Pick Partners With Intelligence, Energy and Integrity
In terms of picking people to work with, I have high intelligence, high energy, and high integrity. I find that's the three-part checklist that you cannot compromise on. You need someone who's smart or they're heading in the wrong direction, and you're not gonna end up in the right place. You need someone high energy because the world is full of smart, lazy people.
We all know people in our life who are really smart but, you know, can't get out of bed or lift a finger. And we also know people who have very high energy but are not that smart, so they work hard but are short of running in the wrong direction. Smart is not a pejorative. It's not meant to say someone is smart while someone else is stupid. It's more that everyone's smart at different things, so depending on what you want to do well, you have to find someone who's smart at that thing.
And then energy—people are often unmotivated for a specific thing but may be motivated for others. For example, someone might be really unmotivated to go to a job and sit in an office, but they might be really motivated to go paint. In that case, they should be a painter. They should be putting art up on the internet and trying to figure out how to build a career out of that, rather than wearing a collar around their neck and going to a dreary job.
High integrity is the most important because otherwise, if you've got the other two, what you have is a smart and hard-working crook who's eventually gonna cheat you. So you have to figure out if the person has high integrity. As we talked about, the way you do that is through signals. Signals are what they do, not what they say. It's all the nonverbal stuff that people do when they think nobody's looking.
With respect to energy, there was this interesting thing from Sam Altman a while back where he was talking about delegation and even said one of the important things for delegation is to delegate to people who are actually good at the thing that you want to do. It's the most obvious thing, but it seems like you want to partner with people who are naturally going to do the things that you want them to do.
I almost won't start a company or hire a person or work with somebody if I just don't think they're into what I want to do. When I was younger, I used to try and talk people into things. I was in this idea that you can sell someone into