Profit is not the default outcome of a business. The natural human tendency is to spend available money, pulling a company toward break-even. Leaders must actively "hold the line" against this pressure, fighting the constant urge to increase spending as revenue grows.
Industry standards represent the average, which for most businesses means low profit. To be exceptional, you must create your own, higher standards and ignore what competitors accept as normal. Measuring yourself against the average ensures you will only ever be average.
To achieve exceptional results, you must believe something and take action that the consensus thinks is wrong. This requires a non-consensual, often stubborn conviction. This path is high-risk because it means you are either a visionary who is early or you are simply an idiot.
When setting audacious goals, the question isn't "Has anyone done this?" but rather "What physical law prevents this?" This first-principles approach reframes seemingly impossible challenges into solvable engineering problems. Competitors' belief in precedent is a mental handicap you can exploit.
Jeff Bezos's final shareholder letter analogizes business to biology: a living thing must constantly expend energy to avoid reaching equilibrium with its environment and dying. Similarly, a company must continuously work to maintain its distinctiveness, or the world will pull it back to being typical.
True high performance isn't about repeating the same failed action. It's about systematically trying numerous different methods to solve a problem. When faced with a roadblock, exceptional people exhaust every possible angle—new hires, acquisitions, creative training—until the goal is achieved.