Five for the business. Six for the person building it. I return to them when a decision has become noisier than it needs to be.
Assume from the beginning that you will not always be in the room. Write down what good work looks like. Give people the context to make decisions. Build systems that remain useful when the founder is tired, travelling, or unavailable.
Platforms change. The durable work does not: answer promptly, make a clear promise, arrive when you said you would, do the work well, and follow up with care. A company can survive a great deal if customers trust it.
Launch, scale, systemise, delegate, then go remote. Each stage has its own problems, metrics, and kind of patience. A later-stage ambition placed on an early-stage company creates confusion and burnout.
If every important decision still returns to the owner, the company has a single point of failure. Delegation means transferring outcomes and judgement, not only tasks. Becoming less necessary is an act of leadership.
Decide what the company is meant to protect and whom it is meant to serve. Time with family, health, place, creative work, the ability to help others, or the freedom to choose what comes next are legitimate business requirements.
Balance is the first of the six. So it gets practised, on my hands, in an underpass in Seoul, wherever the ground is flat enough. A principle you don’t practise is a decoration.
See it in the story →These came first; the operating principles grew out of them.
Do not hold one part of life so tightly that it crowds out the rest. Work, family, body, mind, and stillness each need room. Balance changes by season, but neglect should not become an identity.
A business exists because it is useful to someone else. Keep that person visible when the work becomes abstract. Good service is the discipline of making a promise worth keeping and organising the company to keep it.
Treat customers, colleagues, and difficult people as human beings before they become problems to solve. Kindness is a standard for how power is used.
Do not turn a difficult week into a prophecy, or a strong month into proof of invincibility. Meet the business with the same steadiness on both sides of the graph.
Keep the public and private versions of yourself close together. Write what you believe. Take the work you can respect. Refuse the kind that requires a permanent performance.
There are two long projects: becoming a more capable person, and helping the people near you become more capable too. Business gives both projects daily material.
An instruction to remove before adding: fewer priorities, clearer possessions, simpler plans, and less friction between what matters and what receives my time. Most weeks contain several things that do not need to be there. The practice is noticing them early enough to let them go.