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. And there are other issues that are not first order. At Zappos, we had a situation where the website's not fast enough. Is the first order issue that we have too many pictures? Well, we want the pictures. Is the first order issue that we need to trim the number of search results? Well, customers want longer search results.”— Zappos speaker (likely Fred Mossler or Alfred Lin)

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

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Solve root cause, not symptoms

“Another situation is the distribution at Zappos was not flowing well, and we couldn't figure out which process was broken. Was it the picking process? Was the ordering process broken? What was broken about it? And we went and just looked through the flow and the flow was broken. And so there was too many handoffs across all of these different discrete processes.”— Zappos speaker

Operations & Execution · Strategy & Decision Making · Business & Entrepreneurship

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Optimize flow not discrete processes

“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. Meaning if the AI agent they've built for their customers solves the problem, there's usually a pre-negotiated rate for that. And that comes from the principle that in the age of AI, software isn't just helping you be more productive, but actually completing a task.”— Sierra CEO (likely Bret Taylor or Clay Bavor)

Business & Entrepreneurship · Strategy & Decision Making · Technology & Engineering

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Charge for outcomes not usage rights

“There are people who are anxiously attached. What happens for them is their story of love is that I'm gonna chase you. I have to convince you to like me. You might pull away and we're gonna have this chase dynamic. Then there's people who are avoidant attached. Their version of love is, I'm gonna be smothered, I'm gonna lose my independence. And when they get too close to somebody, they are the ones pulling away. What ends up happening is they often date each other and they reinforce this idea.”— Relationship expert

Psychology & Behavior

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Anxious-avoidant loop reinforces both patterns

“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. And so you can't just go down that list and do them one by one.”— Unidentified speaker

Strategy & Decision Making · Operations & Execution

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Pop up a level to find real priorities

“I really believe that great CEOs and great founders start usually with one specialty but become more broadly specialists in all parts of their business. I think the businesses are multifaceted, and rarely is a business's success due to one thing. As you see founders grow from doing one thing to growing to being a real meaningful company like Airbnb or Meta or something, you can see those founders really transform from being one thing to many things. I think engineers make great leaders.”— Unidentified speaker (likely VC or founder)

Leadership & Management · Business & Entrepreneurship · Psychology & Behavior

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CEO identity shift from specialist to generalist

“The amount of change in such a short period of time is, I think, unprecedented. And so as a consequence, I think if you are responding to the facts in front of you and not thinking from first principles about why we're at this point and where it will probably be 12 months from now, the likelihood that you'll make the right strategic decision is almost zero. How many software engineers will we have at our company 3 years from now?”— Unidentified speaker (likely tech CEO)

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

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Hire for future capability not current need

“I really like the spirit of founder mode, which is just having deep founder-led accountability for every decision at your company. I think that that's how great companies operate. And when you proverbially make decisions by committee, or you're more focused on process than outcomes, that produces all the experiences we hate as employees, as customers.”— Unidentified speaker (likely VC or tech executive)

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

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Mimicking surface traits misses root cause

“The pain of losing is sharp, but it's over fairly quickly. But the pain of regret not putting in the work, not doing the things, you didn't leave it all on the field, that lasts forever. The pain of regret is much more than the pain of preparation. You play the game, you go back, you analyze it. What do we do well? What do we do poorly? What do we need to do better? What adjustments should we have made? What coaching errors did we make? And so forth.”— Bill Belichick or NFL coach

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior

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24-hour reflection window then move on

“I built this game and the central server at the time was literally a floppy drive where all of us saved our programs there. And one day a bunch of the students in the computer lab all found the game that I programmed and then started playing with it. The teacher and the principal just happened to walk in and saw that we're all playing this game. And I was told that computer lab is valuable time and you should be doing something much more productive than producing a game.”— Unidentified speaker (likely tech founder)

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior

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Team performance through knowledge sharing

“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. So 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.”— Dating/relationship expert

Psychology & Behavior · Culture & Society

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Rejection resilience requires practice

“You don't want yes people around you. You want people who say, why don't we push the boundaries of our thinking? 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. I have the same philosophy. You just get up every single day and do the things that are important.”— Multiple speakers

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior · Operations & Execution

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Daily default removes negotiation friction