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.
MIT 147th Commencement, MIT News (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 7 June 2013 source ↗
And it brings us to the debate that has been going on here: aid versus private sector, aid versus trade, etc. And someone stood up to say that one of the frustrating things is that it's been a simplistic debate. And that's not what the debate should be about. That's engaging in the wrong debate. The issue here is how do we get a partnership that involves government donors, the private sector and ordinary African people taking charge of their own lives? How do we combine all this?
I am in favor of strengthening the freedom of the market. At the same time, I am very unhappy about the conceptual restrictions imposed on the players in the market. This originates from the assumption that entrepreneurs are one-dimensional human beings, who are dedicated to one mission in their business lives − to maximize profit.
I have never felt the need to trash talk, and I'm not going to start now! I just quietly do my job and then quietly step into the ring to showcase what I can do. And one thing is for sure: I'm going to leave it all in the ring. I've always had such a will to win, and I always give my heart and my soul, so I don't need to change who I am.
every time I heard the word “smart” attached to anything, it means it’s pretty dumb, because no one knows what it really does. They just add “smart” as a prefix to say, “Oh, you must buy this, because it’s smart.” If they can’t tell you what it does and why it does it, don’t buy it just because it says “smart.”
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.
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.
Tony Fadell, Reid Hoffman, Tobias Lütke, David Vélez, Steve Jobs, Daniel Ek
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