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Sanity

By Sanity

4 recommend/use · 6 sourced episodes

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Leadership4 steps

Can't Do / Won't Do / Not Set Up To Do

Three reasons things don't happen — and 70-80% of the time it's the third one, which is yours.

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Choose Your Abstraction Layer Deliberately

Delegate the work you don't enjoy to a higher abstraction; keep the parts that make you good and happy.

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Mindset5 steps

Dancing With Your Fears

Price the cost of inaction, then stop trying to kill the fears that won't die — have a conversation with them.

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Strategy5 steps

Engineering Financial Space

Convert your job into a contract, cut the burn, and buy back time without a clean break.

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Mindset4 steps

Excellence Over Speed (The Thought-Experiment Filter)

If you must choose, choose excellence — and kill most experiments before they ever go live.

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Innovation4 steps

Fairer Marketplace Rating System Design

Fight rating inflation and averaging bias with renormed labels, priors, blind reviews, and the sound of silence.

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Strategy3 steps

Growth Can't Reverse a Decline

A growth team can't fix a slowing business; stop the decline first, then add growth to amplify.

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Innovation5 steps

Hypothesis-Driven Experimentation: Learning as a Win

Reframe experiments from winners/losers to hypotheses; run more, run shorter, and carry priors forward.

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Strategy4 steps

Inspiration, Not Imitation

Use competitor teardowns as an input to ideation, never as the finished destination.

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Innovation4 steps

Leap-of-Faith MVP Scoping

Scope the smallest build that tests your riskiest assumption, not a stripped-down product

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Strategy4 steps

Marketplace Whack-a-Mole: Managing Winners and Losers

Most consequential marketplace changes create winners and losers; manage the trade, don't chase a metric.

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Strategy6 steps

Multi-Sided Marketplace Operating Rules

In a three-sided marketplace, OKRs and A/B tests break — establish stability, name your primary customer, then bet.

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Strategy4 steps

Predict vs. Decide: Think in Differentials

Prediction finds correlations; decisions need causal differences. Optimize the lift, not the level.

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Innovation4 steps

Problem-First AI Adoption

Start from the customer problem and ask where AI helps — never from 'what do we do with AI?'

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Marketing3 steps

Rebrand Eyes-Wide-Open

A homepage redesign or rebrand won't drive growth; budget 3-6 months to claw performance back after launch.

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Mindset3 steps

Robust-Across-Futures Action

When the future is unknowable, choose actions that are ethical across a wide range of scenarios

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Ship, Quit, and Learn

Design the smallest thing you can ship that is built to be quit — then let shipping it tell you what's next.

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Communication5 steps

Show Don't Tell (The Wall)

Lay out the entire user journey — pixel by pixel, minute by minute — on one physical wall.

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Start Bespoke, Become a Marketplace Later

A marketplace never starts as a marketplace; win with a pre-liquidity value prop first.

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Leadership5 steps

Take People With You Before You Fix Anything

A new leader's toolbox is worthless until the team agrees a problem exists — build the why first.

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Strategy4 steps

The 18-Month Growth Model Overlay

Spend ~20-25% of growth time annually seeding new loops so your S-curve never flattens with no successor.

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Mindset4 steps

The 3-of-500 Months Sabbatical

Frame a sabbatical as 3 months out of a ~500-month working life, and budget 6-8 weeks just to unwind.

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Strategy5 steps

The 4B Framework (100 Focus Points)

Split 100 focus points across Brilliant Basics, Bread and Butter, Big Bets and Breaking Bad.

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Communication2 steps

The Best-Practice Inversion Interview

Ask a candidate for a best practice, then for when it would not apply

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Leadership3 steps

The Chief Engineer Trade-off Owner

Give one person moral authority over a whole product to keep design coherence in one head

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Marketing4 steps

The Earned Channel Priority

Make building an owned/earned acquisition channel your growth team's number one priority over rented ones.

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Peak Performance4 steps

The Energy Audit

After every activity, log energised or drained — then do more of one and less of the other.

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Strategy4 steps

The Fixed-Window Pivot Decision

Time-box a full-focus test on the one thing that matters, then let the team name the next bet

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Founder-Led Growth Prerequisite

Don't hire a growth team until you have proven PMF and enough data to run experiments.

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Self-Mastery4 steps

The Full-Stack PM Triad: Sharpness, Drive, Influence

Raw sharpness you can build, drive you can barely coach, influence is non-negotiable.

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Innovation6 steps

The Horizon-3 Research Team That Ships

Fund a 3-5 year research team, then bolt it to product so ideas actually reach production.

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Leadership5 steps

The Input-Metrics Stack for Developer Productivity

No single metric rules them all — combine per-component input metrics that ladder up to time-to-value.

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Marketing4 steps

The Lazy, Vain, Selfish User Lens

Design acquisition and onboarding for a user who is lazy, vain and selfish — not for your loyal fans.

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Finance5 steps

The Life MBA Reframe

Set a runway budget, name it an investment in yourself, and give people a socially legible story for it.

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Productivity4 steps

The One-Month Experimentation Rule

If you can't collect the sample size in a month, don't A/B test it; ship it and measure pre vs. post.

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Influence5 steps

The Path Expert Conversation

Find someone a few years ahead on the path you're curious about, and offer them written questions.

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Scaled-Liquidity Smell Test

Before calling yourself a marketplace, prove you have scaled liquidity on both sides.

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Marketing4 steps

The Sticky Engine of Growth

Model retention by the three, and only three, reasons a customer returns to your product

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Self-Mastery4 steps

The Three-Hour Work Mindfulness Experiment

Steal three hours from a workday, do something purposeless, and study the guilt that shows up.

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Innovation5 steps

The Zero-Ask Assistant (Copilot Design Philosophy)

If the user has to ask for it or wait for it, they won't adopt it — build assistance that infers.

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Strategy5 steps

Three Divergent PRFAQs (The Power of Three)

Write three fully-thought-through, divergent press releases — then recommend one.

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Leadership4 steps

Trust-by-Structure Governance

Embed your promises into the company's structure so they hold even when you're gone

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Leadership4 steps

Workshop-First Advisor Hiring

Vet an advisor with a paid working session on a real problem, then re-evaluate their value every month.

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Productivity4 steps

Your Problem Isn't Unique

Never start from scratch; find who already solved your problem and patternize the solution.

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