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Business & enterprise

Founders & CEOs

A practical record of judgment under uncertainty, scaling, people decisions, culture, and responsibility — useful without pretending success has one formula.

12 questions, 166 answers on the record, from 135 members. Every question is asked in FLAPSS wording — nobody answers as anybody else.

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Worth reading

What are you best at that nobody watching would notice?

Brian Eno

Composer, record producer and visual artist

I find that you’re a completely different person as a maker than you are as a listener. That’s one of the reasons I so often leave the studio to listen to things.

Recorded · Pitchfork, reproduced in the More Dark Than Shark archive · 2017

Jensen Huang

Co-founder, president and chief executive of NVIDIA

Of all of the things that I value most about my abilities, intelligence is not top of that list.

Recorded · YouTube (recording of the Caltech commencement address) · 2024

Orhan Pamuk

Novelist; Nobel laureate in Literature, 2006

For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know…

Recorded · The Nobel Foundation (nobelprize.org) · 2006

Read all 26 →

Every question in this questionnaire

  1. What is the most consequential decision you made with incomplete information, and what did you rely on? —
  2. What problem was important enough for you to build an organisation around, and what did you misunderstand about it at first? —
  3. What is your theory of how success actually works in the field you work in — the dynamics underneath the surface? —
  4. What part of your job would surprise outsiders because it takes up so much of your time? 41
  5. What worked at an early stage but became harmful as the organisation grew? —
  6. What are you best at that nobody watching would notice? 26
  7. When have you kept the wrong person in a role for too long, and what prevented you from acting sooner? —
  8. Which behaviour does your organisation reward in practice, regardless of what its stated values say? —
  9. How has a setback or failure set you up for later success? 69
  10. When you put your name on something, how thoroughly should you have checked it first — and when have you signed off without checking enough? —
  11. What are you unwilling to optimise? 30
  12. Describe a decision where what was best for the organisation conflicted with what was best for you personally. —

Who has answered

Members with enough answers in this questionnaire to be worth arriving at — listed A–Z, not ranked by count.

  • Alice Waters

    Chef, restaurateur and food activist

    2 answers United States b. 1944

  • AW
    August Wilson

    Playwright; two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama

    2 answers United States 1945–2005

  • Barack Obama

    44th President of the United States, 2009–2017; United States Senator from Illinois 2005–2008

    3 answers United States b. 1961

  • BJ
    Bong Joon-ho

    Film director and screenwriter

    2 answers South Korea b. 1969

  • Cathy Freeman

    Australian sprinter, 1990–2003

    2 answers Australia b. 1973

  • Charlie Munger

    Vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, 1978–2023

    2 answers United States b. 1924

  • Chris Hoy

    British track cyclist, 1994–2013

    3 answers United Kingdom b. 1976

  • DS
    Derek Sivers

    Founder of CD Baby; author of Anything You Want

    2 answers United States

  • Edmund Hillary

    Mountaineer and explorer; first ascent of Everest, 1953

    2 answers New Zealand 1919–2008

  • Haruki Murakami

    Novelist, short-story writer and translator

    2 answers Japan b. 1949

  • JD
    Jamie Dimon

    Chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase from 2005

    2 answers United States b. 1956

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