#483: Jim Collins — The Return of a Reclusive Polymath

You never know when the people you might want to say something to might disappear. Any number of things can happen—accident, disease, life just expires ... If you have it to say, don't wait too long.

Writing is like running ... If you're going to run your best, whatever your PR is, it is always going to hurt. Writing never gets easier; you only get better.

You can always say something you haven't said. You can never unsay something you've said.

If you woke up tomorrow morning and you discovered, absolutely, you have only ten years to live, what would you stop doing?

I'm still a voracious learner from biographies. I think the arc of entire lives is one of the greatest sources of wisdom—to really understand the arc of a life. And one of the things you find when you do that is, I don't care how remarkable the person is, they all have their mistakes, their setbacks, their wandering periods—and it's kind of encouraging.

If you don't have the discipline, no app is going to make you disciplined.

It's easier to turn a small business or an entrepreneurial company into a great company than it is to try to change a giant mediocrity down the road into a great company, so get it right early.

Dark force motivations, for me, have always been the things like anger, rage, channeled rage, insecurity, need for attention, accomplishment... And then there are light force points, which are 'I just love the work' ... Or 'I love the people I'm doing it with, or the sheer curiosity of the question,' or 'I know I can make this better, even if no one else notices, so therefore, I want to make it better.'

It's far better to never say you have a purpose if you don't than to inauthentically proclaim one.

I think that the search for beauty and elegance, which are similar in my mind but not identical, has become the fuel for the seeker ... When I search for beauty... I tend to find more truth than when I purely try to deduce truth intellectually in a very prefrontal way.

There come these times in life when not all time in life is equal, and the quality of your performance in that moment will have outside effects on the rest of your life.

One of my mentors, Michael Ray, had a wonderful line, which is 'Comparison is the primary sin of modern life.'

You might want to think about whether you want a life to envy or a life to admire.

There are two approaches to life: to seek transactions and see life as series of transactions or to take life as building relationships, and the only way to have a great life, in [Bill Lazier's] view. was relationships—and the cornerstone of relationships is trust.

If you can't find a way to make it fun, you shouldn't do it.

And this is what I learned from Admiral Stockdale: This idea [that] you must never, ever confuse the need, on the one hand, for unwavering faith that you can and you will prevail in the end with, at the same time.... the discipline to confront the most brutal facts as they actually are today.

The '20-minute rule' basically says if you wake up in the middle of the night and you're not back to sleep by 20 minutes, you get up and get going.

It's not that beauty is hard to find; it's that it is easy to overlook.

The average tenure and harness of the founding shapers of the companies that became the great companies is about 36 years.