The Hard Thing About Hard Things
I just got back from a week of vacation, for which I was saving Ben Horowitz’s new book. There has been a lot written about this book already, and I’ll add my name to the list of enthusiastic recommenders. A few thoughts:
1. #
Nearly every sentence in the book was quotable as some sort of nugget of wisdom, so instead of saving quotes, my annotations were the few words, thoughts, or lessons that Ben kept repeating. I’d call these his themes, maybe.
- “World-class” (executives, employees, teams, companies, skills, products…)
- “Require” (as in, a CEO should require things of her managers, not make them optional)
- “No excuses.”
- Value strength rather than lack of weakness
- Make sure to pay attention to the leading indicators of success and failure
2. #
This isn’t necessarily a concept unique to Ben’s book, but one thing he mentioned is that a CEO should be measured on the speed and quality of their decisions. Watching Netflix’s series House of Cards, I noticed that the President is a great example of this. The way he makes decisions is a great example of what it advice should look like in practice. After all, the President is the Chief Executive of the USA, so this is a great lesson.
3. #
It seems to me that Ben and Elon are pretty similar in the way they approach problems. This was my favorite part of reading this book, the attitude that it inspires. Elon sums it up in a great quote as:
Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.
and Ben:
Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.