Metadata
- Author: Tony Fadell
- ASIN: B09MVPSJK3
- ISBN: 0063046067
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09MVPSJK3
- Kindle link
Highlights
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. — location: 595 ^ref-54060
And I spent the next ten years getting kicked in the stomach by Silicon Valley before I made something people actually wanted. — location: 606 ^ref-7314
Adulthood is your opportunity to screw up continually until you learn how to screw up a little bit less. — location: 613 ^ref-25913
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. — location: 624 ^ref-64955
The title and the money weren’t important. The people were. The mission was. The opportunity was all that mattered. — location: 637 ^ref-20801
ask for forgiveness, not permission. — location: 645 ^ref-53170
“The only failure in your twenties is inaction. The rest is trial and error.” — location: 651 ^ref-5025
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. — location: 654 ^ref-11898
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.) — location: 706 ^ref-49149
General Magic was making incredible technology but wasn’t making a product that would solve real people’s problems. But I thought I could. — location: 733 ^ref-64419
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: — location: 740 ^ref-65304
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. — location: 752 ^ref-20085
But even if you’ve got the tech, then you still have to time it right. — location: 757 ^ref-48579
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. — location: 762 ^ref-24387
If you’re not solving a real problem, you can’t start a revolution. — location: 769 ^ref-49409
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.” — location: 793 ^ref-24915
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. — location: 801 ^ref-760
Focus on understanding your field and use that knowledge to create connections with the best of the best, people you truly respect. Your heroes. — location: 832 ^ref-48042
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. — location: 845 ^ref-499
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. — location: 850 ^ref-45756
Find the experts on Twitter or YouTube, then send them a message, a comment, a LinkedIn connection. — location: 853 ^ref-34849
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. — location: 864 ^ref-9677
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. — location: 936 ^ref-24490
Managers usually keep their eyes focused 2–6 weeks out. — location: 939 ^ref-7892
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. — location: 942 ^ref-2340
Your job isn’t just doing your job. It’s also to think like your manager or CEO. — location: 947 ^ref-39266
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. — location: 975 ^ref-52432
You’re starting to think like your manager or leader, which is the first step to becoming a manager or leader. — location: 984 ^ref-38113
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. — location: 989 ^ref-47772
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. — location: 991 ^ref-8234
You do not have to be a manager to be successful. — location: 1084 ^ref-49268
Remember that once you become a manager, you’ll stop doing the thing that made you successful in the first place. — location: 1090 ^ref-53786
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. — location: 1092 ^ref-5774
Becoming a manager is a discipline. — location: 1097 ^ref-31163
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. — location: 1100 ^ref-8026
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. — location: 1103 ^ref-940
Don’t worry that your team will outshine you. — location: 1107 ^ref-14526
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. — location: 1117 ^ref-49053
So at least 85 percent of your time should be spent managing. — location: 1127 ^ref-63206
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. — location: 1144 ^ref-35563
Apple formally recognizes and rewards star IC engineers in the Distinguished Engineer, Scientist or Technologist (DEST) program. — location: 1153 ^ref-2632
The best technology wouldn’t always win—look at Windows 95 versus macOS. — location: 1164 ^ref-41842
So engineers often keep their distance from sales, marketing, creative—all the functions that are soft, squishy. — location: 1169 ^ref-30060
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. — location: 1176 ^ref-15268
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. — location: 1181 ^ref-58930
As a manager, you should be focused on making sure the team is producing the best possible product. The outcome is your business. — location: 1200 ^ref-20074
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. — location: 1200 ^ref-42059
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. — location: 1204 ^ref-295
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. — location: 1210 ^ref-31573
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. — location: 1212 ^ref-57094
And then just be honest with them. Even if things aren’t going well, don’t avoid telling them the hard truth. — location: 1223 ^ref-53466