A powerful piece of advice from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang encourages a cycle of impact. First, find a way to work on the most crucial projects ("get on the critical path"). Once your involvement becomes a bottleneck, your next job is to enable others and remove yourself ("get off it") to tackle the next challenge.
Leaders often feel pressured to act, creating 'motion' simply to feel productive. True 'momentum,' however, is built by first stepping back to identify the *right* first step. This ensures energy is directed towards focused progress on core challenges, not just scattered activity.
To achieve rapid growth without burnout, ruthlessly prioritize. Stop doing 90% of tasks and focus exclusively on the few initiatives that have the potential to 10x your business. Treat your focus like a laser that can burn through obstacles, not a wide light that diffuses energy.
Success is often attributed not to a relentless personal grind, but to a superpower in attracting and retaining top talent. True scaling and outsized impact come from empowering a great team, embodying the idea that "greatness is in the agency of others."
Contrary to the popular advice to 'hire great people and get out of their way,' a CEO's job is to identify the three most critical company initiatives. They must then dive deep into the weeds to guarantee their success, as only the CEO has the unique context and authority to unblock them.
Drawing on Pareto's Principle, true growth isn't about working harder. It comes from identifying the 20% of your work that creates the most impact and having the courage to strategically eliminate the other 80%. This disciplined pursuit of less leads to exceptional results rather than diluted focus.
Shift your problem-solving mindset from personal execution to delegation and leverage. By seeking out mentors, coaches, or employees who have already solved your problem, you can achieve your goals more efficiently and avoid common pitfalls.
The transition from a hands-on contributor to a leader is one of the hardest professional shifts. It requires consciously moving away from execution by learning to trust and delegate. This is achieved by hiring talented people and then empowering them to operate, even if it means simply getting out of their way.
Many leaders, particularly in technical fields, mistakenly believe their role is to provide all the answers. This approach disempowers teams and creates a bottleneck. Shifting from advising to coaching unlocks a team's problem-solving potential and allows leaders to scale their impact.
Danny Meyer performs a quarterly audit of his daily tasks, identifying 20% of activities that others could do better. He frames delegating these as an act of generosity that enables team members to grow and frees him to focus on his unique value-adds.
Most entrepreneurs are trapped doing things they believe they *should* do, leading to burnout with minimal results. The Pareto Principle suggests 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. By auditing your activities to find that 20%, you can eliminate busywork and focus only on what truly moves the needle.