On Avoiding Stupidity
It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.
This truly struck a cord with me. You can try being brilliant, being excellent, being the best, and I guess this is not the worst aspiration for a team. But, in the end, success in completing projects and shipping products is less about being exceptional but being non-exceptional. Not about getting one thing perfectly right, but about getting many things not wrong. Success sometimes is less about winning and more about not loosing.