“The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers” by Ben Horowitz has given an account of his own hardships and struggle story he faced when he was establishing his start-up.
He has also emphasized tackling some very severe problems that one faces in this journey.
Here are some very inspirational quotes from “The Hard Thing About Hard Things“:
-Setting up a dream is not actually the hard thing to do but the hard thing is when we lose it and have to lay people off.
-Recruiting people is not hard but when the people start feeling entitled that’s when it’s hard.
-Keeping a big goal is not hard until the goal turns into a nightmare.
-All of us need friends who are of two types.
-One kind is the ones whom we contact when we are elated and feel like we are on top of the world.
-Other is the ones whom we contact when we mess up something very horribly.
-Sometimes people need to question themselves about what is that they are not doing.
-One can’t say they know something until they try to know and understand others.
-One should care about the people, products, and profits in this same sequence.
-All the CEO face long sleepless nights and they are tensed someday or the other.
-The great CEOs are always stable in their answers that they never abandoned trying.
-Life will always be seen as an ongoing struggle for everybody.
-What we all can do is to hold on to all those struggles.
-We should always try to make our culture which will be rewarding rather than punishing.
-We should always acknowledge the people who bring out their problems out in the open.
-An organization needs clarity instead of a solution many times.
-There are possibly no easy recipes for the hard things and this is why they seem to be hard.
-Sometimes they are hard because our logic and emotions do not go together.
-They appear hard because we do not have any solutions for them.
-They are hard as we cannot plea for help unless we reveal our frailty.
-One should bite gently when we try to eat shit.
-All decisions turn to be emotional from being objective when we see the first code.
-There are two prime emotions that a person will witness in a startup.
-One is the feeling of intense pleasure.
-Another one is the feeling of trepidation.
-One could say that sleep deprivation will trigger these feelings.
-There are practically no differences in being yellow and brave.
-Both of the people feel scared to make a move.
-Eventually, the brave one will triumph over his fear as he is more disciplined.
-People will always judge us on the basis of our actions and not on our emotions.
-One should give all their valuable time to what they can do now and in the future.
-We should never waste our time on what we could have done in the past.
-When we establish a tech company one of the greatest pleasures is when you get to hire some awesome people.
-The CEOs of the startup should hope for an outcome; they have to find the odds.
-The work of the CEO is the same whether the possibilities are either nine in ten or one in a thousand.
-Business relations are sometimes very complex to handle.
-They can become way too complex to be handle or too less complex to be beneficial.
-It’s like people will compete with each other until they hate each other or will be too friendly making them unproductive.
-It is not the customer’s work to identify the right product but the innovator to identify.
-There is no mystery of how to become a successful CEO, the one thing is the focus.
-The thing is to focus and to come up with some best solutions when there are no more good solutions.
-We often see that the employees at some big companies are not trained but the people at McDonald’s are properly trained.
-This mistake is often made by the employer who thinks that his employees are so intelligent that they hardly require any training.
-One should focus on the idea of his strength instead of the lack of weakness.
-We certainly have no formula for handling hard things and this is what makes them hard.
-A manager can enhance the output of his employees by sheer motivation and hard training.
-One should believe in statistics and in calculus.
-When you establish a tech startup you are always in a contest with time.
-Sometimes the best of ideas will turn into disasters with time.
-Communication is the only aim of the process.
-Sometimes a single person will prove to be the reason for which the entire project of the company will be delayed.
-The more we trust the person the less it requires the need for communication.
-There is certainly no quick way to gain knowledge.
-The most important knowledge is the knowledge gained through personal experience.
-The perception that training will be time-consuming is the biggest mistake we make in training programs.
-The biggest milestone for a CEO is when he stops being too motivating or positive.
-The perks that we get in our life are good but they cannot be compared to culture.
-The markets are not accurate enough to be methodical.
-Markets seem to jump to the conclusions and these conclusions often turn out to be wrong.
-Sometimes it becomes a lot easier to see the good qualities in others but difficult to see those within ourselves.
-The main base of communication is formed by trust and without it the whole system collapses.
