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Spend time with your best. Watch them. Learn from them. Become as articulate as describing excellence as you are about describing failure.

…conventional wisdom’s view of teamwork is dangerously misleading… excellent teams are built around individual excellence.

…we now know that excellence in every role requires distinct talents and that these talents, unlike skills and knowledge, are extraordinarily difficult to train.

…anywhere individual excellence is revered, you will find… graded levels of achievement.

…in most cases, no matter what it is, if you measure it and reward it, people will try to excel at it.

…there are no shortcuts to excellence. Developing real expertise, figuring out really hard problems, it all takes time – longer than most people imagine.

Everybody expects you to suck at what you do when you’re first starting out. Though it may be a while before you excel at your role, keep at it. You’ll get better.

…excellence takes time and practice to develop.

…years of hard work are often mistaken for innate talent, and… passion is as necessary as perseverance to world-class excellence.

Both successful startups and established companies alike must learn to juggle multiple kinds of work at the same time, pursuing operational excellence and disruptive innovation.