No. 660 – December 21, 2025
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Tiny Thoughts
Your goals are not big enough.
The best way to network is to do something interesting.
When you do interesting work in public, a network will form around you.
If everyone likes you, you’re doing something wrong.
Every time someone disapproves of you, your brain registers it as a survival threat. Evolution wired us to believe that rejection equals death. If the tribe kicked you out, you didn’t survive the winter.
But the world has changed. Being disliked is necessary to live a meaningful life.
The cost of making decisions to please others instead of yourself is misery.
Insights
Henry Ford on the key to life:
“The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one’s destiny to do, and then do it.”
Coach Mike Krzyzewski on wanting the right thing:
“My hunger is not for success, it is for excellence. When you attain excellence, success naturally follows.”
Philip Roth on being wrong:
“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them menacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. … The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that — well, lucky you.”
The Knowledge Project [Outliers]
Bernie Marcus is the co-founder and former CEO of Home Depot.
This short episode is all about how he built a culture of ownership, kept going when everyone turned him down, nearly lost it all, and created one of the most successful retailers in history.
Here are some of the Tiny Lessons from this episode.
1. Bad money is worse than no money.
2. Outcome over ego.
3. Sales are an addiction; low prices are a discipline.
4. You can make money honestly on repeat, or you can make it deceptively once.
5. Invisible benefits often outweigh visible costs.
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More from this episode …
+ Read all 19 Tiny Lessons
+ Read the 16 Lessons
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Thanks for reading,
— Shane Parrish