have been going through some old papers recently and I found two sheets of paper with hand-written thoughts or "truisms" that I had scribbled down in early 2002. The word truism, it turns out, doesn't mean "true" so much as it means "a statement that is obviously true and says nothing new or interesting." Oops.This was a list of things I had learned after two years at GM, two years at MIT, two years at Dell Computer, and just over a year at a startup.

These aren't all original thoughts, by any means, but I had written them down when I was in between jobs (the startup had a real cash crunch after 9/11).If Twitter had existed, I might have tweeted many of the thoughts on that paper. Not all of them are under 140 characters, but here some of the things on that sheet from 13 years ago.