Alex Boltyanskiy > Alex's Quotes

“Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.”
― Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“When in doubt, simplify.”
― Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“We don’t hire smart people to tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do. —Steve Jobs”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“Bad companies,” Andy wrote, “are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing your limits, and if you’re not pushing your limits, you’re not maximizing your potential”
― Ray Dalio, Principles: Life and Work

“Look for people who have lots of great questions. Smart people are the ones who ask the most thoughtful questions, as opposed to thinking they have all the answers. Great questions are a much better indicator of future success than great answers.”
― Ray Dalio, Principles: Life and Work

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.”
― Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: The Million Copy Bestseller Driving Entrepreneurs to Success

“The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.”
― Eric Ries, The Lean Startup

“Reading is good, action is better.”
― Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.”
― Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“I won’t just have a job; I’ll have a calling. I’ll challenge myself every day. When I get knocked down, I’ll get back up. I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I’ll strive to be the grittiest.”
― Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

“I learned a lesson I’d never forget. The lesson was that, when you have setbacks and failures, you can’t overreact to them.”
― Angela Duckworth, Grit

“...interests are not discovered through introspection. Instead, interests are triggered by interactions with the outside world. The process of interest discovery can be messy, serendipitous, and inefficient. This is because you can't really predict with certainty what will capture your attention and what won't...Without experimenting, you can't figure out which interests will stick, and which won't.”
― Angela Duckworth, Grit: Passion, Perseverance, and the Science of Success

“If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.”
― Jason Fried, Rework

“When you don’t know what you believe, everything becomes an argument. Everything is debatable. But when you stand for something, decisions are obvious.”
― Jason Fried, Rework

“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
― Voltaire

“Find a judo solution, one that delivers maximum efficiency with minimum effort. When good enough gets the job done, go for it.”
― Jason Fried, Rework

“Until you actually start making something, your brilliant idea is just that, an idea.”
― Jason Fried, Rework

“If you're opening a hot dog stand, you could worry about the condiments, the cart, the name, the decoration. But the first thing you should worry aout is the hot dog. The hot dogs are the epicenter. Everything else is secondary.”
― Jason Fried, Rework

“Think about it this way: If you had to launch your business in two weeks, what would you cut out?”
― Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, ReWork

“Being original doesn’t require being first. It just means being different and better.”
― Adam M. Grant, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

“Every time I read a management or self-help book, I find myself saying, “That’s fine, but that wasn’t really the hard thing about the situation.” The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal. The hard thing isn’t hiring great people. The hard thing is when those “great people” develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things. The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

“Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

“Great CEOs face the pain. They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweats, and what my friend the great Alfred Chuang (legendary cofounder and CEO of BEA Systems) calls “the torture.” Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say, “I didn’t quit.”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

“Hard things are hard because there are no easy answers or recipes. They are hard because your emotions are at odds with your logic. They are hard because you don’t know the answer and you cannot ask for help without showing weakness.”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers