I have tried in my role of being one of the first women at Google, let alone the first woman to have a baby, to really try to set the tone that this is a great place to work for diversity reasons.
Susan WojcickiRead
Rarely are opportunities presented to you in a perfect way. In a nice little box with a yellow bow on top. 'Here, open it, it's perfect. You'll love it.' Opportunities -- the good ones -- are messy, confusing and hard to recognize. They're risky. They challenge you.
Interpretation
Opportunities often come unexpectedly and may not appear perfect at first glance.
This quote by Susan Wojcicki emphasizes that genuine opportunities are rarely delivered in a straightforward, flawless manner. Instead, they tend to be complex and may involve risks and challenges, requiring us to recognize their potential despite the initial confusion or messiness they present.
In practice
When inspiring your team to take on challenging projects, you might say this quote to illustrate the nature of opportunities.
I have tried in my role of being one of the first women at Google, let alone the first woman to have a baby, to really try to set the tone that this is a great place to work for diversity reasons.
Though we do need more women to graduate with technical degrees, I always like to remind women that you don't need to have science or technology degrees to build a career in tech.
Underrepresented employees already have to overcome discriminatory barriers in their careers; they shouldn't be expected to volunteer their time to help their companies do the same.
Coding is like writing, and we live in a time of the new industrial revolution. What's happened is that maybe everybody knows how to use computers, like they know how to read, but they don't know how to write.
I think about my own career, and when I graduated from college, the Internet didn't really exist yet. And so not having a specific plan, being able to be opportunistic at the end, is what enabled me to make some of my best decisions, which is to go to places that were growing but that I didn't plan to have happen.
Unless we make computer science a priority, we risk making gender, class, and racial disparities worse as jobs flow to those with a computer science background.
I just love it when people say I can't do something. There's nothing that makes me feel better, because all my life people have said I wasn't going to make it.
When you play long enough, everybody goes through spells and streaks and slumps of some nature. I think it's just one of the those things where you have to play yourself out of it.
I like to think of ideas as potential energy. They're really wonderful, but nothing will happen until we risk putting them into action.
With the opening of the New Year, all the closed portals of limitations will be thrown open and I shall move through them to vaster fields, where my worthwhile dreams of life will be fulfilled.
I used to dream about taking the ball 'round the keeper, stopping it on the line, and then getting on my hands and knees and heading it into the net. When I scored against Benfica in the 1968 European Cup final, I nearly did it. I left the keeper for dead, but then I chickened out.
Quite apart from anything else, my experience is trying to change things for the better makes you feel better, healthier. Humans are communicative animals: when you do good in a community, the benefits eventually get back to you.
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