Everyone is making New Years Resolutions these days, but not me.

Please forgive me but I just have to brag about myself today - I didn't need to make any new years resolutions this year because I am actually doing so well on some old resolutions that my only goal is to keep up the ones I already have going.

I took some of my own advice and it has been working extraordinarily well. It's kind of a dumb trick, but you know, we are dumb people, so dumb tricks can work really well.

What is my trick?

In the last lesson we began to explain the Big 5 person traits, including Creativity, IQ, and Conscientiousness. They are by far the biggest indicators of success. But today we will look at Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism, which are also critical.

Great stories often say twice as much with half as many words. Through clever double meanings, oxymorons, and paradox, good writing often rewards multiple readings. Movies and television are no different.

As teams, we need to interact, update each other, and remain flexible so that we can consider new ideas, while also being allowed to keep our heads down and focus without distraction. So how do we both manage and produce when the two seem to be at odds with one another?

How do the software companies of Silicon Valley grow from two man teams in garages, to world dominating monoliths like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook? How is it possible that teams of engineers could completely revolutionize the way we interact with the world. Or at the very least, how can we organize our teams to solve problems as quickly and effectively as they have?

How quickly can we get to critical mass or just the right cultural catalyst to trigger a viral response from the community? We need advocates who are so passionate that the audience will generate on its own so long as we keep providing the platform. And as anyone who has survived this recent pandemic knows, virality can be measured.

What would you need to start an organization? What does it take to make a new business successful? Does it take a lot of money to make money? Not according to Eric Ries, the author of the popular book on entrepreneurship titled, “The Lean Startup.”

Have you ever wondered how two guys living in San Francisco starting a small business out of their garage could disrupt an entire industry? And yet time and time again, we have seen Stanford school dropouts become international billionaires and outperform corporate giants like the music industry, Walmart, and IBM. What is the slingshot that is allowing these Davids to strike these Goliaths down?