Eric Schmidt quotes: the billionaire businessman’s top quotes.
“Here are some simple steps to creating a plan: think about your ideal job, not today but five years from now. Where do you want to be? What do you want to do? How much do you want to make? Write down the job description: if you saw this job on a website, what would the posting look like? Now fast forward four or five years and assume you are in that job. What does your five-years-from-now résumé look like? What’s the path you took from now to then to get to your best?”
“What happens in the future is up to us.”
“If you believe that the qualities defining you are carved in stone, you will be stuck trying to prove them over and over again, regardless of the circumstances. But if you have a growth mindset, you believe the qualities that define you can be modified and cultivated through effort.”
“A mind that’s set in its ways is wasted. Don’t do it.”
“Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment.”
“A great startup, a great project – a great job, for that matter – should be fun… and if you’re working your butt off without deriving any enjoyment, something’s probably wrong.”
“Passionate people don’t wear their passion on their sleeves; they have it in their hearts. They live it. Passion is more than résumé-deep, because its hallmarks – persistence, grit, seriousness, all-encompassing absorption – cannot be gauged from a checklist. Nor is it always synonymous with success. If someone is truly passionate about something, they’ll do it for a long time even if they aren’t at first successful. Failure is often part of the deal.”
“The passionate person will often talk at length, aka ramble, about his pursuits. This pursuit can be professional. In our world, ‘perfecting search’ is a great example of something people can spend an entire career on and still find challenging and engaging every day. But it can also be a hobby.”
“Smart creatives thrive on interacting with each other. The mixture you get when you cram them together is combustible, so a top priority must be to keep them crowded.”
“If I give you a penny, then you’re a penny richer and I’m a penny poorer, but if I give you an idea, then you will have a new idea but I’ll have it too.”
“Our policy is: we try things, we celebrate our failures.”
“It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall.”
“Fast learners win.”
“Leadership requires passion.”
“You need to have confidence in your people, and enough self-confidence to let them identify a better way.”
“The coach doesn’t have to play the sport as well as you do. They have to watch you and get you to be your best.”
“If you want something done, give it to a busy person.”
“Coach Wooden once said, ‘Be interested in finding the best way, not in having your own way.'”
“Ego creates blind spots.”
“Find a way to say yes to things. Say yes to invitations to a new country, say yes to meet new friends, say yes to learn something new. Yes is how you get your first job, and your next job, and your spouse, and even your kids. Even if it’s a bit edgy, a bit out of your comfort zone, saying yes means that you will do something new, meet someone new, and make a difference. Yes lets you stand out in a crowd, be the optimist, see the glass full, be the one everyone comes to. Yes is what keeps us all young.”
“Make sure you would work for yourself.”
“I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.”
“Innovative people do not need to be told to do it, they need to be allowed to do it.”
“To innovate, you must learn to fail well. Learn from your mistakes.”
“The characteristic of great innovators and great companies is they see a space that others do not. They don’t just listen to what people tell them; they actually invent something new, something that you didn’t know you needed, but the moment you see it, you say, ‘I must have it.'”
“In business, and particularly in high-tech, it’s not enough to be great at what you do, you have to catch at least one really big wave and ride it all the way in to shore.”
“The business should always be outrunning the processes, so chaos is right where you want to be.”
“If you focus on your competition, you will never deliver anything truly innovative.”
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
“There is a science to managing high-tech businesses, and it needs to be respected. One of them is that in technology businesses, leadership is temporary. It’s constantly recycling. So the asset has limited lifetime.”
“People are good at intuition, living our lives. What are computers good at? Memory.”
“Just remember when you post something, the computers remember forever.”
“In general, in technology, if you own a platform that’s valuable, you can monetize it.”
“We have only begun to encounter the realities of a connected world: the good, the bad and the worrisome.”
“People who bet against the internet, who think that somehow this change is just a generational shift, miss that it is a fundamental reorganizing of the power of the end user. The internet brings tremendous tools to the end user, and that end user is going to use them.”
“The internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”
“I think it’s pretty clear that the internet as a whole has not had a strong notion of identity. And identity means, ‘Who am I?’ Fundamentally, what Facebook has done has built a way to figure out who people are.”
“The rise of Google, the rise of Facebook, the rise of Apple, I think are proof that there is a place for computer science as something that solves problems that people face every day.”
“We want to make sure the thing you’re looking for is on Google 100% of the time.”
“There’s nothing that cannot be found through some search engine or on the internet somewhere.”
“It’s very difficult for governments to dominate the internet because it’s so difficult to control. People want to be free. People want to hear multiple voices. They want to make their own decisions. And people who see things will report things.”
“Countries that have the internet already are not going to turn it off. And so the power of freedom, the power of ideas will spread, and it will change those societies in very dramatic ways.”
“If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it’s all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It’s had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we’re much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.”
“Half of Google’s revenue comes from selling text-based ads that are placed near search results and are related to the topic of the search. Another half of its revenues come from licensing its search technology to companies like Yahoo.”
“Computers will clearly handle the things we aren’t good at, and we will handle the things computers clearly aren’t good at.”
“People assume that computers will do everything that humans do. Not good. People are different from each other and they are all really different from computers.”
“I’ve come to a view that humans will continue to do what we do well, and that computers will continue to do what they do very well, and the two will coexist, but in different spaces.”
“We used to think that the enterprise was the hardest customer to satisfy, but we were wrong. It turns out, consumers are harder than the enterprise because the consumer will not give you a second chance.”
“If you want to change people’s behavior, you need to touch their hearts, not just win the argument. We call this the ‘Oprah Winfrey rule.'”
“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”
“It is the ultimate luxury to combine passion and contribution. It’s also a very clear path to happiness.”
“In whatever number of years I have on Earth, I think that promoting the values of free expression, the openness of the internet – that’s the best use of my time.”
