Barely a day goes by where I don't talk to Brent Beshore. I'm hard pressed to think of anybody else who combines a sharp eye for business with such a deep heart. Once a year, he compiles his top learnings in one place. Some lessons from this year's piece: - There is no good life without intentionally choosing less. - Dark things grow in darkness. That’s true in business. It’s true in marriages. It’s true in the soul. - Performance and efficiency work well if you’re made of steel and silicon. But us humans need rest and grace. - G.K. Chesterton got it right: “The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground." - Most of what goes wrong in a company is not novel; it’s just novel to you. - Relationships are the invisible infrastructure of every business. - Big wins in investing usually come from not interrupting a good thing. - A lot of CEO work is invisible. It’s pressure management. It’s absorbing emotion without spreading it. It’s knowing what you think without saying all of it. It’s carrying the weight of uncertain outcomes while still asking the team to move forward decisively. - A CEO has to become comfortable being the person who disappoints people in the short term so the company doesn’t disappoint everyone in the long term. - The CEO is the Chief "No" Officer: very yes is a no to something else. Every strategy is a pile of exclusions. Every commitment is a trade off. The organization will always ask for more: more initiatives, more products, more meetings, more hires, more exceptions, more complexity. Increasing complexity is the default setting of life, and companies are not exempt from natural order. - Lies, even polite, respectable ones, create complexity. Truth, on the other hand, is always low-maintenance. It just sits there while a lie is a careening machine you have to keep from crashing. It needs fuel. It needs updates. It needs version control. You have to remember what you said last time so you can repeat it with the same confidence next time. You have to keep track of what you didn’t say. You have to manage who knows what. And if you’re really committed, you start building an entire ecosystem around the lie so it feels normal. That’s when you’re no longer telling a lie, but living one. The whole thing is worth reading in full.