Only the Paranoid Survive (Primary source)
Andrew Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive stands as a seminal meditation on corporate survival in an age of relentless technological upheaval. Published in 1996, when the digital revolution was reshaping the very foundations of American economic life, the book distills Grove’s hard-won wisdom into a theory of what he termed “strategic inflection points”—those epochal moments when the fundamental rules governing a business undergo tectonic transformation.
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“The sad news is, nobody owes you a career. Your career is literally your business. You own it as a sole proprietor. You have one employee: yourself. You are in competition with millions of similar businesses: millions of other employees all over the world. You need to accept ownership of your career, your skills and the timing of your moves. It is your responsibility to protect this personal business of yours from harm and to position it to benefit from the changes in the environment. Nobody else can do that for you.”
Andrew S. Grove
“Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.”
— Andrew S. Grove Primary source“A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done.”
— Andrew S. Grove Primary source“Here I’d like to introduce the concept of leverage, which is the output generated by a specific type of work activity. An activity with high leverage will generate a high level of output; an activity with low leverage, a low level of output.”
— Andrew S. Grove Primary source“Remember too that your time is your one finite resource, and when you say yes to one thing you are inevitably saying no to another.”
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“In business we often find that the winning system goes almost ridiculously far in maximizing and/or minimizing one or a few variables—like the discount warehourses of Costco.”
— Charlie Munger Primary source“Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt Disputed“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Disputed“For, in a democracy, every citizen, regardless of his interest in politics, ‘holds office’ every one of us is in a position of responsibility; and, in the final analysis, the kind of government we get depends upon how we fulfill those responsibilities. We, the people, are the boss, and we will get the kind of political leadership, be it good or bad, that we demand and deserve.”
— John F. Kennedy Primary sourceCareer Responsibility Self-reliance