“The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers” by Ben Horowitz gives an account of his own hardships and struggle story he faced when he was establishing his start-up.
He has also emphasized tackling some very severe problems that one faces in this journey.
Doing The Hard Thing Quotes
-Setting up a dream is not actually the hard thing to do, but the hard thing is when we lose it and have to lay people off.
-Recruiting people is not hard, but when people start feeling entitled, that’s when it’s hard.
-Keeping a big goal is not hard until the goal turns into a nightmare.
-All of us need friends who are of two types.
-One kind is the ones whom we contact when we are elated and feel like we are on top of the world.
-Other is the ones we contact when we mess up something horribly.
-Sometimes, people need to question themselves about what they are not doing.
-One can’t say they know something until they try to know and understand others.
-One should care about the people, products, and profits in this same sequence.
-All the CEO face long sleepless nights, and they are tensed someday or the other.
-The great CEOs are always stable in their answers, and they never abandon trying.
-Life will always be seen as an ongoing struggle for everybody.
-What we all can do is to hold on to all those struggles.
-We should always try to make our culture which will be rewarding rather than punishing.
-We should always acknowledge the people who bring out their problems in the open.
-An organization needs clarity instead of a solution many times.
-There are possibly no easy recipes for the hard things, which is why they seem hard.
-Sometimes, they are hard because our logic and emotions do not go together.
-They appear hard because we do not have any solutions for them.
-They are hard as we cannot plea for help unless we reveal our frailty.
-One should bite gently when we try to eat shit.
-All decisions turn to be emotional from being objective when we see the first code.
-A person will witness two prime emotions in a startup.
-One is the feeling of intense pleasure.
-Another one is the feeling of trepidation.
-One could say that sleep deprivation triggers these feelings.
-There are practically no differences between being yellow and brave.
-Both of the people feel scared to make a move.
-Eventually, the brave one will triumph over his fear as he is more disciplined.
-People will always judge us based on our actions and not on our emotions.
-One should give all their valuable time to what they can do now and in the future.
-We should never waste our time on what we could have done in the past.
-When we establish a tech company, one of the greatest pleasures is when we get to hire some awesome people.
-The startup CEOs should hope for an outcome; they must find the odds.
-The work of the CEO is the same whether the possibilities are either nine in ten or one in a thousand.
-Business relations are sometimes very complex to handle.
-They can become way too complex to handle or less complex to benefit.
-It’s like people will compete with each other until they hate each other or will be too friendly, making them unproductive.
-It is not the customer’s work to identify the right product but the innovator’s to identify.
-There is no mystery of how to become a successful CEO; the one thing is the focus.
-The thing is to focus and to come up with the best solutions when there are no more good solutions.
-We often see that the employees at some big companies are not trained, but the people at McDonald’s are properly trained.
-This mistake is often made by the employer who thinks his employees are so intelligent that they hardly require any training.
-One should focus on the idea of his strength instead of the lack of weakness.
-We certainly have no formula for handling hard things, making them hard.
-A manager can enhance the output of his employees through sheer motivation and hard training.
-One should believe in statistics and in calculus.
-When you establish a tech startup, you are always in a contest with time.
-Sometimes, the best ideas will turn into disasters with time.
-Communication is the only aim of the process.
-Sometimes, a single person will be the reason for which the entire company project will be delayed.
-The more we trust the person, the less it requires the need for communication.
-There is certainly no quick way to gain knowledge.
-The most important knowledge is the knowledge gained through personal experience.
-The perception that training will be time-consuming is our biggest mistake in training programs.
-The biggest milestone for a CEO is when he stops being too motivating or positive.
-The perks we get in our life are good, but they cannot be compared to culture.
-The markets are not accurate enough to be methodical.
-Markets seem to jump to conclusions, which often turn out to be wrong.
-Sometimes, it becomes easier to see the good qualities in others but difficult to see those within ourselves.
-The main communication base is formed by trust; without it, the whole system collapses.
-It doesn’t matter who you are. You need friends in your life.
-Every time I get past a situation, I think: It was hard. But not so much tough as I thought it would be.
-The hardest thing is leaving people when you miss the goal that you truly want to achieve.
-The hardest thing is waking up cold and sweaty at night after a dream that eventually turned into a nightmare.
-Sometimes, ask yourself what you are actually doing in life.
-You absolutely know nothing until and unless you try to know anything.
-People, products, profits; that’s the order in which you take care of things.
-Great people like CEOs have to deal with sleepless nights.
-Struggle is a very crucial part of anyone’s life.
-Form a culture that awards, not a culture that penalizes or is frowned upon.
-Sometimes, a formation doesn’t need an answer; it just needs a clearer vision.
-Tough things seem tough because there is no easy answer for those things.
-If you are going to eat trash, do not pick it over.
-You only have two feelings: elation and fear.
-Rather than spending your time thinking about what you could have done, spend it to think what you might do.
-The greatest thing about building a technology company is the beautiful minds that you can work with.
-The most significant moral in entrepreneurship is to feel the struggle.
-There is no secret to being a successful CEO.
-People at McDonald’s are trained, but people with far more complicated jobs are not.
-You should always hire people for their strengths rather than for their lack of weaknesses.
-The hard thing about hard things is that there are no formulas to deal with them.
-The struggle is when you don’t know the answer for not quitting your job.
-The struggle is when you think your employees are right when they think you are lying.
-The struggle is when you forget the taste of food.
-The only two ways for a manager to improve the output of their employees are focus and practice.
-I don’t believe in numbers. I believe in calculations.
-The best ideas become terrible ideas after a certain point of time.
-The sole purpose for communication is the progress of your company.
-Whenever you start to do something, it always narrows down to that one single person for whom that something needs to be delayed or even shelved.
-The amount of conversation you have with someone is inverse in proportion to the amount of trust.
-People leave service because you did not keep them involved enough with yourself and your service.
-There is no shortcut for gaining knowledge, especially regarding knowledge that has to be gained from your own experience.
-Hire people with the same mentality as yours and then build strict rules for specific issues and do not deviate from those.
-You should have an opinion on everything because you are a company’s CEO.
-There has always got to be a little bit more.
-My biggest personal improvement as a CEO occurred the day I stopped being too optimistic about everything.
-A company with a healthy culture helps share good and bad news together.
-A company with no personal conflicts and that can solve its own problems frustrates everyone.
-If our company is not doing any good, then what the hell are we doing?
-Things like communication, common knowledge, and decision-making, do not seem big when you have just started but eventually seem bigger when you start to grow.
-The hard thing is to get people to share things within a company that you design.
-You have to become clean to rebuild your trust.
-Keeping an account is significant.
-Startups should definitely train their people first. Or else they would do no good to the company.
-The most important management lesson for a manager/CEO is total training.
-The responsibility of the employee of a big company is much greater than the employee working in a smaller company.
-Finding the right product is the innovator’s job, not the buyer’s.
-The moments when you want to hide or even hide can make a huge difference in your career as a CEO.
-Never bring a problem without an approachable solution in your mind.
-Perks are not a part of the culture. Yet, they are good.
-No market is successful in finding the truth.
-Markets are responsible for getting to a conclusion that is wrong most of the time.
-What would you do if I said that ice cream gives you the same value as that of Broccoli?
-Try spending your mental energy on a solution that is out of the box than on overthinking and expanding your misery.
-You get happier when you see a few things in other people you don’t possess.
-Humans generally prefer to listen to optimistic statements.
-Communication breaks without trust.
-The core reason to being the CEO of a good company is knowledge.
-You are a true leader when someone tends to follow you just out of curiosity.
-To advance your career, you must work long hours.
-If you don’t realize what you need, probably you’re never going to get it.
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Carol T. Mahaffey is a certified American Author And a creator of Theleaderboy. Carol is a Self-Taught Marketer with 10+ Years of Experience. She brings her decade of experience to her current role, where she is dedicated to writing books, blogs, and articles, inspiring the world on how to become a better Leader.