My advice to everyone is: “Become a journalist.” ... if you have a chance to be a newspaper reporter for three or four years — before you do whatever you want to do — do it, because you will know so much.
What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore?
Question
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?
Failure & regret
Question
What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise?
Craft & work
Question
What is the best advice you have ever received?
Time & hindsight
Learn by doing, not learn first, then do. The way you discover what it is you like to do in life is by doing first, then learning about it.
Academy of Achievement interview, 5 February 2016 source ↗
Others on this question
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Nora Ephron
Journalist, essayist, screenwriter and film director
Steve Jobs
Co-founder and chief executive of Apple; co-founder of NeXT; chief executive of Pixar
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Recorded
Stanford University 114th Commencement, Stanford News (Stanford University), 12 June 2005
source ↗
Jeff Bezos
Founder and former chief executive of Amazon; founder of Blue Origin
My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever.”
Naomi Osaka
Japanese professional tennis player
I feel uncomfortable being the spokesperson or face of athlete mental health as it's still so new to me and I don't have all the answers. I do hope that people can relate and understand it's O.K. to not be O.K., and it's O.K. to talk about it. There are people who can help, and there is usually light at the end of any tunnel.
More from Tony Fadell
View profile →I had such failure for the first ten years in Silicon Valley. General Magic — over a billion dollars invested in 1990 dollars! Could you imagine what that is today? The best team in the world. We were told we were gonna topple Microsoft and all these companies.
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.”
Elliot, he has such passion for what it was we were doing that he instilled that passion in me. He was like, “Just go for it. Make it happen.” And I would give him some wild idea, and he’d say, “Go try it.” It was that next set of just knocking down the fear of failure. Just go try anything.
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Brian Chesky, Grace Hopper, Whitney Wolfe Herd, Susan Wojcicki, Jeff Bezos, Marvin Minsky
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