John T. Reed, author of Succeeding:

“When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify identify the core principles – generally three to twelve of them – that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles.”

“Each field of endeavor has a bunch of tricks, shortcuts, best practices, rules, whatever you want to call them. If you want to succeed in that field, you must learn them and master them. The great news about them is that everybody can master these things, but many of the more talended people will not master those things and you will beat them out as a result.”

This entry was posted on June 5, 2009, and is filed under Quotes. Here's the permalink for this post.

Jason Fried, partner at 37signals:

“… What’s success? Do you need to make Google money? Do you need to have Microsoft market share? Do you need to have Apple’s brand loyalty? Nope.

So what do you need to be successful? Luckily that’s entirely up to you. Success is relative.

The best way to be successful is to define your own success. Success can be tiered too. If you want to eventually run a public company you can still be successful on your way there. If you want to stay small you can fight growth and remain successful too. It’s up to you, not up to someone else.

A small company with a few employees pulling in $25,000/month can be successful. Another company with a couple thousand paying customers can be successful. And another company that just breaks even but stays happily afloat can be successful. You don’t need to win every medal to be successful.”

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