Dui Toledo on Life

philosophy Featured

Universal Excellence – Pursue excellence in everything you choose to do

The gaps in our lives are filled between our current state and our potential.

philosophy

Stories are the brain's programming language

I think the most important reason for reading fiction is it's one of the best methods available for deliberately updating our own values

philosophy

Exploring the morality of actions when removing money's influence

Would we morally judge this exact action differently if there was no money involved?

self-discipline Featured

High expectations and high slopes of growth

If we want to increase our growth the most over time, which characteristic will create the growth of the others?

leadership

How to build a department

To build groups, you must be able to perform roles, hire, and then give those roles away.

leadership

Leader, Manager and Expert – The 3 Startup Roles

It's essential to evaluate your role to ensure you're contributing at the highest level to the company and being assessed correctly, given your primary role.

self-discipline

What are your gaps? Developing high standards through scorecards

It's obvious, but often ignored, that to pursue high standards, you must have standards that are actually high.

meta

International Women Month Book Recommendations

Since March is International Women's Month, I'd like to recommend five books either by women authors or biographies about women.

philosophy

How we choose: Do we have free will?

Our motivations are affected by how dopamine and other neurotransmitters affect our brain, and those, in turn, are affected by our surroundings and previous behavior.

philosophy

Are you a different person when you speak a different language?

If our thoughts depend on the symbols they manipulate, and those symbols are linguistic in nature, then linguistic richness and poverty would likely imply the same for thought.

philosophy

How free am I? Understanding agency and rights

Our agency, rights, obligations and prohibitions are contextual to our current situation.

philosophy

When we say "Find meaning in life," what do we mean exactly?

I think most of our difficulty trying to find meaning in life is a difficulty in finding our top values.

philosophy

On feeling strongly about uncertain moral truths

After much reading and talking to ethics experts, my conclusion is that we know close to the same as we did when we started 2,500 years ago: very little.

self-discipline

How to create a personal vision

Visions must have 3 characteristics: They clearly contrast present and future, they are about outcomes "out there" in the real world, and they inspire us to act

self-discipline

How to read a lot: Building focus and endurance

It wasn't always this way. I started small and built up to this level of focus and endurance over many years of practice.

self-discipline Featured

Setting strategic New Year resolutions

Is that a strategic goal that leads you closer to your values, or just a reaction to things you wish you had more time for?

self-discipline

Antifragility: Turning stress into strength

Avoiding stress will prevent the adaptation required for growth. Not growing will, ironically, make us more easily stressed.

leadership

The third pillar of leadership: Motivation

Autonomy and Responsibility must be aligned so the team has enough autonomy over what they're responsible for

leadership

The second pillar of management: Competence

You can't empower a team to make decisions without an extremely high competence team

leadership

The first pillar of management: Priority

Without consistency, there are no commitments. Without commitments, there's no work on priorities.

leadership

How to transition to the work you need

It's crucial to know your skills and competencies and how they can help you find a role that better matches your needs.

leadership

"How sure are you?" – Calibrating our confidence levels

While explaining is useful in justifying our confidence when we're sure, it's most useful for decreasing our confidence when we're NOT sure.

leadership

Focus on fewer goals by asking "What's going on?"

Most of the time, when we have too many things to focus on, we lack a correct diagnosis.

self-discipline

Rest: sustaining high performance

Top performance is characterized by the recovery necessary for the next peak, followed by the subsequent recovery.

leadership

Why, What, and How: Creating effective goals

"Why, What, and How" come in order of importance and difficulty.