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Drew Houston

Co-founder and chief executive of Dropbox

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here
That night, I realized there are no warmups, no practice rounds, no reset buttons. Every day we're writing a few more words of a story. And when you die, it's not like “here lies Drew, he came in 174th place.” So from then on, I stopped trying to make my life perfect, and instead tried to make it interesting. I wanted my story to be an adventure — and that's made all the difference.

MIT 147th Commencement, MIT News (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 7 June 2013 source ↗

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Andy Murray British professional tennis player, 2005–2024
I've never set out to be a spokesperson for women's equality. My experience of working with Amelie Mauresmo gave me a small insight into attitudes to women in sport and, because it was unusual for a male tennis player to work with a female coach, I am often asked about that. Working with Amelie was, for me, because she was the right person for the job, and not a question of her sex at all. However, it became clear to me that she wasn't always treated the same as men in similar jobs, and so I felt I had to speak out about that.
Recorded Column written for the BBC as part of the BBC 100 Women series, BBC News, 18 September 2017 source ↗
Akio Toyoda President of Toyota Motor Corporation, 2009–2023; chairman from 2023
Even I can't predict what kind of car we will be driving 20 years from now, but my time at Babson taught me to embrace change rather than run from it, and I urge all of you to do the same.
Recorded Babson College Graduate Commencement, Babson College (Babson Thought & Action), 21 May 2019 source ↗
Andrew Ng Co-founder of Coursera and of Google Brain; founder of DeepLearning.AI
I just finished reading BJ Fogg's new book, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. Fogg explains that the best way to build a new habit is to start small and succeed, rather than starting too big and giving up. For example, rather than trying to exercise for 30 minutes a day, he recommends aspiring to do just one push-up, and doing it consistently. This approach may be helpful to those of you who want to spend more time studying. If you hold yourself accountable for watching, say, 10 seconds of an educational video every day — and you do so consistently — the habit of studying daily will grow naturally.
Recorded Ng's own newsletter, The Batch, DeepLearning.AI, 2020 source ↗
Ray Dalio Founder of Bridgewater Associates
I gained a humility that I needed in order to balance my audacity. I wanted to find the smartest people who would disagree with me to try to understand their perspective or to have them stress test my perspective. I wanted to make an idea meritocracy. In other words, not an autocracy in which I would lead and others would follow and not a democracy in which everybody's points of view were equally valued, but I wanted to have an idea meritocracy in which the best ideas would win out.
Recorded TED2017, 24 April 2017 source ↗

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Question What bad recommendations do people in your field repeat too often? Craft & work
I was going to say work on what you love, but that's not really it. It's so easy to convince yourself that you love what you're doing — who wants to admit that they don't? When I think about it, the happiest and most successful people I know don't just love what they do, they're obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them.
Recorded MIT 147th Commencement, MIT News (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 7 June 2013 source ↗
Question How has a setback or failure set you up for later success? Failure & regret
No one has a 5.0 in real life. In fact, when you finish school, the whole notion of a GPA just goes away. When you're in school, every little mistake is a permanent crack in your windshield. But in the real world, if you're not swerving around and hitting the guard rails every now and then, you're not going fast enough. Your biggest risk isn't failing, it's getting too comfortable.
Recorded MIT 147th Commencement, MIT News (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 7 June 2013 source ↗

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