Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!
Larry PageRead
Excellence matters, and technology advances so fast that the potential for improvement is tremendous. So, since becoming CEO again, I've pushed hard to increase our velocity, improve our execution, and focus on the big bets that will make a difference in the world.
Interpretation
Striving for excellence is crucial, especially in a fast-evolving technological landscape.
In this quote, Larry Page emphasizes the importance of excellence in the rapidly advancing field of technology. He highlights his efforts as a CEO to work towards increasing the pace of innovation and making impactful decisions, indicating that with the right focus and execution, significant improvements can be achieved that positively affect the world.
In practice
This quote can be used in a keynote address at a technology conference to inspire innovation.
Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!
Technology should do the hard work, so you can get on and live your life. We're only at one percent of what's possible, and we're moving slow relative to the opportunity we have.
Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future. I try to focus on that: What is the future really going to be? And how do we create it? And how do we power our organization to really focus on that and really drive it at a high rate? When I was working on Android, I felt guilty. It wasn’t what we were working on, it was a start-up, and I felt guilty. That was stupid! It was the future.
Always deliver more than expected.
You don't need to have a 100-person company to develop that idea.
I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What's the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.
With all the abundance we have of computers and computing, what is scarce is human attention and time.
The mistake that makes launching a venture expensive is when you try to make a disruptive technology so good that it can compete on a quality basis with an established product.
Access to information, to music or any kind of culture, is getting faster and faster and more streamlined. At each juncture, people are thrown into tumult and have to adapt or die.
I think a lot of the time there isn't such a black-and-white difference between what's a platform and what's an app. It's really just like the most important apps become platforms.
Like most early enthusiasts, I always thought the way the Internet encouraged multitasking made users less vulnerable to manipulation, while simultaneously exploiting even more of our brain's capacity than before. Apparently not.
The only way to make software secure, reliable, and fast is to make it small.
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