Matt Mullenweg quotes: wisdom from the man who made this blog possible.
“Do what you love and don’t focus on money; life’s too short.”
“There’s a lot of ways you can make money, but to actually have an impact on the world is rare, and when you find an opportunity for that, it’s very special.”
“Sometimes, you have to be frustrated and do something unscalable—and a waste of your time—to be inspired.”
“Occupy the space left open by competition.”
“There’s always room to grow.”
“If you want to be good at something, you really have to work at it every single day. You have to work hard at the things that are hard. Otherwise you are just treading water.”
“Eat, breathe, and sleep your business. We work best on the projects that are aligned with the core of who we are. I go to sleep and I wake up thinking about WordPress. I consider myself very lucky to be able to work on something I love so much.”
“As an entrepreneur making decisions for your company, always go back to your first principles of what’s important to you and why you started in the first place.”
“You really have to love every single bit of what you do. The moment that you do something that makes you feel queasy to your stomach, the company dies.”
“If you have a fantastic idea you’re really passionate about and are making $100,000 in your job, if you can set aside some of that to invest in servers or contractors or other folks, that’s actually the best way to start a business in my opinion.”
“It’s good to work for someone else. Because then you appreciate it more when you are an entrepreneur.”
“It’s good to be in a role when you can learn something new.”
“When there’s no one you can point to, or when something goes wrong, it’s your fault. That level of responsibility and accountability is pretty interesting.”
“Money and salary is not a particularly good motivator in the long term.”
“The biggest motivation is not the money but the impact.”
“If you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version, you waited too long.”
“Get the 1.0 out as soon as possible, even if it sucks.”
“There’s no financial aspect to stats.”
“Usage is like oxygen for ideas. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there.”
“You can’t build everything and there is no more a killer feature. Everyone has a different killer feature.”
“Seek to better understand your users. It’s my responsibility to meet as many users as possible and direct the software project in a way that reflects their interests. Knowing your end user is the first step to being able to give them what they want.”
“For me, it always comes back to the blogger, the author, the designer, the developer. You build software for that core individual person, and then smart organizations adopt it and dumb organizations die.”
“Much of the lifeblood of blogs is search engines: more than half the traffic for most blogs.”
“It turns out that social networks drive a heck of a lot of traffic to blogs.”
“Now an audience of more than one billion people is only a click away from every voice online, and remarkable stories and content can gain flash audiences as people share via social networks, blogs and email. This radically equalizes the power relationship between, say, a blogger and a multibillion dollar corporation.”
“I believe that software, and in fact entire companies, should be run in a way that assumes that the sum of the talent of people outside your walls is greater than the sum of the few you have inside. None of us are as smart as all of us.”
“Know your creed. A creed is basically a statement of things important to us, written in the first person.”
“If you’re building a startup or any sort of organization, take a few moments to reflect on the qualities that the people you most enjoy working with embody and the user experience of new people joining your organization, from the offer letter to their first day.”
“Hire well, manage sparingly. Sometimes the key to productivity is setting things up so that they require less work. My management strategy is to find extremely self-motivated and talented people and then let them go.”
“We focus on two things when hiring. First, find the best people you can in the world. And second, let them do their work. Just get out of their way.”
“You can’t teach taste.”
“The center of gravity for an organization should be as close to what they make as possible. If you make cars, you need people in the factory. If you breed horses, be in the stable. If you make the internet, live on the internet, and use all the freedom and power it gives you.”
“You can learn practically anything you want in the world online.”
“There’s something very real about helping someone one-on-one.”
“Everybody jokes about that old story about the world only needing five computers, but when you think about it, that’s where we’re heading.”
“Technology is closing the gap between what one can imagine and what one can do and as a result the equality of opportunity is unmatched in human history.”
“Technology is best when it brings people together.”
“I am an optimist, and I believe that people are inherently good and that if you give everyone a voice and freedom of expression, the truth and the good will outweigh the bad. So, on the whole, I think the power that online distribution confers is a positive thing for society. Online we can act as a fifth estate.”
“The biggest challenge for open source is that as it enters the consumer market, as projects like WordPress and Firefox have done, you have to create a user experience that is on par or better than the proprietary alternatives.”
“One thing about open source is that even the failures contribute to the next thing that comes up. Unlike a company that could spend a million dollars in two years and fail and there’s nothing really to show for it, if you spend a million dollars on open source, you probably have something amazing that other people can build on.”
“Akismet started on a $70-dollar-a-month server. Anyone can scrape together $70.”
“My job is such that I get to run new things every day, and I get to run new markets and new technologies. I enjoy that quite a bit.”
“I don’t have big ideas. I sometimes have small ideas, which seem to work out.”
“Simplicity can have a negative impact when it’s the crude reduction of nuances beyond appreciation.”
“People might start with LiveJournal or Blogger, but if they get serious, they’ll graduate to WordPress. We try to cater to the more powerful users.”
“WordPress.com is the only service of its kind that not only lets you export your data, but gives you an open source package you can run on pretty much any web host out there to run your own instance of the software. So the freedom is really in your hands.”
“There are 100 million blogs in the world, and it’s part of my job as the cofounder of WordPress to help many more people start blogging.”
“There is no moderator or ombudsman online, and while the transparency of the Web usually means that information is self-correcting, we still have to keep in mind the responsibility each of us carries when the power of the press is at our fingertips and in our pockets.”
“We’re not done yet, but two things WordPress has been able to exemplify is that open source can create great user experiences and that it’s possible to have a successful commercial entity and a wider free software community living and working in harmony.”
“The idea of having no responsibilities except general edification seems like such a luxury now. When I had it, all I wanted to do was hack around on the Web. Now the vast majority of my hours are hacking around on the Web.”
“No matter what I do, I always come home to my blog.”
“I like to read first thing in the morning. I’m addicted to the Kindle. I read a lot of business books, because I feel like I should figure out how to be a real businessman before someone figures out that I’m not one. I really enjoy reading classics as well, which I try to work in once every two months.”
“A common quality I see of people who are successful is that they are voracious readers.”
“Rescue your time.”
“I think it’s good to have different locations for different modes you want to be in throughout the day, and to keep them separate.”
“Occasionally, if I’m in a rut, I find changing location helps. Environment plays a huge role in my ability to creatively focus and my mood, for better and worse.”
“Everybody has times of the day (or night) during which they can be particularly productive. Try to make sure you’re working during the times when you do your best work.”
“In the morning, I have certain aspirations. One of my goals is to avoid looking at the computer or checking email for at least an hour after I wake up. I also try to avoid alarm clocks as much as possible, because it’s just nice to wake up without one.”
“Starting your day unplugged gives you time for reflection and calm at the beginning of your day.”
“Respect flow. If you are taken out of the flow, if that little toaster pops up that says you’ve got mail, and you look at it, you’ve lost it. To me, being in a state of flow means being totally immersed in the task at hand. When I’m flowing—whether I’m writing, editing a video, or making music—I find that my work comes easily, happily and inspired.”
“Love is great, but not as a password.”
“I was raised Catholic, and I can get incredibly guilty about mistakes.”
“I drive a Prius and drink $10k bottles of wine. The wine isn’t on Instagram. The Prius is.”
“If I’m on the titanic I want to be steering.”
“In every aspect of life, I consider myself incredibly fortunate.”
“There’s a much longer road ahead of us than what we’ve done so far.”
“The Automattic Creed: I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.”
