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If you want something done, give it to a busy person.
Marissa Mayer, who became one of Silicon Valley’s most famous working mothers
not long after she took over as Yahoo’s CEO in 2012, says that burnout isn’t caused by working too hard, but by resentment at having to give up what really matters to you.
(Henry Ford: “If I had listened to customers, I would have gone out looking for faster horses.”)
Sun cofounder Bill Joy noted, “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”
Scouting is like shaving: If you don’t do it every day, it shows.
Berkeley political science professor Raymond Wolfinger once observed, “the plural of anecdote is data,”
If you want to change people’s behavior, you need to touch their hearts, not just win the argument.
Yet as a leader it is precisely the bad news that you most need to hear. Good news will be just as good tomorrow, but bad news will be worse. That’s why you must make it safe to ask the tough questions and to tell the truth at all times, even when the truth hurts. When
creativity loves constraints.175 It’s why pictures have frames and sonnets have fourteen lines.
A lack of resources forces ingenuity.
As Frank Lloyd Wright once observed, “The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest.”
Several studies have shown that extrinsic rewards don’t encourage creativity, and in fact hinder it, by turning an inherently rewarding endeavor into a money-earning chore.198
