Do The Hard Thing

Reed Hastings, Jamie Dimon, Arthur Brooks, Steve Cohen & More

“Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body. Do not dread adversity—it is your greatest teacher.” - Seneca

Hey Coaches,

Here you go!

✍️ Articles

"Personal Renewal": I don’t think I’ve shared this 1990 speech before, but even if I have, it’s well-worth the re-read.

Not long ago, I read a splendid article on barnacles. I don't want to give the wrong impression of the focus of my reading interests. Sometimes days go by without my reading about barnacles, much less remembering what I read. But this article had an unforgettable opening paragraph. "The barnacle" the author explained "is confronted with an existential decision about where it's going to live. Once it decides.. . it spends the rest of its life with its head cemented to a rock.." End of quote. For a good many of us, it comes to that.

We've all seen men and women, even ones in fortunate circumstances with responsible positions who seem to run out of steam in midcareer.

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The Benefit of Doing Things You’re Bad At: The fantastic Arthur Brooks explains why learning a difficult new skill means risking failure—but it’s also a path to greater happiness.

This kind of mental pain does, however, have an evolved benefit—creating the motivation to succeed, if not at the activity at hand then at some other one. In a recent study of baseball players, skilled pitchers—who are generally poor hitters—were given batting practice. The scholars found that their inferior performance in batting and their resulting frustration led them to be more driven to improve their pitching.

🎙️ Podcast

The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish - #232 Netflix Founder Reed Hastings: Hastings — one of the clearest thinkers in modern business — covers a bunch of leadership topics and how he scaled the Netflix culture as the company grew. [6/10/25 - 72 minutes] Apple | Spotify | YouTube

💭 Miscellaneous

Steve Cohen on Ambition (source)

“Everyone around you is always going to hold you back and say ‘you're doing great, you don't need to run more money, you're making a really good living.' And the reality is, if you're constrained by that, you don't know what's possible,” Cohen says. “I've seen people develop at my firm and do some amazing things. If they had a mindset of holding back on what they're capable of doing, they never would have accomplished what they accomplished.”

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Eagles GM Howie Roseman says the Eagles won't even scout players who’ve been convicted of domestic violence

📺 Video

Management Learnings with Jamie Dimon I JPMorganChase (35 minutes)

J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon held a “master class” focused on management lessons for 400 of his top executives. He explains why great companies need to nurture innovation, ambition and discipline while discouraging complacency, arrogance and bureaucracy.

Belichick, McVay, Jeter

"You just get caught up in this tidal wave of success that we've had. You lose perspective. You struggle with the ego at times because you've been on this incredible run..." - Dan Hurley

Hey Coaches,

Here you go!

✍️ Articles

How a phone call from a college football legend reset Sean McVay’s coaching career: Former college football coach Chris Petersen reached out to Rams Coach Sean McVay after seeing him in a press conference. This is about their relationship and Coach Peterson helping McVay grow as a person and a coach.

“You’re in the middle of a storm. It’s real gray; things are cloudy,” McVay said. “He saw that press conference. I was crying out for help, I just didn’t realize I was.”

🎙️ Podcast

The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish - #230 Bill Belichick: 8x Super Bowl Champion on Winning, Leadership, and Discipline: A nice break from the usual news about Coach Belichick lately, covering his approach to everything that goes into winning. This is one of the better episodes I’ve heard this year. [5/27/25 - 76 minutes] Apple | Spotify | YouTube

“Discipline is doing the right thing over and over again—every time.”

“Confidence is being able to perform when the bull’s-eye is on your back every week.”

“In the NFL, everyone is talented. The difference between a good player and a great one is consistency—can you do your job perfectly, over and over, without letting up? That’s what separates careers that last three years from ones that last ten. Discipline is what allows skill to shine through under pressure.”

The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Can You Become a "Practical" Optimist?: There are many benefits to being an optimist – particularly when things go wrong in our lives. But we aren’t all naturally optimistic, so can we learn to adopt the best and most positive behaviors of born optimists? This explains how. [4/21/25 - 45 minutes] Apple | Spotify | YouTube

💭 Miscellaneous

Learning from Adversity (source)

Older adults who score highly on measures of wisdom reported that they applied valuable life lessons gained from previous experiences of coping with adversity when confronted with new crises and obstacles. By contrast, older adults low on wisdom did not appear to have learned any life lessons from past adversity.

📺 Video

Derek Jeter delivers University of Michigan Spring 2025 Commencement speech (16 minutes) The Captain gave a great speech a few months ago.

“I wouldn’t have had the success without the failures. It’s your job to make sure that a speed bump doesn’t become a road block.”

🤟 What Else

When you have the chance, go check something off your bucket list. Go Thunder

100+ Minutes with Rory McIlroy

+ Leadership Rules, Forecasting, Jamie Dimon Management Master Class

“External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now.” — Marcus Aurelius

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Sponsored By:

The Chase Sapphire Preferred is my favorite credit card for all purchases and is currently running the best ever 100,000 point bonus if you meet spend criteria. Highly recommend (only if you haven’t applied for 5+ cards in the last 24 months).*

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Hey Coaches,

Here you go!

✍️ Articles

The Problem with Saying “Don’t Bring Me Problems, Bring Me Solutions”: Managers say "Don't bring me problems, bring me solutions" because they don't want a complaint culture. But encouraging your employees to speak up about tough issues helps them feel safe to bring up bad news earlier on — helping to avert crises down the line.

As Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei says, “Identifying problems can be a solo sport, but finding solutions rarely is.”

Fastenal's Foundation: Revisiting Bob Kierlin's Leadership Rules: Fastenal is a ~$45 billion company. The founder of the company talks through some of his 10 rules for leadership in the article (rules are shown below).

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🎙️ Podcast

I Can Fly: #12 | Rory McIlroy | Four-Time Major Champion from Northern Ireland: This is a year old, but a great episode with the 2025 Masters Champion. [4/2/2024 - 102 minutes] Apple | Spotify | YouTube

"Just because you shot a good score doesn't make you the greatest person on earth and just because you shot a bad score doesn't make you a piece of shit."

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💭 Miscellaneous

Four of the last six NBA coaches to win the Finals are no longer with the team they won with.

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Investor Howard Marks on Forecasting (source)

One of the things I insist on is that even for someone who deals with the future via forecasts, a forecast isn’t enough. In addition to a forecast, you also need a good sense for the probability your forecast is correct, since not all forecasts are created equal. In this case, under these circumstances, it must be accepted that forecasts are even less likely to prove correct than usual.

Why? Primarily because of the vast number of unprecedented unknowns involved in the current matter, which has the potential to turn into the biggest economic development in our lifetimes. There’s no such thing as foreknowledge here, just complexity and uncertainty, and we must accept that as true. This means that if we insist on achieving certainty or even confidence as a precondition for action, we’ll be frozen into inaction. Or, I dare say, if we conclude we’ve reached decisions with certainty or confidence, we’ll probably be mistaken. We must make our decisions in the absence of those things.

But we also have to bear in mind that deciding not to act isn’t the opposite of acting; it’s an act in itself. The decision to not act – to leave a portfolio unchanged – should be scrutinized as critically as a decision to make changes

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📺 Video

J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon held a “master class” focused on management lessons for 400 of the company’s top executives. The talk focuses on the need to nurture innovation, ambition and discipline while discouraging complacency, arrogance and bureaucracy.

Warren Buffett Speaks

+ Michael Mauboussin on Probabilities

“There is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence – and in the end, you make it look like a quantum leap.” James Dyson

Hey Coaches,

Here you go!

✍️ Articles

Berkshire Hathaway 2025 Annual Letter

Here are a few takeaways from Warren Buffett’s annual letter, which was published last week:

• On Personnel Decisions - “A decent batting average in personnel decisions is all that can be hoped for. The cardinal sin is delaying the correction of mistakes or what Charlie Munger called “thumb-sucking.” Problems, he would tell me, cannot be wished away. They require action, however uncomfortable that may be.”

• On Big Decisions - “…our experience is that a single winning decision can make a breathtaking difference over time. (Think GEICO as a business decision, Ajit Jain as a managerial decision and my luck in finding Charlie Munger as a one-of-a-kind partner, personal advisor and steadfast friend.) Mistakes fade away; winners can forever blossom.”

• On Mistakes - “During the 2019-23 period, I have used the words “mistake” or “error” 16 times in my letters to you. Many other huge companies have never used either word over that span. Amazon, I should acknowledge, made some brutally candid observations in its 2021 letter. Elsewhere, it has generally been happy talk and pictures. I have also been a director of large public companies at which “mistake” or “wrong” were forbidden words at board meetings or analyst calls. That taboo, implying managerial perfection, always made me nervous (though, at times, there could be legal issues that make limited discussion advisable. We live in a very litigious society.)”

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Michael Mauboussin - Probabilities and Payoffs: The Practicalities and Psychology of Expected Value

Mauboussin publishes some of my favorite investment research and gets into sports/decision-making from time to time. This piece is about probabilities applied to investing, but here are some takeaways (note: everything below is verbatim from the paper):

• Feedback and calibration. In decision-making, calibration measures the degree to which someone’s subjective assessment, a measure of confidence, aligns with how often they are correct. Exhibit 6 shows a classic example: thousands of participants answered 50 true-false questions and indicated their confidence in their response for each. The exhibit shows that the confidence of the participants exceeds their correctness in the aggregate. For example, when they are 100 percent sure they know the answer, participants are correct only 77 percent of the time. Psychologists have replicated this finding many times.

• Words to probability. People assign different probabilities to the same word or phrase. This introduces the potential for miscommunication. Exhibit 5 shows some of the results of a survey of more than 3,000 respondents who were presented with words or phrases, in random order, and asked to assign probabilities to each.

• Control and reversibility. Because payoffs reflect future states of the world, it is important to understand when the payoffs are expected to happen (time horizon), whether the decision-maker can alter the payoffs (control), and if the investment can be exited at an acceptable cost (reversibility).

• Consider the shape of the distribution of payoffs. Benoit Mandelbrot, a renowned mathematician, used the terms “mild” and “wild” to distinguish between the ranges of future states. Mild states can generally be captured with a normal, bell-shaped distribution. The distribution of the height of people, for instance, is mild, with the ratio between the tallest and shortest humans on record being five-to-one (left panel of exhibit 2). Statistical concepts such as mean (average) and standard deviation are useful in expressing mild states. Wild states are often power laws, where few very large outcomes have a disproportionate impact on the distribution.

Leadership is a Contact Sport

+ Aaron Glenn, Ben Johnson, Epictetus & More

“There’s a difference between interest and commitment. When you’re interested in something, you do it only when it’s convenient. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses; only results.” - Kenneth Blanchard

Hey Coaches,

Here you go!

✍️ Articles

Calderwood Capital - Popular Delusions (11 pages)

Investor Dylan Grice wrote a review of Of Human Freedom by Epictetus. I’m drawn towards the Stoicism-related principles mentioned and really enjoyed reading this. Highly recommend.

Think first about what you are in control of, and think as deeply as you can about it, because time spent learning to identify and then accept what we cannot control will likely bear more fruit than time spent trying to get rich.

Marshall Goldsmith and Howard Morgan - Leadership Is a Contact Sport (9 pages)

Executive coach and author Marshall Goldsmith explains why leadership is a contact sport.

Leaders who discussed their own improvement priorities with their co-workers, and then regularly followed up with these co-workers, showed striking improvement. Leaders who did not have ongoing dialogue with colleagues showed improvement that barely exceeded random chance.

Leadership is a relationship, not between the coach and the “coachee,” but between the leader and the colleague.

Our studies show that leaders who regularly ask for input are seen as increasing in effectiveness.

Real leadership development involves a process that occurs over time, not an inspiration or transformation that occurs in a meeting.

💭 Miscellaneous

Chicago Bears Head Coach Ben Johnson was previously the Offensive Coordinator of the Detroit Lions. This clip gives a glimpse into his creativity as a play-caller.

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Stay The Course (source)

Dead reckoning relied heavily on assumptions about speed and direction, but what if the wind shifts or a current pulls you off course? Extrapolating inaccuracies too far over time and space can be treacherous.

Golfers know this. On the green, in order to maximize accuracy, a putter’s face angle at impact should be perfectly square to the intended line. For putts of less than four feet in length, the ball will generally still go in even if the putter face is open or closed by +/- 2° at impact. (If this doesn’t sound like much, don’t be so hard on yourself the next time you miss a gimme … even PGA Tour professionals miss 12% of 4-foot putts!) But at fifteen feet, the margin for error increases: a mere half-a-degree face angle difference is too much to sink a 15-foot putt. Small errors magnify over time and distance.

Bonus

I wrote why I was confused UF basketball fouled at the end of the first half last week. If I’m missing something, let me know!