Today’s tip: Take ten to read twelve.
There is a lot you can learn from other leaders. Today’s SAMtastic Tip is take ten to read twelve. Below, you will find twelve statements of advice from well know leaders. Read all twelve and pick one to talk about at your SAM Daily Meeting. What can you schedule tomorrow that will move you forward?
These twelve tips are from Inc. magazine.
In a 2010 interview with Yahoo, Berkshire Hathaway chairman and CEO Warren Buffett said the best advice he ever received was from Berkshire Hathaway board-of-directors member Thomas Murphy. He told Buffett:
“Never forget, Warren, you can tell a guy to go to hell tomorrow — you don’t give up the right. So just keep your mouth shut today, and see if you feel the same way tomorrow.”
During this year’s Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting, Buffett also told a curious seventh-grader that the key to making friends and getting along with co-workers is learning to change your behavior as you mature by emulating those you admire and adopting the qualities they possess.
In her book The Best Advice I Ever Got, Katie Couric quotes author, poet, dancer, actress, and singer Maya Angelou:
“My paternal grandmother, Mrs. Annie Henderson, gave me advice that I have used for 65 years. She said, ‘If the world puts you on a road you do not like, if you look ahead and do not want that destination which is being offered and you look behind and you do not want to return to you place of departure, step off the road. Build yourself a new path.'”
Richard Branson’s mother taught him that.
“The amount of time people waste dwelling on failures, rather than putting that energy into another project, always amazes me,” The Virgin Group founder and chairman told The Good Entrepreneur. “I have fun running ALL the Virgin businesses — so a setback is never a bad experience, just a learning curve.”
J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter series, knows a lot about achieving success — and failure.
“I don’t think we talk about failure enough,” Rowling recently told Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today. “It would’ve really helped to have someone who had had a measure of success come say to me, ‘You will fail. That’s inevitable. It’s what you do with it.'”
Before Rowling became one of the wealthiest women in the world, she was a single mom living on welfare in the U.K. She began writing about her now famous character, the young wizard Harry Potter, in Edinburgh cafes, and received “loads” of rejections from book publishers when she first sent out the manuscript, The Guardian reports.
“An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless ... By every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew,” Rowling said during a 2008 Harvard University commencement speech.
She went on to say that she considered her early failure a “gift” that was “painfully won,” since she gained valuable knowledge about herself and her relationships through the adversity.
In her book The Best Advice I Ever Got, Katie Couric quotes Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt as advising:
“Find a way to say yes to things. Say yes to invitations to a new country, say yes to meet new friends, say yes to learn something new. Yes is how you get your first job, and your next job, and your spouse, and even your kids.”
In a 2011 interview with the Social Times, current Yahoo president and CEO Marissa Mayer revealed the best advice she ever received:
“My friend Andre said to me, ‘You know, Marissa, you’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself to pick the right choice, and I’ve gotta be honest: That’s not what I see here. I see a bunch of good choices, and there’s the one that you pick and make great.’ I think that’s one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten.”
In a recent Business Insider article, Cal Newport, author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, referenced Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, who recalled an exchange he had with Jobs shortly before he passed. Jobs reportedly told Isaacson: “Yeah, we’re always talking about following your passion, but we’re all part of the flow of history ... you’ve got to put something back into the flow of history that’s going to help your community, help other people ... so that 20, 30, 40 years from now ... people will say, this person didn’t just have a passion, he cared about making something that other people could benefit from.”
In a LinkedIn article about the best advice she ever received, motivational speaker, author, and CNBC host Suze Orman wrote that success has often made her a target of nasty criticism “entirely disconnected from facts.” At first these attacks made her angry, but she eventually learned to ignore them.
“A wise teacher from India shared this insight: The elephant keeps walking as the dogs keep barking,” she wrote.
“The sad fact is that we all have to navigate our way around the dogs in our career: external critics, competitors, horrible bosses, or colleagues who undermine. Based on my experience, I would advise you to prepare for the yapping to increase along with your success.”
In a 2009 interview with CNBC, Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates admired Warren Buffett’s ability to keep things simple.
“You look at his calendar, it’s pretty simple. You talk to him about a case where he thinks a business is attractive, and he knows a few basic numbers and facts about it. And [if] it gets less complicated, he feels like then it’s something he’ll choose to invest in. He picks the things that he’s got a model of, a model that really is predictive and that’s going to continue to work over a long-term period. And so his ability to boil things down, to just work on the things that really count, to think through the basics — it’s so amazing that he can do that. It’s a special form of genius.”
In a LinkedIn post last year, The Huffington Post president and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington revealed that she’s often asked if young people pursuing their dreams should burn the candle at both ends?
“This couldn’t be less true,” she writes. “And for far too long, we have been operating under a collective delusion that burning out is the necessary price for achieving success.”
She says she wishes she could go back and tell her younger self, “Arianna, your performance will actually improve if you can commit to not only working hard but also unplugging, recharging, and renewing yourself.”
Stewart Butterfield, the co-founder of Flickr and chief executive of Slack, one of the fastest- growing business apps of all time, recently shared his best advice for young people with Adam Bryant of The New York Times:
“Some people will know exactly what they want to do at a very young age, but the odds are low,” he said. “I feel like people in their early- to mid-20s are very earnest. They’re very serious, and they want to feel like they’ve accomplished a lot at a very young age rather than just trying to figure stuff out. So I try to push them toward a more experimental attitude.”
“Almost nothing you’re worried about today will define your tomorrow,” Good Morning America co-anchor George Stephanopoulos told personal finance website NerdWallet.
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