Reid Hoffman's Billion Dollar Thoughts
(1) Get busy living or get busy dying. If you’re not growing, you’re contracting. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward.
(2) “Twenty years of experience” is really “one year of experience” repeated twenty times because each year will be marked by new, enriching challenges and opportunities. Permanent beta is essentially a lifelong commitment to continuous personal growth.
(3) “Keeping your options open” is frequently more of a risk than committing to a plan of action.
(4) No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you are playing a solo game, you will always lose out to a team.
(5) If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you have launched too late.
(6) Every internet entrepreneur should answer these questions: How do we get to one million users? Then how do we get to 10 million users? Then how will you get deep engagement by your users?
(7) All human beings are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA, and creation is the essence of entrepreneurship.
(8) Help the people in your network. And let them help you.
(9) Most often I am only interested in an idea if it’s going to get hundreds of millions of users. That’s the scale that I am always trying to play to.
(10) The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely by making money.
(11) For life in permanent beta, the trick is to never stop starting.
(12) The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.
(13) A team in the business world will tend to perform at the level of the worst individual team member.
(14) Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it. Remember: If you don’t find risk, risk will find you.
(15) Until you hear “No,” you haven’t been turned down.
(16) An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff, and builds a plane on his way down.
(17) Ideally, most of the top executives of a company should be on Foundational tours.
(18) If you are not receiving or making at least one introduction a month, you are probably not fully engaging your extended professional network.
(19) Always ask yourself: Which plan offers the most learning potential?
(20) You need to think and act like you’re running a start-up: your career.
(21) Take intelligent and bold risks to accomplish something great. Build a network of alliances to help you with intelligence, resources, and collective action. Pivot to a breakout opportunity.
(22) Start a personal blog and begin developing a public reputation and public portfolio of work that’s not tied to your employer.
(23) One of the challenges in networking is everybody thinks it’s making cold calls to strangers. Actually, it’s the people who already have strong trust relationships with you, who know you’re dedicated, smart, a team player, who can help you.
(24) When the Naysayers Are Loud, Turn Up the Music.
