Ed Lee

“Similarly, habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance. In the early and middle stages of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment. You expect to make progress in a linear fashion and it’s frustrating how ineffective changes can seem during the first days, weeks, and even months. It doesn’t feel like you are going anywhere. It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes are delayed. This is one of the core reasons why it is so hard to build habits that last. People make a few small changes, fail to see a tangible result, and decide to stop. You think, “I’ve been running every day for a month, so why can’t I see any change in my body?” Once this kind of thinking takes over, it’s easy to let good habits fall by the wayside. But in order to make a meaningful difference, habits need to persist long enough to break through this plateau—what I call the Plateau of Latent Potential.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“If the key to inclusion means seeing someone for who they are even if they come in a color or gender that you’re not used to, then it follows that hiring people on the basis of color or gender will actually defeat your inclusion program. You won’t see the person, you will just see the package. This seems obvious enough, but it’s actually trickier to understand than it would seem, because if you are hiring your own race or gender then you can see them just fine. If a woman hires a woman, there will probably be no problem later. If a man does it, then he runs a strong chance that he’ll only see that she’s a woman and not who she really is. Because most advisors on inclusion come from the groups being included, they often miss this point. And this is why hiring women and minorities into senior positions usually accelerates your inclusion efforts.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“An old boss once warned: “You’ll never be rich since you’re obviously smart, and someone will always offer you a job that’s just good enough.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness

“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