Dennis Gotta

If you're a high-performing person, eventually your job mostly becomes getting other people to do theirs.

It's remarkable how often the real problem is not what happened, but how it was communicated.

The best advice I got in my 20s: When you feel stuck, shrink the time horizon. Don't ask what the year needs. Ask what today needs. One finished task. One workout. One closed loop. One hard conversation. Momentum is a byproduct of movement. Remember that.

"To simplify before you understand the details is ignorance. To simplify after you understand the details is genius."

Spent my last 20 years in consulting. Made Partner in my 30s. Led teams of 100+ people. Run 9-figure client portfolios. Lived and worked in 4 continents. Hired ~200 employees in multiple geos. The hardest lesson I had to learn, at a real crossroads in my career, is a cliché everyone agrees with, but almost nobody truly understands: "What got me here won't get me there." Early on, progress rewards competence: you grind, you solve, you deliver. YOU become the person. Then you climb... and, basically without warning, the entire game changes. At senior levels, being a brilliant problem-solver is no longer enough. In fact, it *can* become a liability. The work that used to be all about answers, now starts being about implementing common sense at bigger scale. The work now becomes about making ambiguous, high-stakes decisions with incomplete and/or conflicting information, and about building people who can succeed *without* you sitting next to them. I'm telling you: if you still need to be in the weeds, you are already behind! Real leadership (I know... the infamous L word...) requires something deeply uncomfortable for most human beings in corporate: You gotta make yourself redundant. Most people resist this. I did too. When a team member brings you a problem, your instinct is to fix it in 30 seconds. Don't. Sit on your hands. Ask a question and walk away. If you keep fixing things, your team stays weak and you stay overworked. Think back to a moment when you felt indispensable on a project or to a team: chances are that feeling (which you likely thought was a strength) was your ceiling. If a deck is 80% as good as you would make it, leave it alone. If you spend your Sunday night polishing someone else's slides, what are you really?! A proofreader?! You have to let people fail small so the organization doesn't fail big. The shift from "doer" to "enabler" forces you to unlearn habits that once had made you successful; it can be ego-bruising and perhaps boring, but it is the only way to scale. That shedding is the price of playing the long game - the only one worth playing. All the best.

Dieses Interview sollte man lesen, aushalten und darüber diskutieren, was anders werden muss.

A lesson I wish I learned earlier: Clarity isn’t found in thinking. It’s found in doing. This is why there are so many smart people that never accomplish anything. The world belongs to the people who never let thinking get in the way of doing. Move. Fail. Adapt. Repeat.

I highly recommend this article for anyone who still thinks that LLMs are still "only predicting the next token". It's long and unsettling but worth the read.

The older I get, the more I realize preparation always beats planning. Planning is based on the expectation of order. Preparation is based on the expectation of chaos. Plan for order and you'll be destroyed by chaos. Prepare for chaos and you'll thrive in any condition.

How to increase agency *and* have fun: Work less. Focus more.

„No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.“

Organizations that can't measure performance end up measuring performativeness instead.

Speed up in work, slow down in life.

“It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time. Give yourself permission to be a beginner.” — ​Julia Cameron​, The Artist’s Way

You should be a generalist. Generalists can make tradeoffs across the entire stack. It's better in every way, trust me. You can do things that other people couldn't have, you can be creative. The only cost to do so is your ego. You need enough humility to be a permanent amateur

Comparison is the thief of joy when applied broadly, but the teacher of skills when applied narrowly (@JamesClear)

Harsh truth: Running a company is simply a game of prioritizing problems. Here’s how to become the Chief Problem Solver in your business:

this hits...

Heuristic for US foreign policy: You should not be competing with South Park's writers.