things_a_little_bird_told_me.md

Things a little bird told me

Things a little bird told me - Biz STONE - ISBN: 978-1-4472-7112-3

• I realized that a company can build a business, do good in society, and have fun.

• If you take an idea and just hold it in your head, you unconsciously start to do things that advance you toward the goal.

• If you make the opportunity, you'll be the first in position to take advantage of it. [..] I realized that this is the core of entrepreneurship - being the person who makes something happen for yourself.

• Believing in yourself, the genius you, means you have confidence in your ideas before they even exist. In order to have a vision for a business, or for your own potential, you must allocate space for that vision.

• Think about your work situation. Do you treat your creativity like a fossil fuel - a limited resource that must be conserved - or have you harnessed the unending power of the sun? Are you in an environment where creativity thrives? Is there room for new ideas every day? Can you make room?

• We lacked something that is the key to a successful startup, and it was bigger than sound quality. It was emotional investment. If you don't love what you're building, if you're not an avid user yourself [dogfooding], then you will most likely fail even if you're doing everything else right.

• I can't work on anything I'm not interested in.

• Then he suggested a "hackaton".

• Adopting a career because it's lucrative, or because your parents want you to, or because it falls into your lap, can sometimes work out, but often, after you settle in, it starts to feel wrong.

• If you don't wake up excited for the day ahead, and you think you're on the wrong path, how do you find your way? I always tell people to back into it. Imagine working on something you love. Describe it to yourself. Don't focus on how much money you want. Instead think about this: What type of people surround you? What sort of work are they doing? How do you get to work? What adjectives would people use to describe what you do?

• Once true passion hits you, you can recognize all the times in your life when you were chasing the wrong dream. And after you've experienced that sustained fulfillment, you'll never want to settle for anything less.

• Constraint inspires creativity.

• [...] when he was making the movie Jaws, Steven SPIELBERG wanted to build a giant, realistic mechanical shark in order to shoot scenes of the scary beast attacking people. But making that full-size shark became a budgeting nightmare, so Spielberg came up with a low-budget solution. He decided to shoot from the shark's point of view, under-water, looking hungrily up at the tasty legs of the oblivious swimmers. Guess what? Way scarier. Those shots came about because the director's budget was constrained.

• "[...] we came upon the perfect chip for mobile. You know what I gave my team? No money, no time, and no resources."

• Embrace your constraints, whether they are creative, physical, economic, of self-imposed. They are provocative. They are challenging. They wake you up. They make you more creative. They make you better.

• Over and over again, through the Error messages, the blog postings, the Fail Whale, and responses to user mail, I told people that we were human. We knew we were failing. We didn't like it.

• Trust your instincts, know what you want, and believe in your ability to achieve it. Rules and conventions are important for schools, businesses, and society in general, but you should never follow them blindly. And it always helps to have a like-minded partner in crime.

• [...] there's wiggle room in Don't Be Evil. The motto sound morally aboveboard. It implies, "We have the power to be evil; let's not use it." But aphorisms phrased in the negative are weak. Nike's motto is Just Do It - not Don't Just Sit There. With its motto, it appears that Google is measuring its actions on a scale of evilness rather than on a scale of goodness.

• Assumptions for twitter Employees:

  • 1. We don't always know what's going to happen.
  • 2. There are more smart people out there than in here.
  • 3. We will win if we do the right thing for our users.
  • 4. The only deal worth doing is a win-win deal.
  • 5. Our coworkers are smart, and they have good intentions.
  • 6. We can build a business, change the world, and have fun.

• Every time we made a decision about what to add, change, or take away from the product, the big, simple question was: Does it make the experience better for people?

• [WTF-1] This meant we could give our users ads they likes. Ads were good for our users, because if Twitter made money, then Twitter would continue to exist.

• [WTF-2] All money we raised went to Room to Read, which buys books for kids in developing nations. If you think about it, it's symbiotic. If you can't read, you can't tweet. The more readers there are in the world, the bigger Twitter's potential reach.

• Relationships were destroyed. [...] Even my friendship with Jack was strained for a bit, though never broken. Why is all this happening? And then the answer dawned on me. Oh. Because billions of dollars are now involved.

• [WTF-3] Only 114 000 people in the world have thirty million dollars or more in assets. What if they were in a Google group and decided to invest in one thing to change the course of history?

• Global empathy is the triumph of humanity