CEO OS

Highlights

706 highlights from 39 books.

15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management: The Productivity Habits of 7 Billionaires, 13 Olympic Athletes, 29 Straight-A Students, and 239 Entrepreneurs

Kevin Kruse

  • the most important things are to know what to focus on and how you are going to get it done. I call this always knowing your most important task, or MIT.
  • Instead of writing a goal to “save money,” it should be something like “Save $5,000 by the end of the year.” Instead of “lose weight,” you would specify, “Lose ten pounds in ten weeks.”
Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0: The book Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings told every aspiring CEO to read

Jim Collins

  • Hewlett believed that a company had a responsibility to everyone it touched and that the people who worked hard to make the company successful deserved to share in the wealth that they helped create.
  • If you spend your life keeping your options open, that’s exactly what you’ll do … spend your life keeping your options open.
  • people rise to what you believe of them.
  • Never leave yourself open to catastrophe; keep your eyes on the cash flow,”
  • Trustworthy people feel validated and motivated by being trusted.
  • there is more upside and less downside to an opening bid of trust than an opening bid of mistrust.
  • “Transactions can give you success, but only relationships make for a great life.”
  • entrepreneurial success shouldn’t be primarily about what you do but about who you are.
  • If you define success by money, you always lose. The real scorecard in life is how well you build meaningful relationships and how well you live to your core values.
  • a company should start not so much with a business plan, but almost with a Declaration of Independence that begins with a statement of values: We hold these truths to be self-evident. Values come first, and all else follows—in business, in career, in life.
  • living to core values is often inconvenient, sometimes costly, and always demanding.
Build

Tony Fadell

  • No matter how much you learn in school, you still need to get the equivalent of a PhD in navigating the rest of the world and building something meaningful.
  • And I spent the next ten years getting kicked in the stomach by Silicon Valley before I made something people actually wanted.
  • Adulthood is your opportunity to screw up continually until you learn how to screw up a little bit less.
  • The best way to find a job you’ll love and a career that will eventually make you successful is to follow what you’re naturally interested in, then take risks when choosing where to work. Follow your curiosity rather than a business school playbook about how to make money.
  • The title and the money weren’t important. The people were. The mission was. The opportunity was all that mattered.
  • ask for forgiveness, not permission.
  • “The only failure in your twenties is inaction. The rest is trial and error.”
  • The critical thing is to have a goal. To strive for something big and hard and important to you. Then every step you take toward that goal, even if it’s a stumble, moves you forward.
  • But if you want to prove yourself, to learn as much as you can and do as much as you can, you need to put in the time. Stay late. Come in early. Work over the weekend and holidays sometimes. Don’t expect a vacation every couple of months. Let the scales tip a little on your work/life balance—let your passion for what you’re building drive you.)
  • General Magic was making incredible technology but wasn’t making a product that would solve real people’s problems. But I thought I could.
  • If you’re going to throw your time, energy, and youth at a company, try to join one that’s not just making a better mousetrap. Find a business that’s starting a revolution. A company that’s likely to make a substantial change in the status quo has the following characteristics:
  • Cool technology isn’t enough. A great team isn’t enough. Plenty of funding isn’t enough. Too many people throw themselves blindly at hot trends, anticipating a gold rush, and end up falling off a cliff. Look at the body count of virtual reality (VR)—dead startups as far as the eye can see and billions of dollars burned up over the past thirty years.
  • But even if you’ve got the tech, then you still have to time it right.
  • General Magic did not. We started from the technology—focusing on what we could create, what would impress the geniuses at our company—not the reason why real, nontechnical people would need it.
  • If you’re not solving a real problem, you can’t start a revolution.
  • Steve Jobs once said of management consulting, “You do get a broad cut at companies but it’s very thin. It’s like a picture of a banana: you might get a very accurate picture but it’s only two dimensions, and without the experience of actually doing it you never get three dimensional. So you might have a lot of pictures on your walls, you can show it off to your friends—I’ve worked in bananas, I’ve worked in peaches, I’ve worked in grapes—but you never really taste it.”
  • To do great things, to really learn, you can’t shout suggestions from the rooftop then move on while someone else does the work. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to care about every step, lovingly craft every detail. You have to be there when it falls apart so you can put it back together.
  • Focus on understanding your field and use that knowledge to create connections with the best of the best, people you truly respect. Your heroes.
  • I spent most of my time building—chips and software and devices and companies—and the rest of my time reading everything I could get my hands on about the industry. And that’s what set me apart. That’s what can set anyone apart.
  • Follow your curiosity. Once you’re armed with that knowledge, then you can start hunting down the people who are the best of the best and trying to work with them.
  • Find the experts on Twitter or YouTube, then send them a message, a comment, a LinkedIn connection.
  • The key is persistence and being helpful. Not just asking for something, but offering something. You always have something to offer if you’re curious and engaged. You can always trade and barter good ideas; you can always be kind and find a way to help.
  • The CEO and executive team are mostly staring way out on the horizon—50 percent of their time is spent planning for a fuzzy, distant future months or years away, 25 percent is focused on upcoming milestones in the next month or two, and the last 25 percent is spent putting out fires happening right now at their feet. They also look at all the parallel lines to make sure everyone is keeping up and going in the same direction.
  • Managers usually keep their eyes focused 2–6 weeks out.
  • Junior individual contributors spend 80 percent of their time looking straight down—maybe a week or two out—to see the fine points of their day-to-day work.
  • Your job isn’t just doing your job. It’s also to think like your manager or CEO.
  • New perspectives are everywhere. You don’t have to drag a bunch of people off the street to stare at your product and tell you what they think. Start with your internal customers. Everyone in a company has customers, even if they’re not building anything.
  • You’re starting to think like your manager or leader, which is the first step to becoming a manager or leader.
  • The most wonderful part of building something together with a team is that you’re walking side by side with other people. You’re all looking at your feet and scanning the horizon at the same time.
  • So don’t think doing the work just means locking yourself in a room—a huge part of it is walking with your team. The work is reaching your destination together. Or finding a new destination and bringing your team with you.
  • You do not have to be a manager to be successful.
  • Remember that once you become a manager, you’ll stop doing the thing that made you successful in the first place.
  • Your job will now be communication, communication, communication, recruiting, hiring and firing, setting budgets, reviews, one-on-one meetings (1:1s), meetings with your team and other teams and leadership, representing your team in those meetings, setting goals and keeping people on track, conflict resolution, helping to find creative solutions to intractable problems, blocking and tackling political BS, mentoring your team, and asking “how can I help you?” all the time.
  • Becoming a manager is a discipline.
  • Being exacting and expecting great work is not micromanagement. Your job is to make sure the team produces high-quality work. It only turns into micromanagement when you dictate the step-by-step process by which they create that work rather than focusing on the output.
  • Honesty is more important than style. Everyone has a style—loud, quiet, emotional, analytical, excited, reserved. You can be successful with any style as long as you never shy away from respectfully telling the team the uncomfortable, hard truth that needs to be said.
  • Don’t worry that your team will outshine you.
  • And since you’re stretched so thin, focusing on every detail of everyone else’s process, nobody really knows what they should be working on or what’s most important. People start complaining to you and about you. Everyone gets pissed off.
  • So at least 85 percent of your time should be spent managing.
  • When you’re a manager, you’re no longer just responsible for the work. You’re responsible for human beings. And while that seems obvious—yes, that’s the whole point of the job—it’s a difficult thing to grapple with when all of a sudden eighty people are looking at you, expecting you to know how to lead them.
  • Apple formally recognizes and rewards star IC engineers in the Distinguished Engineer, Scientist or Technologist (DEST) program.
  • The best technology wouldn’t always win—look at Windows 95 versus macOS.
  • So engineers often keep their distance from sales, marketing, creative—all the functions that are soft, squishy.
  • One of the hardest parts of management is letting go. Not doing the work yourself. You have to temper your fear that becoming more hands-off will cause the product to suffer or the project to fail. You have to trust your team—give them breathing room to be creative and opportunities to shine.
  • Examining the product in great detail and caring deeply about the quality of what your team is producing is not micromanagement. That’s exactly what you should be doing. I remember Steve Jobs bringing out a jeweler’s loupe and looking at individual pixels on a screen to make sure the user interface graphics were properly drawn. He showed the same level of attention to every piece of hardware, every word on the packaging. That’s how we learned the level of detail that was expected at Apple. And that’s what we started to expect of ourselves.
  • As a manager, you should be focused on making sure the team is producing the best possible product. The outcome is your business.
  • As a manager, you should be focused on making sure the team is producing the best possible product. The outcome is your business. How the team reaches that outcome is the team’s business.
  • It helps to agree on the process early. To define it up front—here’s our product development process, here’s our design process, our marketing process, our sales process. Here’s our schedule and how we work and how we work together. Everyone—manager and team—signs off on it and then the manager has to let go. They let the team work.
  • Write down a list of what you’re worried about for each project and person so you can immediately see when the list is getting too long and you need to either dive deeper or back off.
  • It’s all too easy to turn 1:1s into friendly chats that go nowhere, so just as you need to have a process for your team meetings, your weekly meetings with individuals should have an agenda, a clear purpose, and should be beneficial to both sides. You should get the info you need about product development and your team members should get insight into how they’re doing.
  • And then just be honest with them. Even if things aren’t going well, don’t avoid telling them the hard truth.
CEO Tools 2.0

Jim Canfield and Kraig Kramers

  • “Well, the way I see it, people are either running from something or running to something. You, my friend, look like a man who’s running from something. Am I wrong about that?”
  • “It used to be so much easier to run the business,” he confessed. “We were smaller back then and full of energy. Everyone seemed to know where we were headed, and we all did everything we could to make things happen. We had a great team: we relied on each other and watched each other’s backs, making the most out of every little victory, no matter how small.”
  • Some of our people have been with us a long time, but they aren’t qualified to take us to the next level.
  • I don’t think I’m as effective as a leader as I used to be—or as I need to be now.
  • “How would you like your company to change?” Three answers surfaced most often. The first answer was increased growth and profits. These leaders said they wanted to generate growing revenues with improved profit margins and more predictable, reliable cash flow.
  • The third thing they wanted was more time. They wanted the company to achieve better profits and growing revenues without their direct involvement, so they could have more time—more time with their families, more time to travel, and more time for their hobbies and other interests.
  • most employees need the answers to three questions to be effective: Where are we headed? How am I doing? What can I do to make things better?
  • Step 1: Set the Direction—Clarify your overall goals, vision, and action plans using a One-Page Business Plan.
  • Step 2: Communicate to Build Trust—Start by listening to every employee at every level of your business.
  • Step 3: Track Metrics and Give Feedback—Break your long-term goals into workable chunks with the Quarterly Priorities Manager (QPM).
  • Step 4: Anticipate the Future and Create It—Using What’s Next? to anticipate changes in your business or industry can allow you to capitalize when others falter.
  • Step 5: Attract, Hire, and Coach Winners—Look inside your company to determine the three to five key customer-impacting jobs.
  • Step 6: Build an Autonomous Company—Build a business that can run without your day-to-day involvement.
  • Step 7: Celebrate Successes—Recognition and appreciation are the secret engine that drives ongoing success and accomplishment.
  • “To start with, I think we’ve been trying to serve too many markets. Some are declining and will never come back. “And we’ve got employee issues. We’re afraid of losing them, so we don’t give them the feedback they need to do their jobs well. And some of our employees who used to perform well don’t fit current roles; we haven’t done anything about that. “Our data gives us information without any real insights. But I don’t have to look at data to know we’ve lost the sense of camaraderie and the energy we once had.”
  • “Not problems. Challenges. Problems are what people talk about instead of doing something. Challenges are obstacles that winners overcome on their paths to victory,”
  • “The first step is to set the direction. Nothing is worse than telling people to work harder when what they’re doing doesn’t produce results. It’s demoralizing, and it erodes their trust. They know it’s not working, and so do you.
  • As the leader, it’s your responsibility to set the direction for the organization. You’re also responsible for communicating the company’s goals throughout the organization in clear and meaningful terms. Clear means the goals are easy to understand; meaningful means the goals are significant and relevant.
  • How did GAC make its direction clear and meaningful? The message was literally everywhere. Signs posted on the walls clarified the direction, and it was discussed at every meeting at every level of the company.
  • A goal is like a dartboard. You don’t have to hit the bull’s-eye every time to score; you can earn points simply by getting on the board. Your company goals must be so clear and so meaningful that they move every constituency toward the bull’s-eye. When the goals are meaningful motivators, everyone will want to play, and everyone will get a shot at the board.
  • A promise equals a commitment—a commitment to action and to results.
  • Nothing leads to success like having clear, written goals that are continually communicated to every constituency.
  • Bring the team together to set goals—Never set goals for others without their involvement.
  • Create the budget—Your budget reflects the minimum acceptable performance for your company or group, and it serves as the baseline for your goals.
  • Set bigger, more audacious goals—Next, set some bigger, more audacious goals that are a stretch to reach.
  • Test the goals—Test the goals against the company values and check for alignment with all parts of your business strategy.
  • Communicate the goals—Communicate the goals over and over again.
  • Provide rewards and feedback—Praise and reward all behaviors and any results that support reaching the goals.
  • Example: Increase (verb) sales (noun) from $60 million to $100 million (outcome) by December 31, 2019 (date).
  • Big, audacious goals (BAGs) are about what’s possible, not probable.
  • Big Audacious Goals are about what’s possible.
  • No matter what you decide to target and measure, the secret to success is making sure everyone in the company understands the BAG, has fun going for it, and stays focused on it with laser-beam precision.
  • Profits drop because expenses keep climbing, even when sales don’t.
  • Asked how he knew how to turn a failing company around, turnaround expert Jerry Goldress replied, “I ask the people working there. They always know what to do. They’ve just lost the will to do it.”
  • What does your company do that’s better than everyone else? What differentiates you from your competitors? What’s your “secret sauce”? More importantly, do your customers and suppliers clearly understand what you do so well, and would they attest to it?
  • To define your USP, ask: What is unique, different, unusual, or compelling about our company? What does our company do? What business are we actually in? How do our customers describe us? Why do customers come to us in the first place? Why do current customers come back for repeat business? Why do we lose customers to competitors?
  • Our job as leaders is to get our team members to accomplish the goals of our company, division, or functional area.
  • Goals should be linked to aggressive compensation plans that reward your employees for achieving them.
  • To get your superstars to reach for higher and higher levels, you must understand their personal dreams and find ways to help fulfill them.
  • Setting a challenging goal is only half the equation. To keep your employees on track to achieve it, be sure to pepper them with lots of encouragement, enthusiastic support, and ongoing feedback.
  • One-Page Business Plan—Create a one-page plan to define a common direction. Spell out your goals, purpose, and strategy. Include your unique sales proposition and big, audacious goals. Share it with everyone in the company and continually communicate the message.
  • Accountability—Include a metric to track and a goal to shoot for, and assign a specific person responsible for tracking the progress and requesting resources.
  • Reinforcement—Use repetitive communication about goals and give everyone encouragement. Goals become a positive challenge rather than a meaningless chore.
Chop Wood Carry Water

Joshua Medcalf

  • Sometimes you might think you are building for your school, your family, your company, or your team, but you are always building your own house… I hope you build wisely.”
  • “John, everyone wants to start the next Ikea, but few are willing to be faithful selling individual matchsticks door to door.
  • Everyone wants to be great, until it’s time to do what greatness requires.
  • Focus on what you can control.
  • The secret is to understand that nothing is a test, but only an opportunity to learn and grow. Many people never fulfill their potential, because they look at every situation in life as a test.
  • “Practice is good, but too much practice is not. Your muscles have torn, and they need time and rest in order to heal.”
  • my value comes from who I am, not from what I do.
  • Your value comes from who you are, not from what you do.
  • When your identity gets wrapped up in what you do, it clouds every decision you make.
  • Like thirsty people guzzling salt water, achievement only creates a greater desire for accomplishing more, dehydrating us of true satisfaction and fulfillment.
  • You fuel your heart with six things: what you watch, what you read, what you listen to, who you surround yourself with, how you talk to yourself, and what you visualize.
  • ‘Humility is not thinking less of your self, but thinking of your self less.’
  • Your memories are not created through your experiences, rather they are created through the stories you tell yourself and others about those experiences.
  • Worth Statement: My value comes from who I am, NOT from what I do. Growth Mindset: Anything that happens to me today is in my best interest and it is an opportunity for me to learn and grow. What Went Well: (Write out 15 specific things you did well today. Feel free to use examples of areas you got better in even if they weren’t the very best you are capable of.)
  • ‘Talent without character is like an expensive, fast car with no gas. It is useless without the fuel that drives it2.’”
  • comparison is the thief of all joy, and the grass isn’t greener on the other side. The grass is greener where you water it.
  • Talent can be a kind of lottery, John. A talented athlete is often less likely to develop the skills and work ethic that a less-talented one has to develop just to survive, and because of that, they may end up much worse off down the road.
  • Believe it or not, the setbacks of today can quickly become the forging blades of greatness for tomorrow.
  • Words put pictures in your mind. Pictures in your mind impact how you feel. How you feel impacts what you do. What you habitually do impacts your destiny.
  • Worrying is a form of negative visualization, that helps create the scenario you see happening in your mind.
  • use our words to put beneficial pictures in our minds,
  • using beneficial and constructive self-talk instead of giving power to our inner critic is one of the most formidable strategies possible to use toward reaching our own potential.
  • it moves in steps, not constants.
  • Everything impacts everything. Everything is aiming. You have much to learn, John. Get some sleep, and tomorrow we chop wood, carry water.”
  • not forgiving people is like swallowing a deadly drug and hoping the person who wronged you dies from it.”
  • Greatness isn’t sexy John, it is the dirty, hard work that is often very boring.
  • Talk to yourself instead of listening to yourself.
  • Ask the question, “What is one thing I can do to make the situation better?”
  • When you tell yourself that you have to do something, it creates a negative internal energy, but when you realize you want to do something it creates a more beneficial internal energy.”
  • Goals actually allow you to shirk responsibility. But a mission? Only the person in the mirror can stop you from living that out.
  • I believe a mission is something you can do right where you are, anywhere, using only what you have. You do not need anyone’s permission.
  • The ultimate illusion of the human experience is control
  • Things like winning, rebounding, sales, or beating your opponent’s records, can distract us from what is more important: the person we become on the journey.
  • focusing on partially controllable goals can be much more trouble than it is worth!”
Copywriting Secrets

Jim Edwards

  • Nobody is born knowing how to sell.
  • the best copywriting occurs when people don’t realize it’s copy because it’s interesting to them.
  • Your content addresses their fears. It speaks to their desires.
  • Instead, you grab them, get their attention with curiosity, and then drive them to the point you’re trying to make.
  • if people understand the benefit of your product, service or software, they’re going to buy
  • Your copy either works or you starve.
  • You don’t go halfway with your copy. You don’t do something just to see what happens and maybe it’ll work out.
  • you can’t learn how to make great decisions until you make bad decisions, right?
  • People don’t buy without a reason why.
  • Usually, it involves saving or making money.
  • Make money Save money Save time Avoid effort Escape mental or physical pain Get more comfort Achieve greater cleanliness or hygiene to attain better health Gain praise Feel more loved Increase their popularity or social status
  • What are five ways my product or service will help them make money? How can I or my product or service help them save money over the next week, month, or year? How much time can I save them and what else could they do with that time? What is something they don’t have to do anymore once they get my product or service? (This is how you figure out how it helps them avoid effort.) What physical pain do I eliminate for them and what does that mean for their life and business?
  • How does my product or service eliminate mental pain or worry for them? What are three ways I or my product can help them feel more comfortable? How does my product or service make it easier for them to achieve greater cleanliness or hygiene? How does my product or service help them feel more healthy or more alive? What are three ways my product or service is going to help them be the envy of their friends and feel more loved by their family? How will buying my product make them feel more popular and increase their social status?
  • Force yourself to come up with ten answers to each of those questions.
  • “Take the problem you’re trying to solve and write it at the top of a piece of paper. Then write solutions to fill up the entire piece of paper. Then go to the next page and fill that page up.”
  • Example: “I want to tell you something here.” Changed perspective: “Here’s something you need to know,” or, “There’s something you need to know in this situation.”
  • We all need to get good at writing sales copy for several reasons.
  • You have to be able to measure your progress and results in order to improve your results moving forward.
  • Next, you do what works and stop doing what doesn’t. The only way you’re going to know the difference is to do a bunch of it.
  • If the copy in someone else’s funnel, video sales letter, or Facebook video makes you spend money, you need to dissect that.
  • First Step: Become great at creating headlines.
  • Second Step: Become good at writing bullets.
  • Bullets that describe benefits or arouse curiosity create pressure in people to get them to take the action you desire.
  • The number one copywriting skill everybody needs is to write great headlines.
  • The purpose of a headline is simple: to get people to stop what they’re doing and to start reading (or watching) whatever it is you put in front of them.
  • The secret of a great headline is one that connects emotionally with the person who represents your perfect prospect. A well-written headline targets people emotionally, usually around either a fear or a desire. You headline targets either something they’re scared of or something they really want . . . and it does so on an emotional level.
  • One of the cool things about headlines (and almost all sales copy) is that headlines follow formulas which you can model.
  • A swipe file is a collection of advertisements you like, and you say, “Okay, wow, that’s a cool headline I could use.”
  • A swipe file is just a collection of ads that grab your attention. I like to pick up the “Bottom Line” reports,
  • How To ________ In As Little As ________
  • How To ________ In As Little As ________ . . . even if you ________!
  • How Every ________ Can ________
  • The key here is to use an odd number like 3,5,7,9—they seem to work better and carry more credibility.
  • 5 Quick And Easy Ways To ________
  • ________ Mistakes All ________ Need To Avoid!
  • WARNING: you can overdo this
  • WARNING: Here’s What Every ________ Needs To Know About ________
  • Here’s The Perfect Solution If You Want ________
  • Here’s The Perfect Solution If You Want ________ (even if ________)
  • My Proven ________ Method To ________
  • Spend a lot of time working on your headlines, especially for sales copy and ads. It’s the #1 factor that determines success or failure.
  • Your software is not their focus! Your brand is not their focus! Your name is not their focus!
  • So if they’re focused on problems, you start the conversation with the problem to get in sync with them. Then show them you’ve got the solution.
  • understanding your audience is more about excluding people than it is including people.
  • Don’t talk about what people need. Talk about what people want.
  • Focus on your avatar’s problems, questions, roadblocks and results.
Design Systems

Alla Kholmatova and Smashing Magazine

  • A design system is a set of interconnected patterns and shared practices coherently organized to serve the purpose of a digital product.
  • The purpose of the product shapes the design patterns it adopts.
Execution

Larry Bossidy

  • Most often today the difference between a company and its competitor is the ability to execute.
  • Execution is not just tactics—it is a discipline and a system.
  • Execution is a specific set of behaviors and techniques that companies need to master in order to have competitive advantage.
Harvard Business Review Entrepreneurs Handbook

Harvard Business Review

  • entrepreneurs often sweep away stagnant industries and replace them with growing ones that generate new jobs, often at higher wages.
High Growth Handbook

Elad Gil

  • We are in a product cycle business. Which is to say that every product in tech becomes obsolete, and they become obsolete pretty quickly. If all you do is take your current product to market and win the market, and you don’t do anything else—if you don’t keep innovating—your product will go stale. And somebody will come out with a better product and displace you.
  • In fact, the general model for successful tech companies, contrary to myth and legend, is that they become distribution-centric rather than product-centric. They become a distribution channel, so they can get to the world. And then they put many new products through that distribution channel.
  • One of the things that’s most frustrating for a startup is that it will sometimes have a better product but get beaten by a company that has a better distribution channel.
  • The definition of a moat is the ability to charge more.
  • Charging more is a key lever to be able to grow. And the companies that charge more therefore tend to grow faster.
  • First and foremost: managing yourself.
  • Key components of personal time management include: Delegation. Auditing your calendar regularly. Saying no more often. Realizing your old way of operating will no longer work. Finding time for the things you care about in life.
  • they send items on to other people for execution and end meetings with few to no action items for themselves), a strategist, and a problem solver
  • Trial and error. Try delegating and try again until it works.
  • assemble a set of CEOs whose companies are at the same stage as yours, and meet them regularly for dinner so you can compare notes—you can learn a lot from your peers.
  • auditing your calendar and asking yourself, “Do I really need to do this? Or can someone on my team do it instead?”
  • common types of meetings they should skip 90% of the time:
  • First-round interviews.
  • Sales or partnership meetings.
  • Every internal engineering, product, and sales meeting.
  • One of the most important things you will do as CEO is learn to say no to those things that are not the best use of your time.
  • 6am customer or partner meetings. If your East Coast contacts will meet with you at 9am ET, they will also meet with you at noon ET. Don’t take every meeting at any time—that will just exhaust you and not really help progress.
  • A CEO’s energy levels dictate those of the team.
  • Similarly, schedule exercise in the morning at least three times a week.
  • Mark Zuckerberg famously delegated big swaths of Facebook to Sheryl Sandberg in order to free up more time to focus on product and strategy.
  • If you end up working long hours on things you fundamentally couldn’t care less about, you should consider hiring one or more executives (or a COO) to do all those things on behalf of the company.
  • 1. You should hold regular 1:1s with your team.
  • 2. Once you are at about 30 people, you should hold a weekly staff meeting.
  • 3. You should start to add skip-level meetings as one way to stay in touch with the broader organization.
  • I think that founders should write a guide to working with them. It would be one of the pieces I’m describing, to clarify the founder’s role: “What do I want to be involved in? When do I want to hear from you? What are my preferred communication modes? What makes me impatient? Don’t surprise me with X.” That’s super powerful. Because the problem is, people learn it in the moment, and by then it’s too late.
  • So for us, yes, if your launch is not on the product launch calendar, that means it’s not going to happen.
Leader

Devdutt Pattanaik

  • He exists for others; he exists for the weakest in his kingdom; he exists to help the helpless. Otherwise,
  • it is not just about skill alone (turning the wilderness into a rich kingdom). It is about attitude.
  • people are uncomfortable with the truth, especially when it shows them in a bad light or has consequences that could affect them adversely.
  • Rama thus learns how all rules have to be contextualized.
  • Rama realizes there are times when one has to strike and times when one has to forgive.
  • there are situations when a king is called upon to take a tough call and situations where the king is expected to be compassionate.
  • Sometimes in our obsession to be right, we lose sight of the goal and lose the game.
  • in the long run, being right does not matter; winning does.
  • it helps to ask what matters more—getting the other to turn around or getting oneself across the bridge.
  • Winning is one thing, being right is another. We must not confuse issues. It is possible to win and be right. But when the choice is between winning and being right, one needs to choose wisely. More often than not, we prefer being right because it pampers the ego in the short term. In the long term, however, winning yields better results.
  • Business leaders are heroes, like Ulysses and Hercules. They are expected to go where no one has gone before, on great solitary adventures, creating new markets, penetrating old ones, fighting the demons of opposition and emerging triumphant.
  • The whole point of the game is to win—to outlast the competition, to rise above mediocrity, to create new horizons, to shatter old boundaries.
  • In India, the great question was never how you can be swifter, higher and stronger, but: why should you be swifter, higher and stronger.
  • The wise man worked not to indulge the ego, but to triumph over it—and this happened when one truly and sincerely worked for others.
  • It is our responsibility to help more and more people live a better standard of life;
  • When rules do not generate fairness, it is time to bend them, or break them, as Krishna does repeatedly in the Bhagavata and the Mahabharata.
  • while generosity is fine, restraint is good too if one wants to run a household, and an organization.
  • man, while capable of extreme generosity, is also capable of extreme greed.
  • big market may not be big forever and the small market will eventually grow.
  • Good leadership is about capacity building. A good leader is not someone who gives you the fish—he is one who teaches you how to fish. That is the first lesson of the Vishnu Purana.
  • A true leader is able to harness the various forces around him to create an effective and efficient wealth-generating churn.
  • While doing all this, Vishnu never bothers with Lakshmi. He is almost indifferent to her. And that is why, perhaps, she chases him.
  • success is drawn not to them but to their action. The crown follows the position, not the person. To keep Lakshmi walking towards them all the time, it is important that a leader always stays a Vishnu—always balanced, always focused, always impartial, and always detached.
Life is Short And So Is This Book

Peter Atkins

  • the busiest people on his team were always the people to whom he could give more work, while the ones who accomplished less had little time for anything
  • The trick is people who are most productive tend to say no to things that are unimportant to them and focus on what they believe matters.
  • Many people confuse want to with have to.
  • Albert Einstein said: It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.
  • I like to set aside blocks of time for specific activities - even to read or chat.
  • They’re incredibly well prepared in their fields -- they become masters of their domains by practicing for many years, day after day.
  • They spend time deeply focused on solving a key problem or key set of problems, no matter the obstacles.
  • They allow themselves to step away from the problem(s) on which they’re focused, so that insights can come to them in activities such as walking, or looking out on a beautiful scene.
  • So to make the most of your life, say no to things that don’t matter,
  • If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.
  • The lesson to me is that you can focus on something going well, or something beautiful, or something interesting -- even amidst terrible times.
  • You don’t have to change everything overnight.
Million Dollar Weekend: The Surprisingly Simple Way to Launch a 7-Figure Business in 48 Hours

Noah Kagan

  • Don’t think about scaling, focus on starting.
  • Leaping is all that matters.
  • Most people never pick up the phone, most people never ask. And that’s what separates, sometimes, the people that do things from the people that just dream about them. You gotta act. And you gotta be willing to fail.
  • Business is just a never-ending cycle of starting and trying new things, asking whether people will pay for those things, and then trying it again based on what you’ve learned. If you’re afraid to start or ask, you can’t experiment. And if you can’t experiment, you can’t do business.
  • Make it fun and you’ll overcome the fear.
Move Fast

Jeff Meyerson

  • Facebook needed to build new features faster than MySpace in order to take the market. By 2014, Facebook had earned a commanding lead in the social networking category. The phrase was updated to, “Move fast with stable infrastructure.”
  • Facebook’s engineering organization is built for speed. Products are created quickly. Engineers build tools to support the fast pace of product creation. The entire culture of Facebook is structured to select for people who thrive in a fast environment.
No Longer Human

Osamu Dazai and Theo Riven

  • “Why must human beings eat three times a day?” I wondered. “And why do they wear such solemn expressions as they do it?”
  • If my neighbors manage to survive such pain without killing themselves, without going mad—if they can still take interest in political parties, go on with the weary pursuit of daily survival, and not collapse into despair—then can their suffering truly be real?
  • Whenever someone asked what I wanted, my first instinct was always to say, “Nothing.”
  • I was incapable of refusing anything offered by another person, no matter how ill-suited it might be.
No Rules Rules

Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer

  • That night, when I got into bed and closed my eyes, I had this image of all sixty thousand Blockbuster employees erupting in laughter at the ridiculousness of our proposal.
  • a culture that valued people over process, emphasized innovation over efficiency, and had very few controls. Our culture, which focused on achieving top performance with talent density and leading employees with context not control, has allowed us to continually grow and change as the world, and our members’ needs, have likewise morphed around us.
  • Netflix is different. We have a culture where No Rules Rules.
Personal Knowledge Graphs

Ivo Velitchkov and George Anadiotis

  • The road to wisdom is built from knowledge and paved by experience. Now, supercharged with Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKGs).
  • You see, capturing the web’s data gives you the knowledge, the data points, and how they relate to other things, but not why those matter to individuals or specific situations.
  • Experiences and their interpretation come with a heavy responsibility as well.
  • What nowadays is meant by “knowledge graph” is a way of representing knowledge by using only nodes and edges, where nodes represent entities of interest and edges represent relationships between these entities.
  • a graph of data intended to accumulate and convey knowledge of the real world, whose nodes represent entities of interest and whose edges represent relations between these entities.
Predictable Revenue

Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler

  • without consistency you have no predictability.
  • In fact, if you don’t have any repeatable lead generation programs yet, you’re already behind in getting ready for your goals in the coming 6-12 months.
  • “Marketing through teaching” via regular webinars, white papers, email newsletters and live events, to establish yourself as the trusted expert in your space (takes lots of time to build predictable momentum).
  • The most common mistake is lumping all the types of leads into one bucket and then making future projections based on past results.
  • A lead is a prospect that has responded positively in some way to show their interest in what you have to offer, such as registering for a white paper or attending a webinar.
  • Present them with a couple of logical next steps and let them decide how and when to move forward (of course, with some helpful reminders now and then if they’ve stalled).
  • as long as you keep creating great content and building smart links, the number of leads generated from SEO goes up and up.
  • Marketo doesn’t “pitch” their own products on the blog. There’s no selling.
  • Marketo’s blog is popular and successful because they provide a platform to share all kinds of modern marketing best practices and thought leadership.
  • Your blog is not the best place to directly promote your business or service.
  • You can’t have predictability without having repeatable processes.
  • Track as many of these as you can in your Sales Force Automation system’s dashboards: New leads created per month (also, from what source). Conversion rate of leads to opportunities. Number of, and pipeline dollar value of, qualified opportunities created per month. This is the most important leading indicator of revenue! Conversion rates of opportunities to closed deals. Booked revenues in three categories: New Business, Add-On Business, Renewal Business.
Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine

Mike Michalowicz

  • We think that if we can just work harder, longer, better—if we can just hold out—something good will happen one day. Something big is just around the corner, right? Something just like magic will wipe away all of the debt, financial stress, and worry. After all, don’t we deserve that? Isn’t that how the story is supposed to end? No, my friend, that’s only in the movies—nothing like what we experience in real life.
  • eight out of ten businesses fail, and the number one reason they fail is lack of profitability.
  • I patted myself on the back for hiring more employees, for moving into a fancy-schmancy office space, for making big sales. The truth is, I used all that as an excuse to cover up one ugly fact: my business had never once posted a profit.
  • I continued to sink month in month out. Year after year. Constant stress.
  • For the longest time, I thought I was flawed, that my brain was messed up. It took me a long time to ask, what if I’m not the problem? What if the system I have been told to follow is flawed?
  • Relying on traditional accounting methods to grow profitability is the equivalent of telling you to jump off a cliff and flap the living crap out of your arms.
  • Sell as much as you can, then pay the bills, and what is left over is profit. Here’s the problem: there are never any leftovers.
  • You needed to experience those years to get you where you are today,
  • Fools never seek out answers. Fools never realize there is a different way, even when it’s staring them in the face. Fools don’t admit they need to change.
  • The majority of the businesses that survive are racking up debt, and their leaders are perpetually stressed. Most entrepreneurs are living a financial nightmare,
  • Didn’t you start a business so you could be your own boss? Now it looks as though this monster is the boss of you.
  • Mindlessly throwing money at start-up companies wasn’t even in alignment with my values about money;
  • Without enough money, we are slaves to the businesses we launched.
  • Money amplifies who we are.
  • It was a check-to-check lifestyle, but sustainable—as long as sales were sustained and did not dip.
  • Big deposits feel great, but they are irregular.
  • Most business owners try to grow their way out of their problems, hinging salvation on the next big sale or customer or investor, but the result is simply a bigger monster.
  • The perfect size for your business? It will happen naturally, when you take your profit first.
  • Profit is always within sight, but never attainable.
  • Profit is not an event. Profit is a habit.
  • You can’t grow out of your profit problem. You need to fix profit first, then grow. You must figure out the things that make profit and dump the things that don’t.
  • The Survival Trap is not about driving toward our vision. It is all about taking action, any action, to get out of crisis.
  • Sustained profitability depends on efficiency. You can’t become efficient in crisis. In crisis, we justify making money at any cost, right now,
  • To successfully run a profitable business, we need a super simple system to manage our cash, one we can understand within seconds, without help from an accountant. We need a system that is designed for humans, not Spock.
  • Established habits die hard, so why try changing your habits? Instead, use a system that works with your existing habits.
  • Monster businesses have killed marriages, torn apart families, and for some entrepreneurs, decimated any hope for the good life.
  • Here’s the deal. There is only one way to fix your financials: by facing your financials. You can’t ignore them. You can’t let someone else take care of them. You need to take charge of the numbers. But there is good news—the process is really, really simple.
  • The solution is not to try to change our ingrained habits, which is really hard to pull off and nearly impossible to sustain, but instead to change the structure around us and leverage those habits.
  • As the business grew, I started to spend. The more money came in, the more I spent, and I believed—scratch that, I was convinced—that all expenditures were necessary.
  • The key is to get started so both the savings accumulate and the lifestyle adjusts to meet their residual pay.
  • And that’s when it hit me—what if I took my profit first?
  • Similarly, if your client gives you a week to turn around a project, you’d likely take the whole week—but if she gives you just a day, you’ll make it happen in a day.
  • You need to intentionally make less toothpaste (money) available to brush your teeth (to operate your business).
  • We place additional significance on whatever we encounter first.
  • When profit comes first, it is the focus, and it is never forgotten.
  • As you implement Profit First, you are going to use the powerful force of “out of sight, out of mind.”
  • establishing a rhythm will also be a great indicator of overall cash flow.
  • the fastest, healthiest growth comes from businesses that prioritize profit.
  • Businesses that plow back their profits aren’t truly profitable;
  • When you take your profit first, your business will tell you immediately whether it can afford the expenses you are incurring; it will tell you whether you are streamlined enough; it will tell you whether you have the right margins.
  • Each of these accounts has a different objective: one is for profit, one for owner compensation, another for taxes, and another for operating expenses.
  • Always, always allocate money based upon the percentages to the accounts first. Never, ever, ever pay bills first.
  • Your job is to stick with this small step for a while. Watch your profit accumulate. Yes, it is notably small, but it is profit nonetheless.
  • Profit First is a cash-management system.
  • The goal here is to get you to your Real Revenue number. This is the real money your company makes.
  • Real Revenue is different from gross profit, in that Real Revenue is your total revenue minus materials and subcontractors utilized to create and deliver the service or product.
  • Working on the business does not mean hiring a bunch of people to do the work and then spending all the livelong day answering their never-ending questions about how to do the job (the job you used to do). Working on your business is about building systems. Period.
  • my business serves me; I do not serve my business.
  • Paying yourself next to nothing for hard work is servitude.
  • Ironically, getting back in your business is the best way to create systems. And as you put the systems in place and your revenue increases to accommodate them, you can slowly plug in great people to implement those great systems.
  • The bottom line is this: don’t cut your salary to make the numbers work. The goal of every business is health, and that is achieved through efficiency.
  • making yourself the sacrificial lamb does not promote efficiency; it hinders it.
  • you started your business in part to achieve financial freedom. So if that is true, shouldn’t your company pay your taxes for you? Hellll, yeah. So that is exactly what is going to happen.
  • the only way they could reap the benefits of entrepreneurship would be to increase their salaries a little bit each year.
  • As you find ways to increase profitability, or even if you don’t, your competition is doing the same.
  • Profit is a slippery animal. When profit margins are big, usually in excess of 20 percent,
  • focusing solely on top line thinking (sales, sales, sales!) does not lead to profitability.
  • Efficiency increases your profit margins, or the amount of money you earn as profit on each product or service you offer.
  • achieve greater efficiency first, then sell more, then improve efficiencies even more and then sell even more.
  • you need to look at efficiency in every aspect of your business.
Radical Candor

Kim Scott

  • Use THE Radical Candor Framework like a compass to guide individual conversations to a better place.
Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing

Randall Stross

  • NeXT was an eight-year-old company that was attempting the most awkward of all possible transitions: going months without a single revenue-producing product.
  • He said he relished the opportunity to exploit the advantages of the underdog: “sympathy, focus, and nimbleness.”
  • it was their own internal resources, not luck, that accounted for their first success.
  • With or without Bill Gates’s endorsement, Steve Jobs was unconcerned: his motto then was Build It and They Will Come. But hardly anyone came when the machine was introduced in 1988. Nor did they come in 1989.
  • To get from there to here, Jobs has had to scramble, reinventing himself along the way, keeping his company alive through dark days of nonexistent sales. When asked about NeXT, many in the industry shook their heads, saying that if it had been anybody’s but Jobs’s, it would have had no possible chance of surviving.
  • Gates has never had to scrap like Jobs for his company’s survival.
The 1-Page Marketing Plan

Allan Dib

  • almost no business problem that can’t be solved
  • when you’ve taken care of yourself, you have a chance to help others.
  • when people blame their industry they are just playing the blame game.
  • So going back to our example, a good plumber is not necessarily the best person to run a plumbing business.
  • you must resolve to become good at the business of what you do—not just the technical thing you do.
  • While no one can guarantee your success, having a plan dramatically increases your probability of success.
  • 96% of the stuff you do is a waste of time (comparatively).
  • lack of information isn’t the issue holding back the bottom 80% of business owners—it’s human behavior and mindset.
  • Struggling business owners will spend time to save money, whereas successful business owners will spend money to save time.
  • Because you can always get more money, but you can never get more time. So you need to ensure the stuff you spend your time on makes the biggest impact.
  • By far the biggest leverage point in any business is marketing. If you get 10% better at marketing, this can have an exponential or multiplying effect on your bottom line.
  • marketing is the same—because that’s where the money is.
  • The marketing plan ended up being the 20% part of the business planning process that produced 80% of the result.
  • The 1-Page Marketing Plan is the 4% of effort that generates 64% (or more) of the result in your business.
  • marketing is the strategy you use for getting your ideal target market to know you,
  • Understanding the difference between strategy and tactics is absolutely key to marketing success.
  • Strategy is the big-picture planning you do prior to the tactics.
  • Strategy without tactics leads to paralysis by analysis.
  • Marketing must be one of your major activities if you’re to have business success.
  • If they don’t buy, they’ll never know how good your products or services are.
  • Following the path of other successful businesses is smart, but it’s vital that you understand the full strategy you’re following and that you’re able to execute it.
  • direct response marketing is “money at a discount.”
  • direct response ads, they become lead generating tools rather than just name recognition tools.
  • At the beginning of the “before” phase, prospects typically don’t even know you exist.
  • At the beginning of the “during” phase, leads have indicated some interest in your offer.
  • At the beginning of the “after” phase, customers have already given you money.
  • The after phase never ends
  • Prospects are people who may not even yet know you exist.
  • Many business owners worry about narrowing down their target market because they don’t want to exclude any potential customers.
  • To be a successful small business marketer you need laser-like focus on a narrow target market, sometimes called a niche.
  • A niche is a tightly defined portion of a subcategory.
  • Being all things to all people leads to marketing failure.
  • Targeting a tight niche allows you to become a big fish in a small pond. It allows you to dominate a category or geography in a way that is impossible by being general.
  • A specialist is sought after rather than shopped on price.
  • Trying to target everyone really means that you’re targeting no one.
  • Dominate a niche, then once you own it, do the same with another and then another.
  • Remember it’s not about the “turnover,” it’s all about the “left over.”
  • Unless you belong to your target market, then a large part of your initial marketing efforts should be directed at in-depth research, interviews and careful study of your target market.
  • It’s like these businesses are visiting a slot machine in a casino.
  • Rather than trying to sell directly from your ad, simply invite prospects to put their hand up and indicate interest.
  • don’t leave anything to chance.
  • From a customer’s perspective, there is no compelling reason to buy from them and they make sales just because they happen to be there.
  • The entire goal of your USP is to answer this question: Why should I buy from you rather than from your nearest competitor?
  • Quality and great service are expectations;
  • People only find out about your quality and great service after they’ve bought.
  • The uniqueness may be in the way it is packaged, delivered, supported or even sold.
  • What do they really want? It’s rarely the thing you are selling; it’s usually the result of the thing you are selling.
  • confusion leads to lost sales.
  • being unique is a dangerous, difficult and expensive place to be.
  • the actual product being sold is a commodity and what makes it remarkable is something totally peripheral to what you are buying.
  • By charging higher prices, you attract a better quality client.
  • You know [problem]? Well, what we do is [solution]. In fact, [proof].
  • Of all the products and services you offer, which do you have the most confidence in delivering?
  • Of all the products and services you offer, which do you enjoy delivering the most?
  • What are the best emotionally charged words and phrases that will capture and hold the attention of this market?
  • purchasing is done with emotions and justified with logic after the fact.
  • What is the result that takes them from point A to point B which you can take them through while making a good profit?
  • Reason why: when you have a great offer, you need to justify why you’re doing this.
  • Value stacking: packing in many bonuses can make your offer seem like a no-brainer.
  • you need an outrageous guarantee.
The Copywriters Handbook

Robert W. Bly

  • But the goal of advertising is not to be liked, to entertain, or to win advertising awards; it is to sell products.
  • But just because an ad is pretty to look at and pleasant to read doesn’t necessarily mean it is persuading people to buy the product.
The Decision Maker

Dennis Bakke

  • Decision-making is simply the best way in the world to develop people.
  • the leader chooses someone to make a key decision • the decision-maker seeks advice (including from the leader) to gather information • the final decision is made not by the leader, but by the chosen decision-maker.
  • In a decision-maker organization, the leader leads by choosing a decision-maker.
The Diary of a CEO

Steven Bartlett

  • the height of your success is gauged by your self-mastery, the depth of your failure by your self-abandonment.
  • Everything that stands in your way is a human.
  • Stories are the single most powerful weapon any leader can arm themselves with – they are the currency of humanity.
  • Your philosophy is the set of beliefs, values or principles that guide your behaviour – they are the fundamental beliefs that underpin your actions.
  • Everything the organisation produces, good or bad, originates from the minds of the members of your group of people.
  • The five buckets 1. What you know (your knowledge) 2. What you can do (your skills) 3. Who you know (your network) 4. What you have (your resources) 5. What the world thinks of you (your reputation)
  • ‘You cannot pour from empty buckets.’
  • These first two buckets are your longevity, your foundation and the clearest predictor of your future.
  • The late spiritual leader Yogi Bhajan once said, ‘If you want to learn something, read about it. If you want to understand something, write about it. If you want to master something, teach it.’
  • The key factor here is that I made learning, then writing/recording and sharing it online, a daily obligation, not just an interest.
  • Having something to lose is fundamentally what an obligation is, and having something to lose is sometimes referred to as having ‘skin in the game’.
  • ‘Skin in the game’ works because across several global studies it’s been demonstrated that human behaviour is more strongly driven by the motivation to avoid losses than to pursue gains, which is what scientists call ‘loss aversion’.
  • Give yourself something to lose.
  • if you want to master something, do it publicly and do it consistently.
  • At some point in their life, through intention or accident, they had created an obligation to think, write and share their ideas, consistently.
  • You become a master when you’re able to release it.
  • if you want to keep someone’s brain lit up and receptive to your point of view, you must not start your response with a statement of disagreement. When you find yourself disagreeing with someone, avoid the emotional temptation, at all costs, to start your response with ‘I disagree’ or ‘You’re wrong’, and instead introduce your rebuttal with what you have in common, what you agree on, and the parts of their argument that you can understand.
  • It’s no surprise that the people who are most likely to change our minds are the ones we agree with on 98 per cent of topics
  • The fundamental beliefs you hold about yourself, the fundamental beliefs you hold about others, the fundamental beliefs you hold about the world – you’ve ‘chosen’ none of them.
  • Authority figures are powerful forces for belief change, but the most powerful force of all is first-party evidence from our own five physical senses.
  • the brain considers any new evidence alongside the current evidence it has stored.
  • in order to change beliefs, ‘the secret is to go along with how our brain works, not to fight against it’,
  • Asking someone to explain the detail and logic underpinning their strongly held beliefs is a profoundly powerful way to reduce their conviction.
  • beliefs change when a person gets new counteracting evidence
  • stepping out of your comfort zone and into a situation where that limiting belief will be confronted head on with new first-party evidence.
  • If you want to change someone’s belief, don’t attack it, make them a direct witness to positive new evidence that will both inspire them and counteract the negative effects of their old beliefs.
  • Growth happens when you start doing the things you’re not qualified to do.
The Dip

Seth Godin

  • Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.
  • society assumes you’re going to quit.
  • Before we start on the quitting, though, you probably need to be sold on why being the best in the world matters so much.
  • Winners win big because the marketplace loves a winner.
  • With limited time or opportunity to experiment, we intentionally narrow our choices to those at the top.
  • Scarcity makes being at the top worth something.
  • It comes from the fact that most competitors quit long before they’ve created something that makes it to the top.
  • So if I’m looking for a freelance copy editor, I want the best copy editor in English, who’s available, who can find a way to work with me at a price I can afford. That’s my best in the world.
  • Web sites highlighted on Digg still get a hundred times as much traffic as ordinary sites.
  • If you’re not going to put in the effort to be my best possible choice, why bother?
  • They fail because they don’t know when to quit and when to refuse to settle.
  • In a free market, we reward the exceptional.
  • the people who are the best in the world specialize at getting really good at the questions they don’t know.
  • The Dip is the long slog between starting and mastery.
  • The Dip is the difference between the easy “beginner” technique and the more useful “expert” approach in skiing or fashion design.
  • It’s easy to be a CEO. What’s hard is getting there.
  • If there wasn’t a Dip, there’d be no scarcity.
  • Successful people don’t just ride out the Dip. They don’t just buckle down and survive it. No, they lean into the Dip. They push harder, changing the rules as they go.
The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

Michael E. Gerber

  • Contrary to popular belief, my experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.
  • people who own small businesses in this country work far more than they should for the return they’re getting.
The Five Temptations of a CEO, 10th Anniversary Edition

Patrick M. Lencioni

  • Being the chief executive of an organization is one of the most difficult challenges a person can face in a career. But it is not a complicated one.
  • For many CEOs the light is best in places like marketing, strategic planning, and finance, safe havens from the painful darkness of behavioral self-examination.
  • The tragedy here is that most executives are intuitive enough to understand all this—but many of them struggle to do anything about it.
  • Essentially, what they are doing is putting the success of their organizations in jeopardy because they are unwilling to face—and overcome—the five temptations of a CEO.
  • “Wanting to be popular with your direct reports instead of holding them accountable.”
The Miracle Of Mindfulness

Thich Nhat Hanh

  • Washing the dishes to wash the dishes
  • Sitting on the same spot as a Buddha gives rise to happiness and sitting in mindfulness means itself to have become a Buddha.
  • Then how are we to practice mindfulness?
  • keep your attention focused on the work, be alert and ready to handle ably and intelligently any situation which may arise—this is mindfulness.
  • If we are not in control of ourselves but instead let our impatience or anger interfere, then our work is no longer of any value.
  • Mindfulness is like that—it is the miracle which can call back in a flash our dispersed mind and restore it to wholeness so that we can live each minute of life.
  • Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts. Whenever your mind becomes scattered, use your breath as the means to take hold of your mind again.
  • In order to maintain mindfulness throughout a long period, we must continue to watch our breath.
  • After a month or so, the difference between the length of your exhalation and inhalation will lessen, gradually evening out until they are of equal measure.
  • When you are walking, each step should correspond to one word.
  • proper breathing is more important than food.
The Mountain is You

Brianna Wiest

  • When we can no longer rely on our coping mechanisms to help distract us from the problems in our lives, it can feel as though we’ve hit rock bottom.
  • The objective of being human is to grow.
  • human beings often need to be faced with no other option but to change before they really do.
  • The fact that you are imperfect is not a sign that you have failed; it is a sign that you are human, and more importantly, it is a sign that you still have more potential within you.
  • Usually when we have a problem that is circumstantial, we are facing the reality of life. When we have a problem that is chronic, we are facing the reality of ourselves.
  • Your mountain is the block between you and the life you want to live. Facing it is also the only path to your freedom and becoming. You are here because a trigger showed you to your wound, and your wound will show you to your path, and your path will show you to your destiny.
  • if you are willing to do the work, you will find that it is the entryway to the breakthrough you have spent your entire life waiting for.
  • Your old self can no longer sustain the life you are trying to lead; it is time for reinvention and rebirth.
  • You must envision and become one with your future self, the hero of your life that is going to lead you from here. The task in front of you is silent, simple, and monumental.
  • You must now learn agility, resilience, and self-understanding. You must change completely, never to be the same again.
  • In the end, it is not the mountain that you must master, but yourself.
  • THERE IS NOTHING HOLDING you back in life more than yourself.
  • self-sabotage is simply the presence of an unconscious need that is being fulfilled by the self-sabotaging behavior.
  • We must pinpoint the traumatic event, release unprocessed emotions, find healthier ways to meet our needs, reinvent our self-image, and develop principles such as emotional intelligence and resilience.
  • fears and attachments are very often just symptoms of deeper issues for which they do not have any better way to cope.
  • Sometimes, we sabotage our professional success because what we really want is to create art, even if it will make us seem less ambitious by society’s measures.
  • self-sabotage is very often just a maladaptive coping mechanism,
  • If you try to fix the problem on the surface, you will always come up against a wall.
  • Your life is defined not only by what you think about it, but also what you think of yourself.
  • When we self-sabotage, it is often because we have a negative association between achieving the goal we aspire to and being the kind of person who has or does that thing.
  • Your anxiety around the issue that you’re self-sabotaging is usually a reflection of your limiting belief.
  • Maybe you keep eating the wrong foods because they soothe you, but you haven’t stopped to ask what they have to keep soothing you from.
  • You have to recognize that being healthy makes you less vulnerable, not more, and that criticism comes with creating anything for the public and isn’t a reason to not do it.
  • Self-sabotage is very often the simple product of unfamiliarity, and it is because anything that is foreign, no matter how good, will also be uncomfortable until it is also familiar.
  • Even though we think we’re after happiness, we’re actually trying to find whatever we’re most used to.
The SaaS Playbook

Rob Walling and Jason Cohen

  • There are superpowers to being bootstrapped. One is that you don’t need anyone’s permission to start or build your company. Another is that your business doesn’t die until you quit. Bootstrappers don’t run out of money; they run out of motivation.
  • Subscription revenue is a business cheat code.
  • Recurring revenue protects you during recessions and builds on itself every month. Every business wants recurring revenue, but only some can pull it off.
  • Most entrepreneurs don’t have enough conversations with potential, current, and past customers.
  • There’s another reason entrepreneurs don’t talk to customers: fear—fear that they’re bothering them, fear the customer will say something they don’t want to hear, fear that it’s a waste of time.
  • Who should you be talking to? Prospects Customers People who decided not to become customers People who became customers and then canceled
  • Asking the Right Questions The key to getting actionable information from customers depends on whether you’re doing early customer discovery or researching how (and whether) to build a new feature. But typical questions might include: Can you walk me through a sample flow? What problem are you trying to solve? What do you currently use to solve this problem? What did you use in the past? What are some of your biggest frustrations about this solution?
  • In these conversations, this is the time to put your consultant hat on and have a conversation entirely focused on your customer’s needs, not your product—this part is important.
  • Your customers don’t know how to build software as well as you do, and even if they did, they’d never match the insights about the market you’ve learned building your product.
  • I wanted to build a product that people used—a lot of people—and that meant learning how to take certain points of feedback to heart and discard the rest.
  • As a bootstrapper, time and money are precious, and feature requests can wipe out both quickly.
  • For one, a competitive market is proven. You already know that people are willing to pay for the problem your product solves.
  • You’re not going to outmuscle or outspend entrenched, well-funded competitors. You need to use their biggest strength (their size) to your advantage.
  • unless you’re losing deals to specific competitors on a regular basis, it’s more helpful to keep your eyes on your own paper.
  • In SaaS—particularly in bootstrapped SaaS companies—the network effect moat comes not from users, but integrations.
  • Having a strong brand means you’re in a lot of conversations. When people discuss options, you’re in the mix.
  • owns these organic traffic channels in his market, so even though other names on those pages might be more recognizable, he can stay highly competitive.
  • Most APIs are difficult to leave because to do so requires expensive developer time to integrate with a new product. Companies like Stripe, Twilio, and SendGrid have a pretty hefty switching cost moat.
  • For example, a social media scheduling tool is easy to switch from because there is no critical history stored or complex workflows that need to be recreated using a new tool.
  • If your company isn’t growing, you don’t need to chase a siren song. You need to get to the root of the real problem, one that’s not usually fixed by the approaches discussed below.
  • “If no one’s complaining about your price, you’re probably priced too low.”
  • When you segment your customers by size and usage, you start to see how your pricing tiers work to offer the most value to customers while driving growth for your business.
  • Expansion revenue is when customers pay you more as they get more value from your product.
  • Feature Gating. The second way to unlock expansion revenue is by expanding the features your customers can access at higher plans. This tends to be less effective than value metrics because it’s not as intrinsically tied to the growth of your customers’ businesses.
  • A loose rule of thumb is to charge 10 to 20 times more than your standard plan.
  • Free plans don’t just magically work—you need to understand how they function.
  • Just remember the golden rule of experimenting: Only change one variable at a time.
  • revisiting your pricing every six to 12 months because if you’re like most founders, you’re probably charging too little.
  • Dropping your price is rarely the answer when it comes to product-market fit because pricing is such a huge lever in the business.
  • When you announce a price increase, use this template: Set the stage for the value your product offers (i.e., we’ve been around for some time, we’ve become a trusted provider in this space, etc.). “We’re changing our pricing.” Let them know up front what’s going on. Provide high-level justification about why you’re changing your pricing (i.e., we’ve added tons more value, we’re in a completely different space than when we launched, we’re expanding our features, etc.). (Optional) Offer more specifics about whom it impacts, when price increases will go into effect, etc. (Optional) Provide more justification if you feel it’s necessary. “Reach out with questions.” Let them know your doors are open for questions, comments, and feedback.
  • the only way to reliably build a business was to get good at marketing.
  • founders need to learn SaaS marketing strategy or risk losing control of and visibility into a crucial part of their business.
  • most markets prefer high-touch. Switching from low- to high-touch was really hard for me because it wasn’t what I wanted, but it’s what propelled us to product-market fit. How you sell is as important as what you sell.”.
  • Higher-touch funnels also tend to focus more on outbound marketing tactics like cold-calling, cold-emailing, and LinkedIn outreach.
  • Keep in mind that you need to have enough traffic coming through your funnel that reliable patterns appear. If you’re only tracking a handful of customers, you won’t have enough data to see noticeable patterns.
  • Do you have a lot of website traffic, but no one is signing up for your trial? You probably have an issue with your value proposition, marketing copy, or positioning.
  • If you’ve built a tool for developers, you can take a look at other tools your audience would likely use. If they’re not direct competitors, contact the founder and ask for a quick call. Say, “I know you market to developers. Could you spend 30 minutes chatting with me about what’s working for you?”
  • But even if you don’t think of yourself as a salesperson, every founder needs to be able to sell—whether you’re talking to potential customers, trying to raise investment, or even just “selling” the company’s vision to new hires.
  • “When selling SaaS, think of yourself as an unpaid expert who’s helping the prospect solve their problem using software.”
  • You’re putting on your consultant hat to help your prospect define their problem and come up with a good solution.
  • Thinking of yourself as an expert problem solver first sets a good tone for sales demos.
  • Asking even a few questions about budget, timeline, and the problem they are trying to solve can be a window into whether it’s worth your time to jump on a demo.
  • What Problem Are You Looking to Solve? Your demo is not a product tour; it’s proof you can solve their problem. Focus on the customer’s pain and how you can fix that.
  • How Big Is Your Organization? Are they a solopreneur with 500 people on their email list? A company with a few dozen employees? A Fortune 1000 company with an intense enterprise sales process?
  • Toward the end of a sales demo, it’s good to get a sense of who else needs to weigh in on this decision. Are you talking to the decision maker? Does your prospect need to go back to a group? Is there any collateral you can provide, like a PDF or a guide, that will help them champion your product to their organization?
  • You need a good process for qualifying prospects before they get to you so you’re not stuck doing demos with people who will pay you $30 a month or are the wrong fit for your product.
  • Hiring someone to help you with sales comes down to whether you’re good at it and whether you enjoy
  • Sales demos are usually easy to teach, and as a founder, your energy will be better spent elsewhere.
  • When building your team you should delegate roles, not tasks.
  • In a perfect world, you’ll find that what the company needs most urgently is one of the things you’re not good at or don’t enjoy.
  • focus on building skills in sales and marketing and start hiring developers to get yourself out of the nuts and bolts of the code.
  • As a founder, you will absolutely be on a Manager’s Schedule, which cuts the day into one-hour increments you can fill with all those necessary meetings and other tasks.
  • Because for bootstrappers, a lack of money isn’t what kills businesses. It’s founder burnout.
  • Think of Your Job Description as a Sales Letter. Your job description should convince the person reading it that you have a fantastic company and that they should apply.
  • Bonuses can make people feel left out or that you’re playing favorites. They might feel like you’re giving more money to someone who doesn’t deserve it.
  • Equity is tricky, though. An equity holder only makes money if you sell the business or pull out dividends.
  • Because bootstrapped startups tend to grow more slowly and deliberately, equity isn’t always as much of an incentive.
  • Stock options are the standard startup approach to getting deeper buy-in from employees. An option just means an employee has the option to purchase a share of stock in the company.
  • Consider structuring profit sharing as a pool rather than a committed percentage to an individual.
  • You don’t have to be a metrics savant, though.
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles

Steven Pressfield (Author) and Robert McKee (Foreward)

  • It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.
  • What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.
  • Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. It is the root of more unhappiness than poverty, disease, and erectile dysfunction.
  • If you believe in God (and I do) you must declare Resistance evil,
They Ask You Answer

Marcus Sheridan and Krista Kotrla

  • Today, on average, 70 percent of the buying decision is made before a prospect talks to the company.
  • They Ask, You Answer starts with an obsession: What is my customer thinking?
  • When an organization embraces They Ask, You Answer, they believe it’s their duty to be the teacher, the go-to source within their particular industry. One that’s not afraid to answer any and every question the prospect or customer may have. For them, it’s a moral obligation to do this,
  • regardless of whether the question is perceived as good, bad, or even ugly.
  • Because they are so keenly in tune with what the marketplace is thinking, feeling, and asking, they see where their business model needs to go, evolve, and head toward.
  • What happened next is where things became very interesting. I took these questions I listed and over the coming months, late at night when everyone in my house was asleep. I (along with my two business partners) would write articles or make videos answering each of them.
  • You see, in business, just talking about something isn’t enough.
  • If you don’t show it, it doesn’t exist.
  • Just as we did with used cars, take a moment to brainstorm every single reason (fear, worry, question, concern) as to why someone would not buy from your company. What would hold them back? What would keep them from clicking “buy,” swiping their credit card, or writing that big check?
  • Pricing and Costs Problems Versus and Comparisons Reviews Best in Class
  • When you’re researching a company and their products and services, the moment you feel like anyone is hiding anything from you, all trust is lost.
  • Chances are, if you want to give the potential customer a feel for how pricing works within your industry, as well as how pricing works within your company, you could very likely do it.
  • “Have you bothered to explain these factors well on your company website?”
  • Remember, it doesn’t matter what you and I think—what matters is what consumers think, how they behave, and what they expect.
  • Novak realized the value a solid, evolving website and blog could add to the business if they were going to enter the commercial space with any success.
  • People trusted us because we were willing not only to address, but to embrace, the elephant in the room.
  • How many times over the years have prospective customers questioned you about any of the potential problems or issues they may experience with your products or services, or your company?
  • Stating first that our company sells only fiberglass pools. Admit immediately that fiberglass isn’t necessarily the best choice for everyone. State that concrete pools might, at times, be the better option. Explain how the article (or video) takes an honest look at the pros and cons of each, allowing the reader to therefore decide the best choice for them.
  • “Who Are the Best Pool Builders in Richmond, Virginia (Reviews/Ratings)”
  • Brainstorm the top competitors and companies in your space, and then take the time to write an article about the best companies in your field. Remember to stick to facts and stay away from opinions when discussing the competition on your own website. But the key here is your willingness to have the conversation and become the trusted source of your industry in the process.
  • he was writing about everything from the business’s point of view (and not the consumer’s) and was therefore experiencing no momentum from his efforts.
Think and Grow Rich

Napoleon Hill

  • “when one is truly ready for a thing, it puts in its appearance.”
  • One of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat.
  • greatest success came just one step beyond the point at which defeat had overtaken them. Failure is a trickster with a keen sense of irony and cunning.
  • When riches begin to come they come so quickly, in such great abundance, that one wonders where they have been hiding during all those lean years.
  • When you begin to think and grow rich, you will observe that riches begin with a state of mind, with definiteness of purpose, with little or no hard work.
  • Success comes to those who become success conscious.
  • Henry Ford is a success, because he understands, and applies the principles of success.
  • knowing what one wants.
  • filled with a form of universal power which adapts itself to the nature of the thoughts we hold in our minds; and influences us, in natural ways, to transmute our thoughts into their physical equivalent.
  • we must magnetize our minds with intense desire for riches,
  • Barnes succeeded because he chose a definite goal, placed all his energy, all his will power, all his effort, everything back of that goal.
  • He left himself no possible way of retreat. He had to win or perish!
  • Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to burn his ships and cut all sources of retreat. Only by so doing can one be sure of maintaining that state of mind known as a burning desire to win, essential to success.
  • Wishing will not bring riches. But desiring riches with a state of mind that becomes an obsession, then planning definite ways and means to acquire riches, and backing those plans with persistence which does not recognize failure, will bring riches.
  • Be definite as to the amount.
  • Determine exactly what you intend to give in return for the money you desire.
  • Establish a definite date
  • Create a definite plan
  • Write out a clear, concise statement of the amount of money you intend to acquire,
  • Read your written statement aloud, twice daily, once just before retiring at night, and once after arising in the morning.
  • the successful application of these six steps does call for sufficient imagination to enable one to see,
  • Tolerance, and an open mind are practical necessities of the dreamer of today.
  • The world is filled with an abundance of opportunity which the dreamers of the past never knew.
  • The state of mind must be belief, not mere hope or wish.
  • Faith is the head chemist of the mind.
  • Love and faith are psychic;
  • any impulse of thought which is repeatedly passed on to the subconscious mind is, finally, accepted and acted upon by the subconscious mind,
  • Faith is the starting point of all accumulation of riches!
  • I know that I have the ability to achieve
  • I realize the dominating thoughts of my mind will eventually reproduce themselves in outward,
  • I know through the principle of auto-suggestion, any desire that I persistently hold in my mind will eventually seek expression through some practical means
  • I have clearly written down a description of my definite chief aim in life,
  • I fully realize that no wealth or position can long endure, unless built upon truth and justice, therefore,
  • No thought, whether it be negative or positive, can enter the subconscious mind without the aid of the principle of auto-suggestion,
  • reading of the words is of no consequence-unless you mix emotion,
  • Your subconscious mind recognizes and acts upon only thoughts which have been well-mixed with emotion or feeling.
  • The price of ability to influence your subconscious mind is everlasting persistence in applying the principles described here.
  • “fix in your own mind the exact amount of money you desire,” hold your thoughts on that amount of money by concentration, or fixation of attention, with your eyes closed, until you can actually see the physical appearance of the money. Do this at least once each day.
  • Do not wait for a definite plan, through which you intend to exchange services or merchandise in return for the money you are visualizing, but begin at once to see yourself in possession of the money,
  • First. Go into some quiet spot
  • Second. Repeat this program night and morning until you can see, (in your imagination) the money you intend to accumulate.
  • Third. Place a written copy of your statement where you can see it night and morning,
  • Knowledge will not attract money, unless it is organized, and intelligently directed, through practical plans of action,
  • Any man is educated who knows where to get knowledge when he needs it, and how to organize that knowledge into definite plans of action.
  • The accumulation of great fortunes calls for power, and power is acquired through highly organized and intelligently directed specialized knowledge, but that knowledge does not, necessarily, have to be in the possession of the man who accumulates the fortune.
  • Knowledge has no value except that which can be gained from its application toward some worthy end.
Tim Cook by Kahney

Leander Kahney

  • While Jobs often set teams against each other—and even individual executives—Cook has favored a more harmonious approach, letting go of a few executives who created conflict and drama while increasing cross-collaboration between previously heavily siloed teams.
  • This type of public mourning was unheard of for a corporate leader.
  • “When Steve Jobs departed, he took three things with him: 1) singular charismatic leadership that bound the company together and elicited extraordinary performance from its people; 2) the ability to take big risks; and 3) an unparalleled ability to envision and design products.”
  • How could anyone compete with a visionary so brilliant and unforgettable that not even death could make him go away?”
  • gleefully focused on his failures, casting him as a “one hit wonder,” particularly as his work at NeXT failed to achieve
Traction

Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares

  • traction thinking: the mind-set you need to adopt to maximize your chances of getting traction.
  • Successful companies have built microsites, developed widgets, and created free tools that drive thousands of leads each month.
  • Having a product or service that your early customers love, but having no clear way to get more traction is a major problem.
  • Traction and product development are of equal importance and should each get about half of your attention. This is what we call the 50 percent rule: spend 50 percent of your time on product and 50 percent on traction.
  • splitting your time evenly between product and traction will certainly slow down product development. However, it counterintuitively won’t slow the time to get your product successfully to market.
  • In contrast, waiting until you launch a product to embark on traction development usually results in one or more additional product development cycles as you adjust to real market feedback.
  • you should figure out what this goal means in terms of hard numbers. How many customers do you need and at what growth rate?
  • Poor distribution—not product—is the number one cause of failure.
  • The first step in Bullseye is brainstorming every single traction channel. If you were to advertise offline, where would be the best place to do it? If you were to give a speech, who would be the ideal audience? Imagine what success would look like in each channel, and write it down in your outer ring.
  • For each channel, you should identify one decent channel strategy that has a chance of moving the needle.
  • The second step in Bullseye is running cheap traction tests in the channels that seem most promising.
  • How much will it cost to acquire customers through this channel? How many customers are available through this channel? Are the customers that you are getting through this channel the kind of customers that you want right now?
  • The third and final step in Bullseye is to focus solely on the channel that will move the needle for your startup: your core channel.
  • If everyone in your industry uses social ads to grow, you might be better off using another channel.
  • The biggest mistake startups make when trying to get traction is failing to pursue traction in parallel with product development.
  • Many entrepreneurs think that if you build a killer product, your customers will beat a path to your door. This line of thinking is a fallacy: that the best use of your time is always improving your product. In other words, “if you build it, they will come” is wrong.
  • The goal of middle ring tests is to find a promising channel strategy to focus on.
  • For example, offline ads is a traction channel, and billboards, transit ads, and magazine ads are all channel strategies within offline ads.
  • Inner ring tests are designed to do two things. First, to optimize your chosen channel strategy to make it the best it can be. Second, to uncover better channel strategies within this traction channel.
  • For example, for targeting blogs you can tweak which blogs to target, what type of content to push, and what the call to action is in this content.
  • For search engine marketing, you can tweak keywords, ad copy, demographics, and landing pages.
  • Making A/B testing a habit (even if you run just one test a week) will improve your efficiency in a traction channel by two or three times.
  • Once you truly focus on a channel, you will become an expert in it.
  • the company that leverages a newer platform that’s growing quickly will have a significant advantage over companies chasing the same old methods.
  • what you choose to focus on should relate directly back to your traction goal.
  • If you need to raise money in X months, what traction do you need to show to do so?
  • Clear subgoals provide accountability.
  • By placing traction activities on the same calendar as product development and other company milestones, you ensure that enough of your time will be spent on traction.
  • Critical Path is a framework to help you decide what not to do.
  • Targeting Blogs Publicity Unconventional PR Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Social and Display Ads Offline Ads Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Content Marketing Email Marketing Viral Marketing Engineering as Marketing Business Development (BD) Sales Affiliate Programs Existing Platforms Trade Shows Offline Events Speaking Engagements Community Building
  • You can get a competitive advantage by acquiring customers in ways your competition isn’t.
  • Targeting blogs prospective customers read is one of the most effective ways to get your first wave of customers.
  • To hit those numbers, Noah created a quant-based marketing spreadsheet like this:
  • those searches that are searched a lot and clumped at the front are called “fat-head” keywords.
  • SEO comes down to two things: content and links.
  • The more aligned your content is with the keywords it’s targeting, the better it will rank. Similarly, the more links you can get from credible and varying sources, the better your rankings.
  • Remember, links are the dominant factor in a site’s ranking for a given term.
  • The most common hurdle in content marketing is writer’s block. To overcome it, simply write about the problems facing your target customers.
  • The secret to shareable content is showing readers they have a problem they didn’t know about, or at least couldn’t fully articulate.
  • Unbounce engaged in any online forum where conversations were taking place about online marketing, and did its best to contribute.
  • It was particularly successful reaching out to influential people on Twitter. It would simply follow marketing mini-celebrities and ask them for feedback on recent posts.
  • One of the best methods of growing your audience is guest posting.
  • Having a strong company blog can positively impact at least eight other traction channels—SEO, publicity, email marketing, targeting blogs, community building, offline events, existing platforms, and business development.
User Friendly

Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant

  • teach computers about people, instead of teaching people about computers?
Who Moved My Cheese

Spencer Johnson

  • Haw was beginning to realize the difference between activity and productivity.
  • But it is not good when you are so afraid that it keeps you from doing anything.
  • He decided that if he ever got the chance again, he would get out of his comfort zone and adapt to change sooner. It would make things easier.
  • He was taking control, rather than simply letting things happen to him.
  • He would trust his basic instincts to sense when change was going to occur and be ready to adapt to it.
  • Haw kept thinking about what he could gain instead of what he was losing.
  • He wondered why he had always thought that a change would lead to something worse.
  • He’d been so afraid of never finding New Cheese that he didn’t even want to start looking. But since starting his journey, he had found enough Cheese in the corridors to keep him going. Now he looked forward to finding more. Just looking ahead was becoming exciting.
  • Now he realized it was natural for change to continually occur, whether you expect it or not. Change could surprise you only if you didn’t expect it and weren’t looking for it.
  • He knew that when you change what you believe, you change what you do.
  • He realized that when he had been afraid to change he had been holding on to the illusion of Old Cheese that was no longer there.
  • He realized the fastest way to change is to laugh at your own folly—then you can let go and quickly move on.
  • You did not need to overcomplicate matters or confuse yourself with fearful beliefs.
Without a Doubt

Surbhi Sarna

  • realized that the single most important decision I made in my career was to push forward even while being doubted by so many.
  • That your power lies in being able to recognize those qualities, define them, and leverage them in pursuit of your dreams.
  • I took a deep breath and managed to whisper one of the most powerful words in any language—“Mom”—before passing out, crashing to the floor.
  • This is when a dream started to take shape for me. It began in high school, grew in college, and drove me through the years that followed: I wanted to spend my life improving the quality of care women receive, by replacing antiquated approaches with cutting-edge innovation, providing them the standard of health care they deserve. It would start with finding a better way to detect ovarian cancer.
  • what really mattered for my first job wasn’t the money: it was gaining the right experience.
  • If you want to be part of bringing the next big app to the public, take courses in coding or teach yourself, so that even if you are not doing the actual coding in the long run, you know what the people who code are doing, and you have the experience to ask the right questions and judge the results.
  • Business skills can be acquired while you’re building your company. But mastering the technical skills needed to execute the business you want to be in—whether that’s retail, art, health care, organic farming, or green energy—begins with an understanding of that field from a technical perspective.
  • Entrepreneurs are people who build their own ladders while also climbing them. It’s difficult, sometimes perilous, sometimes disastrous, but in the end, it’s your ascent to your dream.

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