Author: onetusk
Retirement letter from Google’s CFO
Google chief financial officer Patrick Pichette announced his retirement in unusual fashion Tuesday. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
It’s common for corporate executives who are retiring to say they’ll be spending more time with their family. But Google’s chief financial officer, Patrick Pichette, appears to really mean it.
In an unusually reflective and candid letter posted Tuesday afternoon to Google Plus, Pichette wrote that “after nearly 7 years as CFO, I will be retiring from Google to spend more time with my family. Yeah, I know you’ve heard that line before. We give a lot to our jobs. I certainly did.” He said he wrote the letter because “I want to share my thought process because so many people struggle to strike the right balance between work and personal life.”
Can thought resolve our problems?
Thought for the Week – 9th March 2015
Book Recommendation – Ultra Prevention by Dr Mark Hyman
We need to think about failure differently
I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a necessary evil. Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality). And yet, even as I say that embracing failure is an important part of learning, I also acknowledge that acknowledging this truth is not enough. That’s because failure is painful, and our feelings about this pain tend to screw up our understanding of its worth. To disentangle the good and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth…….
Uncertainty is a very healthy place to dwell….
“The future is no more uncertain than the present.”
– Walt Whitman Poet
Some people despair about the darkening direction of the world today. Others are excited by the possibilities for creativity and new ways of living they see emerging out of the darkness. Rather than thinking one perspective is preferable to the other, let’s notice that both are somewhat dangerous. Either position, optimism or pessimism, keeps us from fully engaging with the complexity of this time. If we see only troubles, or only opportunities, in both cases we are blinded by our need for certainty, our need to know what’s going on, to figure things out so we can be useful.
Thought for the Week – 2nd March 2015
10 Lies You Will Hear Before You Pursue Your Dreams
Unfortunately, just before you take your first step on the righteous journey to pursue your dreams, people around you, even the ones who deeply care for you, will give you awful advice. It’s not because they have evil intentions. It’s because they don’t understand the big picture – what your dreams, passions, and life goals mean to you. They don’t understand that, to you, the reward is worth the risk.
So they try to protect you by shielding you from the possibility of failure, which, in effect, also shields you from the possibility of making your dreams a reality.
As our friend Steve Jobs says:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Here are 10 ill-advised tips (lies) people will likely tell you when you decide to pursue your dreams, and why they are dreadfully mistaken.
- You can follow your dreams someday, but right now you need to buckle down and be responsible. – Someday? When is ‘someday?’ Someday is not a day at all. It’s a foggy generalization of a time that will likely never come. Today is the only day guaranteed to you. Today is the only day you can begin to make a difference in your life. And pursuing your dreams is what life is all about. So don’t be irresponsible. Don’t wait until ‘someday.’ Make today the first day of the rest of your new life.
http://www.marcandangel.com/2010/08/30/10-lies-you-will-hear-before-you-pursue-your-dreams/
Hiring Great People
“I hire people brighter than me and I get out of their way.”
– Lee Iacocca
“The competition to hire the best will increase in the years ahead. Companies that give extra flexibility to their employees will have the edge in this area.”
– Bill Gates
“Some people can do one thing magnificently, like Michelangelo, and others make things like semiconductors or build 747 airplanes — that type of work requires legions of people. In order to do things well, that can’t be done by one person, you must find extraordinary people.”
– Steve Jobs
ONE TUSK 