You generally know when someone asks you to do something- am I more writing, or am I more editing? The editor is the best metaphor for your job.

You can build the most important companies in history with a very simple to describe concept. You can market products in less than 50 characters. There is no reason why you can't build your company the same way. So force yourself to simplify every initiative, every product, every marketing, everything you do. Basically take out that red and start eliminating stuff.

Ultimately, I don't believe that you can build a company without a lot of effort, and that you need to lead by example.

What you actually want to do with every single employee, every single day is expand the scope of their responsibilities until it breaks.

Build a company that idiots could run because eventually they will.

Building a company is basically taking all the irrational people you know... Putting them in one building and then living with them 12 hrs a day at least.

The key metric of whether you've succeeded is what fraction of your employees use that dashboard everyday.