Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition. - Ben Horowitz

You hired for the generic position. There is no such thing as a great CEO, a great head of marketing, or a great head of sales. There is only a great head of sales for your company for the next twelve to twenty-four months. That position is not the same as the same position at Microsoft or Facebook. Don’t look for the candidate out of central casting. This is not a movie.

Once we’ve taken all of this into account, we see that the results against objectives or “black box” results are a lagging indicator. And as they say in the mutual fund prospectuses, “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” The white-box CEO evaluation criteria — “Does the CEO know what to do?” and “Can the CEO get the company to do it?” — will do a much better job of predicting the future.

Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares; just run your company.