I believe in the value of paranoia. Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more successful you are, the more people want a chunk of your business and then another chunk and then another until there is nothing left.
I have been quoted saying that, in the future, all companies will be Internet companies. I still believe that. More than ever, really.
Make mistakes faster.
Most Americans probably aren’t aware that there was a time in this country when tanks and cavalry were massed on Pennsylvania Avenue to chase away the unemployed.
Accept that no matter where you go to work, you are not an employee you are a business with one employee, you. Nobody owes you a career. You own it, as a sole proprietor.
Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age.
So give me a turbulent world as opposed to a quiet world and I’ll take the turbulent one.
The boom was healthy too, even with its excesses. Because what this incredible valuation craze did was draw untold sums of billions of dollars into building the Internet infrastructure. The hundreds of billions of dollars that got invested in telecommunications, for example.
By the late ’90s, those who were paying attention perceived the Internet as a 20-foot tidal wave coming, and we are all in kayaks.
There are two options: adapt or die.
Just as we could have rode into the sunset, along came the Internet, and it tripled the significance of the PC.
You have no choice but to operate in a world shaped by globalization and the information revolution. There are two options: adapt or die.
Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos.
The future is going to take care of itself, like it always has.
No problem is so complicated that you cannot make it more complicated.
There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.
You need to plan the way a fire department plans: it cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.
I wasn’t cut out to be an opera singer, but it was a nice fantasy for a teenager growing up in Hungary during the Stalinist era.
A career in journalism suddenly lost its appeal.
The sad news is, nobody owes you a career. Your career is literally your business. You own it as a sole proprietor. You have one employee: yourself. You need to accept ownership of your career, your skills and the timing of your moves.
Assume any career move you make won’t go smoothly. They won’t. But don’t look back.