Early in my time at Google I realized that most of the company was 99th percentile talent, especially the software engineers. I later discovered there was a wider than normal disparity in salaries at each level of software engineer. I got a chance to chat with the vp of engineering about this and asked them what was the difference between the worst and the best google engineer. Their answer shocked me: 300x I've thought about this in the almost 20 years since - what makes a 300x performer. Most people focus on being skilled and being seen - and all the great are both. The three things all 300x performance additionally have in common are: Self awareness Self confidence Secure in their place in the world Additionally - their life design relative to their goals and dreams is pristine. So if you want to produce more - assess those three areas as a starting point

So my LinkedIn outreach process led me to receive this book for free and I am so happy about it. Here are keys from the introduction: Every system is designed to get the results that it currently gets. So if you want different results, change is necessary and challenging. So what can we do to make it less challenging? We need to find: - Leverage points: actions that have outsized rewards - Resource stacks: Load up resources on the leverage to get max impact fast - because progress is the most important aspect of a good work day for a person It turns out that there is a system to find leverage points and a system to resource stacking - that’s what the rest of the book is about.

First, I’m impressed that a book written 9 years ago is still so relevant today. Since a big part of learning is working for the knowledge, reflecting, and retrieving - here are some things I have learned so far The exception to the hypothesis that we should all invest in deep work is surprisingly the CEO of a company (not to be confused with an owner/operator founder type). A CEO is described as a human decision making machine that’s difficult to replicate. But even they should get their information to decide from those experts who spend the required time in deep work. It gets problematic when CEOs expect everyone to work like they work. Value comes from leverage and rarity - both are important and you can normally only get them from a deep work base. When combined with the idea that humans pursue the part of least resistance and that most things are very hard to measure in the knowledge work arena, and it’s no wonder that people opt to look visibly busy as a proxy of productivity. One final note - the three worker types that will continue to succeed are those good at using intelligent machines, the 10x superstar at their cadet, and those with a capital advantage to make a series of high leverage, outsized reward bets. While we can’t control when we join the capital group - the path seems to be in the first 2 groups. I had fun reading 100 pages at 2am and it really didn’t feel like work. That’s a learning for me.

Someone asked me: If you had unlimited time and resources, what would your ultimate vision look like for the impact you want to make? I didn’t like my answer which was: That’s a really good question. I think I would want to try to redesign education, work, and communities so that more people had a chance to be successful and fulfilled. Have no desire to be a politician and I’ve already held elected office so I know how hard systemic change is from that seat. I want to make the real rules of the game of life accessible to everyone equally. I’m going to work to add specificity to this answer so that I can get it done.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that self-advocacy is a separating talent for both productivity and happiness. So to activate that talent: - Get really clear about what you want - Have the hard conversation with yourself on what you want and need in the ideal scenario - Communicate with the other people affected or impacted what your ideal needs and boundaries are The people I see who are willing to do this consistently thrive so I am going to find a system to act this way and measure the results Stay tuned