read