Brian Sigafoos > Brian's Quotes

“So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“But life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future. When they come to the end of it, the poor wretches realize too late that for all this time they have been preoccupied in doing nothing.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“Since tech became a consumer phenomenon, thousands of nontech people have come up with great ideas that use technology. But if their startups outsource their engineering, they almost always fail. Why? It turns out that it’s easy to build an app or a website that meets the specification of some initial idea, but far more difficult to build something that will scale, evolve, handle edge cases gracefully, etc. A great engineer will only invest the time and effort to do all those things, to build a product that will grow with the company, if she has ownership in the company—literally as well as figuratively. Bob Noyce understood that, created the culture to support it, and changed the world.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“Culture is not like a mission statement; you can’t just set it up and have it last forever. There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard. This is also true of culture—if you see something off-culture and ignore it, you’ve created a new culture.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: An expert guide to building your company’s culture

“In Managing at Apple, we often played a video of Steve explaining his approach to giving criticism. He captured something very important: “You need to do that in a way that does not call into question your confidence in their abilities but leaves not too much room for interpretation … and that’s a hard thing to do.” He went on to say, “I don’t mind being wrong. And I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot. It doesn’t really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing.”
― Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

“When bosses are too invested in everyone getting along they also fail to encourage the people on their team to criticize one another other for fear of sowing discord. They create the kind of work environment where being "nice" is prioritized at the expense of critiquing and therefore improving actual performance.”
― Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

“Here’s what I need to do to stay centered: sleep eight hours, exercise for forty-five minutes, and have both breakfast and dinner with my family. If I skip one or two of those things for a day or two, it’s OK. But that’s the routine. Also, every so often I need to read a novel (ideally one a week), go away for a romantic weekend with my husband (ideally four times a year), and take a two-week vacation with siblings and parents (once a year). If I can manage to do those things, I can usually stay centered no matter what storms are raging around me.”
― Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

“Steve would later say that when a team debated, both the ideas and the people came out more beautiful—results well worth all the friction and noise.5 Your job as a boss is to turn on that “rock tumbler.”
― Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

“There are real advantages to quiet listening, but it also has a downside. When you’re the boss and people don’t know what you think, they waste a lot of time trying to guess. Some will even use your name in vain—“Well, what the boss wants to do is X”—and then go on to describe what they want to do instead.”
― Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

“loud listening is about saying things intended to get a reaction out of them. This was the way Steve Jobs listened.”
― Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

“Steve didn’t just challenge others; he insisted that they challenge him back.”
― Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

“Every minute you spend with somebody who does great work pays off in the team’s results much more than time spent with somebody who’s failing. Ignore these people and you won’t, in short, be managing.”
― Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

“Another great time to solicit feedback is when people are really angry with you. It’s instinctive to avoid people when they are mad, but this is the moment when you’re most likely to hear the unvarnished truth.”
― Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

“A good rule of thumb for guidance is praise in public, criticize in private. Public criticism tends to trigger a defensive reaction and make it much harder for a person to accept they’ve made a mistake and to learn from it. Public praise tends to lend more weight to the praise, and it encourages others to emulate whatever was great.”
― Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean

“In order to build a great team, you need to understand how each person’s job fits into their life goals. You need to get to know each person who reports directly to you, to have real, human relationships—relationships that change as people change. When putting the right people in the right roles on your team, you’ll also have to challenge people even more directly than you did with guidance—and in a way that will impact not just their feelings but also their income, their career growth, and their ability to get what they want out of life. Building a team is hard.”
― Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

“I do not recommend using an average of the ratings for each category to produce an overall rating. The only people who could get a Great rating should have to get a Great rating in all categories. People who get a Not OK rating in one category get an overall Not OK rating. This will help you get to a reasonable distribution of the overall rating.”
― Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

“When Steve Jobs was a kid, his neighbor showed him a rock tumbler—a can that spun on a motor. The neighbor asked Steve to gather up some ordinary rocks from the yard. He took the stones, threw them into the can, added some grit, turned on the motor, and, over the racket, asked Steve to come back two days later. When Steve returned to the noisy clatter of the garage, the neighbor turned off the contraption and Steve was astounded to see how the ordinary rocks had become beautiful polished stones. Steve would later say that when a team debated, both the ideas and the people came out more beautiful—results well worth all the friction and noise.5 Your job as a boss is to turn on that “rock tumbler.”
― Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity