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.
Of course there are moments that you wonder how long you should be doing it because there are other aspects which are not nice, of this lifestyle. But I just love winning.
Everything is possible. If you want something, give something.
We can all reduce our life to a description that makes people feel sorry for ourselves or we can expand our life to a dimension where we connect and give to others.
Intention without action is an insult to those who expect the best from you.
I encourage you to accept that you may not be able to see a path right now, but that doesn't mean it's not there.
Don't worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test... Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap - but it was a revolutionary piece of crap.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.