Be Your Best in 2026: The Most Important Lessons from The Knowledge Project (2025)

“If I get this problem, I have a problem on my hands. If I get to the first-order issue and get to the root cause of that, usually that helps solve that problem. The website's not working fast enough. Is the first order issue that we have too many pictures? We want the pictures. Is it that we need to trim search results? Customers want longer results. No, it's none of that. We need to figure out how to make the website go faster.”— Tony Hsieh or Alfred Lin (Zappos context)

Strategy & Decision Making · Technology & Engineering · Operations & Execution

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Solve root cause not symptoms; reject false tradeoffs

“We went and just looked through the flow and the flow was broken. There were too many handoffs across all of these different discrete processes. We had to pop up a level and figure out what the flow was from when a customer orders something, when it gets through the distribution center, how it's going to be picked, packed, packaged, and shipped.”— Zappos Speaker (Tony Hsieh or Alfred Lin)

Operations & Execution

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Flow perspective reveals batching as false constraint

“Our pricing model is really unique and comes from first principles thinking. Rather than having our customers pay a license for the privilege of using our platform, we only charge our customers for the outcomes. If the AI agent they've built for their customers solves the problem, there's usually a pre-negotiated rate for that. In the age of AI, software isn't just helping you be more productive, but actually completing a task.”— Tech CEO (Sierra context)

Business & Entrepreneurship · Strategy & Decision Making · Economics & Markets

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Price model should match value delivery mechanism

“I have the same philosophy. You just get up every single day and do the things that are important. Instead of trying to figure out which days you're going to work out, it's always a negotiation with which days, and some days you don't feel like exercising, you just work out every day.”— Unknown Guest

Operations & Execution · Psychology & Behavior

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Remove daily negotiation by making it automatic

“I chose to write performance appraisals which said, this is what you've done well, this is where I think you didn't do well, this is what you need to work on, and if you were to work on these issues and show progress, this is where you could go. You see what this letter did: celebrate them for what they did well, told them what they didn't do well, told them the 3 or 4 things they had to demonstrate progress on in the next year and how I was going to help them.”— CEO describing written performance system

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior

DUR_ENDURING

Complete feedback loop with trajectory mapping

“Often we can create a very, very long to-do list and then you've got to pop up a level and just look at the to-do list. What's the most important things I have to get accomplished? Because if you just list all the to-dos, you probably will not be able to get to all of them. And the most important thing might be the last one you list.”— Unknown Guest

Strategy & Decision Making · Operations & Execution

DUR_ENDURING

Pop up a level to see what truly matters

“I have a very nuanced point. I really like the spirit of founder mode, which is having deep founder-led accountability for every decision at your company. When you make decisions by committee or focus on process over outcomes, that produces all the experiences we hate as employees and customers. The issue I have is how people can interpret that and execute it as a caricature.”— Tech CEO discussing founder mode

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior

DUR_CONTEXTUAL

Mimicking surface behavior misses underlying drivers

“Great CEOs and founders start usually with one specialty but become more broadly specialists in all parts of their business. Businesses are multifaceted. Rarely is a business's success due to one thing. As you see founders grow from doing one thing to growing to a real meaningful company, you can see those founders transform from being one thing to many things. One of the main transitions founders need to make is you're not the product manager for the company, you're the CEO.”— Tech CEO

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior · Strategy & Decision Making

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Identity must evolve with role or growth plateaus

“The price has to be paid in advance. You have to put in the work before you get any results. There's no way to honestly know how good your preparation is. That's why I always try to emphasize keep preparing, keep working. You don't know what the other guy's doing. He might be working just as hard as you are. Getting in condition, studying, preparing all your film and your opponents, all that has to be done on the front end. The pain of losing is sharp, but it's over fairly quickly.”— Bill Belichick

Operations & Execution · Psychology & Behavior

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Regret pain exceeds preparation pain and losing pain

“I was told that computer lab is valuable time and you should be doing something much more productive than producing a game. I was no longer allowed to work in the computer lab. The teacher said, well, I'm sorry, the principal wants you out, but you should join the math team. If you want to be a leader and you want the team to win, it's not good enough for me to just solve the problems. I need to figure out how to get the rest of the team to perform.”— Zappos Speaker recounting teacher Mrs. Pitosa

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior

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Leadership means elevating others not just performing

“I am genuinely concerned that because of different societal factors, because of people who maybe lost out on some social skills during the pandemic, there is not that rejection resilience that many of us need in life. If you want your dream job, you need to go out there, get a lot of nos, and go after it. You don't just sit at home waiting for a LinkedIn recruiter to message you about your dream job. You have to make it happen. The same thing is true with dating. You have to shoot your shot.”— Dating expert guest

Psychology & Behavior · Culture & Society

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Rejection resilience must be actively built

“With modern large language models, one of the careers being most transformed is software engineering. I think a lot about how many software engineers will we have 3 years from now. What will the role of a software engineer be as we go from being authors of code to operators of code-generating machines? What does that mean for the type of people we should recruit? If I look at the actual craft of software engineering we're doing right now, it'll be completely different 2 years from now.”— Tech CEO (likely Sierra/Bret Taylor context)

Strategy & Decision Making · Technology & Engineering · Leadership & Management

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Hire for future state not current craft

“You want people who say, why don't we push the boundaries of our thinking? But don't forget the toughness because you don't want yes people around you. You want toughness, kindness, and clarity. All three.”— Unknown Guest

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior

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Toughness plus kindness creates optimal feedback