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Reed Hastings, Deliberate Ignorance and Defensive Behaviors in Conflict
Alex Brogan
June 04, 2025 • Read Time: 9 minutes
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This edition is brought to you by StartEngine
Good morning to all new and old readers! Here is your Wednesday edition of Faster Than Normal, exploring one short story about a person, a company, a high-performance tool, a trend I’m watching closely, and curated media to help you build businesses, wealth, and the most important asset of all: yourself.
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Today’s edition:
> Stories: Reed Hastings & Amazon
> High-performance: Deliberate Ignorance
> Insights: The challenges of success
> Tactical: Defensive behaviors in conflict
> 1 Question: Positive spin
Cheers,
Alex
P.S. Send me feedback on how we can improve. I respond to every email.
Stories of Excellence
Person: Reed Hastings
Reed Hastings is the co-founder and former CEO of Netflix. He started the company in 1997 as a DVD-by-mail service. It grew. Fast. By 2007, Netflix began streaming content online. Hastings led the company through its transformation into a global streaming giant. He's known for his unconventional management style. No vacation policy. Radical candor. "Adequate performance gets a generous severance package," he says. Netflix now has 193 million subscribers in 190 countries. Hastings stepped down as CEO in 2023 but remains executive chairman. His focus? Innovation. Always. "We're about inventing the future," Hastings says.
Key Lessons from Reed Hastings:
On talent: "The best thing you can do for employees is hire only high performers to work alongside them."
On culture: "A culture of fear is disastrous for innovation and long-term success."
On leadership: "Lead with context, not control."
On focus: "I learned the value of focus. I learned it's better to do one product well than two products in a mediocre way."
Company: Amazon
Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 after he left his job at D.E. Shaw & Co. Bezos initially ran the company from his garage in Bellevue, Washington. He invested $10,000 of his own money to start the online bookstore, which launched in July 1995. Within a month, Amazon was selling books in all 50 U.S. states and 45 countries. The company went public in 1997, raising $54 million. Amazon expanded rapidly, adding music and video in 1998. By 1999, Bezos was named Time magazine's Person of the Year. The company survived the dot-com bubble burst and achieved its first full-year profit in 2003. As of 2024, Amazon's annual revenue reached $514 billion, with over 1.5 million employees worldwide.
Key Lessons from Amazon:
On focus: Obsess over customers, not competitors. Bezos famously said, "If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we'll turn out all right." Counterintuitive. Most companies fixate on beating rivals. Not Amazon.
On long-term thinking: Ignore Wall Street's obsession with quarterly results. Amazon reinvested profits for years. No dividends. Minimal earnings. Investors freaked. Bezos didn't care. He played the long game. It paid off.
On innovation: Embrace failure. Big time. Bezos: "If you're going to take bold bets, they're going to be experiments. And if they're experiments, you don't know ahead of time if they're going to work." Fire Phone flopped. So what? AWS soared.
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How can you tap into this diversification play? By investing in StartEngine.
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Accelerants
High-performance tool
⎯
Deliberate Ignorance
Deliberate ignorance is intentionally ignoring a fact when we have every reason to believe its existence—it’s choosing to not believe.
We do this to protect ourselves; knowing too much can detriment our emotional wellbeing.
Insights
Neil Gaiman on the challenges of success:
"The biggest problem of success is that the world conspires to stop you doing the thing that you do, because you are successful. There was a day when I looked up and realised that I had become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby."
Tactical reads
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> When recognizing defensive behaviors in conflict
Signs of defensiveness | Conflict Clinic (Read it here)
> When embracing interdisciplinary thinking
Something Essential About Interdisciplinary Thinking (Read it here)
1 question
How can I make this process more enjoyable?
That’s all for today, folks. As always, please give me your feedback. Which section is your favourite? What do you want to see more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know.
Have a wonderful rest of week, all.
Recommendation Zone
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