Keith Rabois- Spotting Undiscovered Talent, Discovering Your Comparative Advantage and Cultivating Greatness

You don't want to be the best at what you do; you want to be the only one who does what you do.

I don’t think you want to replicate someone else’s strategy or unique insights. You have to figure out which pieces of their success formula apply to your comparative advantages, and which ones you can leverage, and which ones you can maybe even do better than them. That’s where the art is. I’m borrowing lessons I’ve learned from a bunch of different people, from a bunch of different experiences, from a bunch of different companies, and packaging them together in my own Keith custom brew.

If you’re going to attract people with extremely high potential, the first thing you have to do is let them thrive. You have to give them the degrees of freedom to do both what they can do very well, and to some extent, allow them to make mistakes.

There’s nothing more valuable than reading high-quality materials. You can tap into the best thinking of all time, become an expert in many dimensions, and forge connections from different fields.

I think we’ll discover in the next 20-30 years when we have more longitudinal data that most maladies are a function of poor sleep.

To be successful in an efficient market, you need to figure out what your comparative advantage is and magnify it.

Debating with someone who’s very good at what they do—who’s very insightful and sharp—is always a useful exercise.

I’m a better filter of other people’s ideas than I am a generator of my own. A lot of what I do is listen to ideas, riff on them—or critique them—and help other people refine them by my critiques or by my riffs.

Almost everybody’s taught that stress is bad for them… It’s completely false. You want more stress in your life. With the right mental attitude, you’ll live longer, be happier, and be more successful.

A lot of my role, in many ways, is very similar to a psychologist—giving people feedback by asking them questions. At the end of the questioning, they get to the right conclusions.