Reid Hoffman quotes: the LinkedIn co-founder sounds off.
“Finished ought to be an F-word for all of us. We are all works in progress. Each day presents an opportunity to learn more, do more, be more, grow more in our lives and careers.”
“Whether you want to learn a new skill or simply be better at the job you were hired to do, it’s now your job to train and invest in yourself.”
“Great opportunities almost never fit your schedule.”
“If you don’t start out aiming for the big game, you almost never can get there.”
“Opportunities do not float like clouds in the sky. They’re attached to people. If you’re looking for an opportunity, you’re really looking for a person.”
“Theodore Roosevelt’s famous dictum, ‘Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.'”
“When you’re doing work you care about, you are able to work harder and better.”
“Making a decision reduces opportunities in the short run, but increases opportunities in the long run. To move forward in your career, you have to commit to specific opportunities as part of an iterative plan, despite doubt and despite inconvenience.”
“The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely by making money.”
“Success is no longer a simple ascension of steps. You need to climb sideways and sometimes down, and sometimes you need to swing from the jungle gym and establish your own turf somewhere else on the playground.”
“Good ideas need good strategy to realize their potential.”
“Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it.”
“Managing risk is a key variable, frankly, for all aspects of life. Business is just one of them. And one of the things that most people do in terms of managing risk, that’s actually bad thinking, is they think they can manage risk to zero. Everything has some risk to it. So what you’re doing is you’re actually trying to get to an acceptable level of risk.”
“Many people think you get career stability by minimizing all risk. But ironically, in a changing world, that’s one of the riskiest things you can do.”
“Remember: if you don’t find risk, risk will find you. Take intelligent and bold risks to accomplish something great. Build a network of alliances to help you with intelligence, resources and collective action. Pivot to a breakout opportunity.”
“If something worthwhile will be riskier in five years than it is now, be more aggressive about taking it on now. As you age and build more assets, your risk tolerance shifts.”
“People who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don’t.”
“When the naysayers are loud, turn up the music.”
“For life in permanent beta, the trick is to never stop starting.”
“For many people ’20 years of experience’ is really one year of experience repeated 20 times.”
“If you’re in permanent beta in your career, 20 years of experience actually is 20 years of experience because each year will be marked by new, enriching challenges and opportunities. Permanent beta is essentially a lifelong commitment to continuous personal growth. Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’. If you’re not growing, you’re contracting. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward. You need to think and act like you’re running a start-up: your career.”
“Until you hear ‘no,’ you haven’t been turned down. Keeping your options open is frequently more of a risk than committing to a plan of action.”
“Throwing your heart into something is great, but when any one thing becomes all that you stand for, you’re vulnerable to an identity crisis when you pivot to a Plan B.”
“A business without loyalty is a business without long-term thinking. A business without long-term thinking is a business that’s unable to invest in the future. And a business that isn’t investing in tomorrow’s opportunities and technologies—well, that’s a company already in the process of dying.”
“Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that’s really powerful.”
“A team in the business world will tend to perform at the level of the worst individual team member. Relationship builders, on the other hand, try to help other people first. They don’t keep score. They’re aware that many good deeds get reciprocated, but they’re not calculated about it. And they think about their relationships all the time, not just when they need something.”
“The team you build is the company you build.”
“Pay attention to your culture and your hires from the very beginning.”
“Relationships help you find opportunities.”
“We believe that when the right talent meets the right opportunity in a company with the right philosophy, amazing transformation can happen.”
“If you are not receiving or making at least one introduction a month, you are probably not fully engaging your extended professional network.”
“The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.”
“The thing that changes your professional life, your capabilities, your learning, your understanding, your opportunity flow, your ability to make things happen, is the center relationships you have with powerful and effective people around you in the industry, in the activity that you want to be doing.”
“The fabric of society, of a network of relations, is key to being successful.”
“A leader’s job is not to put greatness into people, but rather to recognize that it already exists, and to create the environment where that greatness can emerge and grow.”
“Your competitive advantage is formed by the interplay of three different, ever-changing forces: your assets, your aspirations/values, and the market realities (i.e., the supply and demand for what you offer the marketplace relative to the competition).”
“As Bill Gates wrote more than a decade ago, ‘The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competition, the best way to put distance between you and the crowd, is to do an outstanding job with information.’ How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose.”
“Economic tough times are great times to be investing in the future.”
“Unfortunately, for far too many, focused learning ends at college graduation. They read about stocks and bonds instead of reading books that improve their mind. They compare their cash salary to their peers instead of comparing lessons learned. They invest in the stock market and neglect investing in themselves. They focus, in short, on hard assets instead of soft assets. This is a mistake.”
“Seeing what someone’s reading is like seeing the first derivative of their thinking.”
“Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”
“All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA, and creation is the essence of entrepreneurship.”
“Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurially.”
“Entrepreneurship is a life idea, not a strictly business one; a global idea, not a strictly American one.”
“An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.”
“If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late.”
“While ‘Silicon Valley’ and ‘start-ups’ are used almost synonymously these days, only a tiny fraction of the world’s start-ups actually originate in Silicon Valley, and this fraction has been getting smaller as start-up knowledge spreads around the globe. Thanks to the internet, entrepreneurs everywhere have access to the same information.”
“Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.”
“Having a great idea for a product is important, but having a great idea for product distribution is even more important.”
“It’s better to be the best connected than the most connected.”
“Before dreaming about the future or marking plans, you need to articulate what you already have going for you—as entrepreneurs do.”
“Hard work isn’t enough. And more work is never the real answer. The sort of grit you need to scale a business is less reliant on brute force. It’s actually one part determination, one part ingenuity, and one part laziness.”
“As a child, I wondered often, ‘Why are we? What is the meaning of life?’ These questions made me realize that life is what has meaning—not just individual lives, but all of our lives.”
“Broadly, the meaning of life comes from how we interact with each other. The internet can reconfigure space so that the right people are always next to each other.”
“I don’t normally think of my most successful moments, because like most entrepreneurs, I tend to think that however high of a mountain I’ve climbed, I’m always looking at the next mountain to climb.”
“Giving birth to something that could possibly change the lives of millions of people for possibly decades, hundreds of years, whatever the length of time the run is, is a great feeling.”
“Each year, I ask, ‘Now that I have this knowledge, these resources, what can I do?'”
“You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.”
“Be persistent, and hang on to your vision. And at the same time, be flexible.”
Related: Mark Zuckerberg quotes.
