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Kindle Notes & Highlights
To make great ideas a reality, we must act, experiment, fail, adapt, and learn on a daily basis.
Creation must be made accessible for consumption. This is your real job.
To keep at it long enough to become exceptional, your labor must be sustainable. You must learn to earn a living with your art (or science or thought) so that you can nourish yourself as you nourish your work.
the first step in living your purpose is to distill it. This very act sets an accurate compass heading. It shapes your choices, tells you what is important, and helps you separate the merely interesting from the truly crucial.
Restraint and discipline come to those who are clear about their purpose in life.
Check out this quote.
smart is more important than fast.
The impact you have in the world also affirms your purpose. Impact justifies purpose. It fuels purpose. It empowers you to live your purpose more boldly every day.
Innovation starts with enthusiasts. The reason why it starts with enthusiasts is that they are focused on the right priority, which is the change they want to make in the world, versus say, a business idea that will get funded.
You need to know who is your customer; who cares about this? Identifying that community of people who care and having a deep understanding of why they care is so central.
“Is there something people are not realizing that if they understood it, it would help them think differently and more effectively about the future?”
We have this line at O’Reilly: “Create more value than you capture.”
“Asking the right questions is the number one thing I spend my time thinking about these days,” says Dev Patnaik
All too often, great products gain an edge through their simplicity in the beginning (which is usually a matter of expediency), only to become overly complex or bloated as they are evolved.
An effective hook appeals to short-term interests (aka our selfishness and impatience) but is connected to a long-term promise.
When thinking about products, I like to use a mountain-climbing analogy. The first step is to pick a peak. Don’t pick a peak because it’s easy. Pick a peak because you really want to go there; that way you’ll enjoy the process.
An army does not materialize out of nowhere or assemble on its own.
Whatever your strengths are, they will likely lead straight into your weaknesses.
When you decline an opportunity to lead, you open up a vacuum for other people to take on management roles,
I’ve always thought that the hardest and most valuable thing in work is to get a group of smart people to work together toward a common goal.
I learned that if you want people to think, telling them what to do is not the best way to do it—in fact, it’s the worst.
Once treated like followers, people act like followers. It saps their passion and initiative.
