• The best way to find a job you’ll love and a career that will eventually make you successful is to follow what you’re naturally interested in, then take risks when choosing where to work
• The only failure in your twenties is inaction. The rest is trial and error
• After you move out of your parents’ house, there’s a window - a brief. shining, incredible window - where your decisions are yours alone. You’re not beholden to anyone - not a spouse, not kids, not parents. You’re free. Free to choose whatever you’d like.
• To do great things, to really learn, you can’t shout suggestions from the rooftop then move on while someone else does the work
• I can’t make you the smartest or the brightest, but it’s doable to the most knowledgeable. It’s possible to gather more information than somebody else.
• You always have something to offer if you’re curious and engaged
• The CEO and executive team are mostly staring way out on the horizon - 50% of their time is spent planning for a fuzzy, distant future months or years away, 25% is focused on upcoming milestones in the next months or two, and the last 25% is spent putting out fires happening right now at their feet.
• Managers keep their eyes focused 2-6 weeks out.
• Junior Individual contributors spend 80% of their time looking straight down - maybe a week or two out - to see the fine points of their day-to-day work.
• When you’re a manager, you’re no longer just responsible for the work. You’re responsible for other human beings
• As a manager, you should be focused on making sure the team is producing the best possible product. The outcome is your business. How the team reaches that outcome is the team’s business. When you get deep into the team’s process of doing work rather than the actual work that results from it, that’s when you dive headfirst into micromanagement
• To get people to join you, to truly become a team, to fill them with the same energy and drive that’s bubbling within you, you need to tell them the why
• Most managers are afraid that the people who work for them are going to be better than them. But you need to think of being a manager more like being a mentor or a parent. What loving parent wants their child NOT to succeed? You want your kids to be more successful than you, right?
• Data can’t solve an opinion-based problem
• Insights can be key learnings about your customers or your market or your product space - something substantial that gives you an intuitive feeling for what you should do
• AB and user testing is not product design. It’s a tool. A test/ At best, a diagnosis. It can tell you something’s not working, but it won’t tell you how to fix it.
• I understand your position. Here are the points that make sense for our customers, here are the ones that don’t. We have to keep moving and, in this instance, I have to follow my gut.
• Storytelling is how you get people to take a leap of faith to do something new.
• But pushing for greatness doesn’t make you an asshole. Not tolerating mediocrity doesn’t make you an asshole. Challenging assumptions doesn’t make you an asshole. Before dismissing someone as ‘just an asshole’, you need to understand their motivations
• Your story about why you left needs to be honest and fair and your story for your next job needs to be inspiring: this is what I want to learn, this is the kind of team I want to work with, this is part of the mission that truly excites me.