My book The Lean Startup gave a generation of founders the tools to build quickly, to scale, and to create massive value. But I failed to anticipate what came next. I taught people how to build something worth protecting—but not how to protect it.
– Eric Ries in Incorruptible
Quotes
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Quote Most people walk right past the secret of these outliers’ success, focusing instead on their cultures or founders or missions. But culture dies, founders leave, and missions drift—unless something deeper protects them.
– Eric Ries in Incorruptible
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Quote We often find that the harder we try to get rid of emotions and thoughts, the stronger they become. This is because parts, like people, fight back against being shamed or exiled.
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Quote The more successful an organization is at that first step, the more valuable it becomes as a target. Profits attract predators. This is where the gravity of our financial system buckles most standard structures. To resist requires powerful and carefully designed defenses, and a whole new theory of corporate governance to match. We must rethink corporate purpose, board composition, voting rights, and—eventually—embrace entirely new corporate forms.
– Eric Ries in Incorruptible
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Quote People find it hard to balance work with family, family with self, because it might not be a question of balance.
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Quote I used to think I had to choose: build a sustainable business or build something generous. Drupal taught me that is a false choice. Growth and generosity can reinforce each other. The real challenge is making sure one does not crowd out the other.
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Quote Beware of anyone who thinks innovation is about one lone genius or big piles of money. It’s about communities, creativity, and the joyful optimism of coming together to do hard work.
– Anil Dash in Moguls Moving Money Isn’t the Same as Building a Business
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Quote Simply shipping a product that works is no longer enough, everyone can do that, especially now with AI. It's not the differentiator anymore as people expect things to work. What makes a product stand out is the brand, design, how intuitive it is, the overall experience. Taste is what matters.
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Quote For prolific writers who publish weekly or daily, the ability to see a vast array of top-level connections quickly across subjects isn’t only important, but crucial.
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Quote Brands and logos and press releases do not resonate with us anymore. We are interested in your people — who they are, what they care about, and what they have to say — not your brand.
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Quote We’re born into stories that keep us from accessing our genius. We grow up among those stories and become like fish that aren’t aware of the water they’re swimming in.
– Gay Hendricks in The Big Leap
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Quote Too many of us live by the to-do list. We look at what needs to be done, then try to force ourselves to do it. It’s no wonder why, even if we have the time, we rarely have the energy.
– David Kadavy in Mind Management, Not Time Management
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Quote there are no results within the organization. All the results are on the outside. The only business results, for instance, are produced by a customer who converts the costs and efforts of the business into revenues and profits through his willingness to exchange his purchasing power for the products or services of the business.
– Peter F. Drucker in The Effective Executive
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Quote write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right—as right as you can, anyway—it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you’re very lucky (this is my idea, not John Gould’s, but I believe he would have subscribed to the notion), more will want to do the former than the latter.
– Stephen King in On Writing
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Quote Identify your superpowers. Because if you identify your superpowers and work in accordance with them, you will do the best work of your life. You will love it. And you will be great at it. And you won't have that frustration.
– Shreyas Doshi on 4 Questions Shreyas Doshi Wishes He’d Asked Himself Sooner - Former PM Leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google
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Quote I cannot imagine any company that wants to make the best product of its kind being staffed by people who do not care passionately about the product.
– Yvon Chouinard in Let My People Go Surfing
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Quote You need good constraints to be creative. You need really strong constraints. And people might think, "Well, I want to be outside the box," or at least, "I want a really huge box." And I would argue a lot of the time, you actually want the smallest box possible so that your options are constrained so you can make faster, better decisions.
– Tim Ferriss in How I Write - Write Like A 5x Bestselling Author with Tim Ferriss (~20:40)
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Quote If you're not releasing then you're just journaling. If you're not posting it publicly, if you're just keeping things to yourself, then you need to admit that's just a journal. You're not really being a writer, you're just journaling for yourself. I think to be a writer, the unspoken necessity of that definition is that you have to release it to the world, otherwise it's just your diary.
– Derek Sivers in Derek Sivers Reveals His Writing Secrets For His Forthcoming Book, Useful Not True (~30:00)
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Quote The culture I’m trying to create is one where every year when we celebrate another record result, I get up on the beer box and I say, “Thank you for doing all of the things I never asked you to do.” I don’t want to control. I want to create context. I want to create clarity of culture and strategic choice, but then I want people to surprise me. I don’t want a place where people are doing what they’ve been told to do, because that stifles, that creates bureaucracy, that creates fear.
– Jørgen Vig Knudstorp in At LEGO, Growth and Culture Are Not Kid Stuff
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Quote If you're going to do something that's weird, and potentially disadvantageous in some ways, then find the inverse way to leverage it and make it an advantage
– Tom Preston-Werner in Interview with Bryce Roberts (29:00)
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Quote Think about your favorite athlete, musician, or actor. Behind the scenes of their public persona, there is a process they follow for regularly turning new ideas into creative output. The same goes for inventors, engineers, and effective leaders. Innovation and impact don’t happen by accident or chance. Creativity depends on a creative process.
– Tiago Forte in Building a Second Brain
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Quote There’s a difference between criticism and constructive criticism. With the latter, you’re constructing at the same time that you’re criticizing. You’re building as you’re breaking down, making new pieces to work with out of the stuff you’ve just ripped apart. That’s an art form in itself.
– Ed Catmull in Creativity, Inc.
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Quote Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be. They are the channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself. Quite literally, you become your habits.
– James Clear in Atomic Habits
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Quote The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.
– David Epstein in Range
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Quote You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged. To set up a healthy feedback system, you must remove power dynamics from the equation—you must enable yourself, in other words, to focus on the problem, not the person.
– Ed Catmull in Creativity, Inc.
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Quote I learned to go slowly when faced with the choice between two things that you need that are seemingly at odds. That way you can figure out how to have as much of both as possible. There is almost always a good path that you just haven’t discovered yet, so look for it until you find it rather than settle for the choice that is then apparent to you.
– Ray Dalio in Principles