It works because it’s personal.

We are always under tight deadlines, because time is our most valuable asset.

If you make a promise, set a date. No date, no promise.

If you set a date, meet it.

If you can’t make a date, tell us early and often. Plan B well prepared is a better strategy than hope.

Clean up your own mess.

Clean up other people’s messes.

Overcommunicate.

Question premises and strategy.

Don’t question goodwill, effort or intent.

“I’ll know it when I see it,” is not a professional thing to say. Describing and discussing in the abstract is what we do.

Big projects are not nearly as important as scary commitments.

If what you’re working on right now doesn’t matter to the mission, help someone else with their work.

Make mistakes, own them, fix them, share the learning.

Cheap, reliable, public software might be boring, but it’s usually better. Because it’s cheap and reliable.

Yesterday’s hierarchy is not nearly as important as today’s project structure.

Lock in the things that must be locked in, leave the implementation loose until you figure out how it can get done.

Mostly, we do things that haven’t been done before, so don’t be surprised when you’re surprised.

Caremore.

If an outsider can do it faster and cheaper than we can, don’t hesitate.

Always be seeking outside resources. A better rolodex is better, even if we don’t have rolodexes any more.

Talk to everyone as if they were your boss, your customer, the founder, your employee. It’s all the same.

It works because it’s personal.

Agreement / Alignment

The agreement is merely a condition of content in which everyone is going to the same place. On the other hand, alignment is a context in which everyone is coming from the same source.

Nothing

The idea of nothing can sometimes be challenging because we’re pretty much wired to perceive experiences, things, concepts as meaningful. The notion of “nothing” can seem antithetical to common-sense views held in our culture. We live in a world where meaning is attached to almost everything, but not as if we were the ones who assigned the meaning. The meanings we live inside of and hold as fundamental define our relationships with the world and give us a sense of who we are.

To step outside that structure and encounter nothing as freedom, we have to pass through and beyond (what to some is) the foreignness of the idea. If we get the past out of the future, and put it back in the past, leaving the future empty that we inadvertently placed there, then what’s in the future is nothing—nothing like a “clearing,” one in which we can be fully ourselves. It is from nothing that a “created future” can come into the picture. It doesn’t rest on anything—it rests on nothing. And from this, nothing, we get to know what’s possible in being human.