These are some of the best quotes from The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.
Ben Horowitz is one of Silicon Valley’s renowned personalities. It’s exciting to start a business but to be honest, it is hard to run it successfully in long run. In this book, Ben Horowitz with a touch of his humor has passed on his experience to how to run the business properly all the time.
Quotes from Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.
Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.
Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time to what you might do.
There are only two ways for a manager to improve the output of an employee: motivation and training.
There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience.
Accountability is important, but it’s not the only thing that’s important.
My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when I stopped being too positive.
It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO.
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Build a culture that rewards—not punishes—people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved.
The most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.
One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.
The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place. The Struggle is when people ask you why you don’t quit and you don’t know the answer. The Struggle is when your employees think you are lying and you think they may be right. The Struggle is when food loses its taste.
I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project.
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It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.
No, markets weren’t “efficient” at finding the truth; they were just very efficient at converging on a conclusion—often the wrong conclusion.
All the mental energy you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current.
Leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out of curiosity.
Remember that this is what separates the women from the girls. If you want to be great, this is the challenge. If you don’t want to be great, then you never should have started a company.
Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while.
If you don’t know what you want, the chances that you’ll get it are extremely low.
When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it.
There is no silver bullet that’s going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets.
The key to an emotional discussion is to take the emotion out of it.
Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition.
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A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them.
Good product managers anticipate serious product flaws and build real solutions. Bad product managers put out fires all day.
Investing in courage and determination was an easy decision for me.
Consensus decisions about executives almost always sway the process away from strength and toward lack of weakness.
My greatest management discovery through the transition was that peacetime and wartime require radically different management styles.
The first rule of organizational design is that all organizational designs are bad.
If you don’t have world-class strengths where you need them, you won’t be a world-class company.
The first thing to recognize is that no startup has time to do optional things.
Any technology startup must do is take the market.
People who watch you judge you on what you do, not how you feel.
Image Quotes: The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
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