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Epiphanies are rare.
The truth is that for every good idea, there are a thousand bad ones. And sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference.
The best ideas rarely come on a mountaintop in a flash of lightning. They don’t even come to you on the side of a mountain, when you’re stuck in traffic behind a sand truck. They make themselves apparent more slowly, gradually, over weeks and months. And in fact, when you finally have one, you might not realize it for a long time.
What I needed was the feeling of being deeply engaged with a project. What I needed was purpose.
Part of the fantasy was a wistful yearning for a slower, simpler life – for getting off the treadmill.
Almost everything I ever learned about being a leader, I learned with a backpack on.
But the breakthrough for me was simply telling people the truth. “Can you spare some change? I’m really hungry.” There was something about speaking from the heart that cut right through. It got people’s attention and broke down their cynicism and defenses.
I almost wished she had said no. Because now I had to actually do it.
I didn’t worry about Netflix’s future when I was deeply engaged in ensuring it.
But to do that, I needed to do some planting. I needed to clear a space, plant a sapling, and week by week, month by month, nurture the tender thing that grew there under my care.
Culture is a reflection of who you are and what you do – it doesn’t come from carefully worded mission statements and committee meetings.
I had so many tasks set in front of me, so many little pieces I had to prep and build, that there wasn’t much time for anxiety about the future.
People want to be treated like adults. They want to have a mission they believe in, a problem to solve, and space to solve it. They want to be surrounded by other adults whose abilities they respect.
The second your dream becomes a reality, things get complicated. You simply can’t know how things are going to behave until you’ve actually tried them. Go ahead and write up a plan, but don’t put too much faith in it. The only real way to find something out is to do it.
“Kinda puts all our eggs in one basket,” he said. “That’s the only way to make sure you don’t break any,” I replied.
the necessity not only of creative ideation, or of having the right people around you, but of focus.
Focus is imperative. Even when the thing you’re focusing on seems impossible. Especially then.
Radical honesty is great, until it’s aimed at you.
If people want what you have, they will break down your door, leap over broken links, and beg you for more. If they don’t want what you’ve got, changing the color palette won’t make a damned bit of difference.
Overplanning and overdesigning is often just overthinking – or just plain old procrastination.
When it comes to ideas, it’s more efficient to test ten bad ones than spend days trying to come up with something perfect.
If Nobody Knows Anything, then you have to trust yourself. You have to test yourself. And you have to be willing to fail.
We’d all known that the idea could work, but in the end nobody knew anything about how – until it did.
it wasn’t something that we thought our way toward – it wasn’t something anyone could have predicted ahead of time. It took a lot of hard work, a lot of hard thought. It also took a lot of cards falling just right. Other people call that luck. I call it nobody knowing anything.
trust your gut, but also test it. Before you do anything concrete, the data has to agree.
one of the most powerful weapons at your disposal is dogged, bullheaded insistence. It pays to be the person who won’t take no for an answer, since in business, no doesn’t always mean no.
happiness existed on a totally different axis than money.
As you get older, if you’re at all self-aware, you learn two important things about yourself: what you like and what you’re good at. Anyone who gets to spend his day doing both of those things is a lucky man.
Success is what you accomplish. It’s being in a position to do what you like, do what you do well, and pursue the things that are important to you.
The most powerful step that anyone can take to turn their dreams into reality is a simple one: you just need to start. The only real way to find out if your idea is a good one is to do it. You’ll learn more in one hour of doing something than in a lifetime of thinking about it. So take that step. Build something, make something, test something, sell something. Learn for yourself if your idea is a good one.
