No. 666 – February 1, 2026
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Tiny Thoughts
Your greatest competition is yourself.
You can’t outperform your attitude.
What you believe about the work shows up in how you do the work, and how you do the work determines your results.
Fix the attitude first. Everything else follows.
The more ambitious you are, the easier it is to fall into this trap. You hand someone a project and think, “I would have stayed late every night for this.” When they leave at 5, you feel betrayed.
But here’s the thing: you are unusual. Most people aren’t like you. That’s not a flaw in them. It’s what makes you different.
Once you stop expecting others to be you, the frustration disappears.
Insights
French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on engineering excellence:
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Bruce Lee on focusing on the outcome:
“The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of the engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or in defeat.”
Performance Coach Greg Harden on what it means to be assertive:
“Being assertive means being able to have your needs met while still interacting with great sensitivity to those around you.
+ It means valuing yourself—valuing your own life, your own goals, your own precious time here on this earth—while at the same time valuing others.
+ It means recognizing that you have a God-given right to pursue happiness and every other good and worthy thing in life. And that you don’t have to put anyone else down to lift yourself up.
+ It means standing up for what you believe in and expressing your own feelings and opinions in a direct and appropriate way.
+ It means taking responsibility for your actions, recognizing your achievements, owning your mistakes.
+ It means knowing that for you to win doesn’t have to mean that someone else must lose. It means always being honest, within respectful bounds.
+ It means protecting yourself and not allowing others to violate your rights or infringe on your happiness or peace of mind.
+ It means being less concerned about what others think of you and more concerned with who you aspire to be. Being assertive is all about giving yourself the four A’s … Self-attention, self-affection, self-approval, and self-acceptance. In other words, self-love.”
The Knowledge Project
Ray Kroc turned McDonald’s from a single roadside restaurant into a system built to scale.
At 52, after decades of selling paper cups and milkshake machines, he opened “the first McDonald’s” in 1955 and helped grow it to nearly 8,000 restaurants worldwide.
Here’s the story of McDonald’s
Some Tiny Lessons from this episode:
- “I was an overnight success all right. But thirty years is a long, long night.”
- Do a few things. Do them perfectly.
- Trust isn’t built in grand gestures. It’s built when you could take the last slice and don’t.
- What you refuse to do matters more than what you do.
- Dreams are only wasted if they’re not linked to action.
+ Listen on Apple | Spotify | YouTube | X | Web/Transcript
Still curious?
+ All 21 Tiny Lessons I learned researching and creating this episode
+ Members have access to my personal highlights from Grinding it Out, the book used as the basis for this episode, as well as to the repository, which offers all of my highlights.
Thanks for reading,
— Shane Parrish