Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

Mentors are more personal. They don’t just help with people’s jobs, they help with their lives, their families.

A coach helps because they know the company; a mentor helps be...

the product manager’s sole focus and responsibility is to build the right products for their customers.

Your legal team is there to inform your choices, not make them for you.

The best CEOs push the team to strive for greatness, then take care of them to make sure they can achieve it.

Great leaders can recognize good ideas even if those ideas didn’t come out of their own mouths.

if you aren’t failing, you aren’t trying hard enough.

When you’re a manager, you can look at the collective achievement of your team and feel a sense of accomplishment and pride. When you’re a CEO, you dream that maybe, ten years down the road, some people will think you did a good job. But you can never tell how you’re doing in the moment. You can never sit back and look at a job well done.

In the end, there are two things that matter: products and people. What you build and who you build it with.

It’s incredibly special to create something together with a team.

The thing holding most people back is themselves.