Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making - The New York Times bestseller

Vocabulary gets in the way sometimes. Design is not just a profession. A customer is not only a person who buys something. A product is not just a physical object or software that you sell.

Take whatever job you can at one of those companies. Don’t worry too much about the title—focus on the work. If you get a foot in the door at a growing company, you’ll find opportunities to grow, too.

Find the experts on Twitter or YouTube, then send them a message, a comment, a LinkedIn connection. You’re interested in the same things, you have the same passions—so share your point of view, ask a smart question, or just tell them about some fascinating minutiae that your family and friends find deeply, desperately, unfathomably boring. Make a c

Bill Gurley, the incredibly smart, wry, contrarian Silicon Valley VC and Texan deal maker, puts it this way: “I can’t make you the smartest or the brightest, but it’s doable to be the most knowledgeable. It’s possible to gather more information than somebody else.” And if you’re going to devote that much time to gathering information, then learn ab

There’s often an assumption that if you find the right job when you’re young, you can guarantee some level of success. That your first job out of college connects in a straight line to your second and your third, that at each stage of your career you’ll use your inevitable wins to propel yourself upward.

I’ll notice people who come with something interesting to share. Something smart. Especially if they keep coming. If they sent me something cool last week and something cool this week and they keep bringing fascinating news or tech or ideas and they’re persistent, then I’ll start to recognize them. I’ll start to remember them, and respond.

My life has swung wildly between success and failure, incredible career highs immediately followed by bitter disappointment. And with each failure I chose to start from scratch, take all that I’d learned and do something completely new, become someone completely new.

The best way to find a job you’ll love and a career that will eventually make you successful is to follow what you’re naturally interested in, then take risks when choosing where to work. Follow your curiosity rather than a business school playbook about how to make money. Assume that for much of your twenties your choices will not work out and the

A good mentor won’t hand you the answers, but they will try to help you see your problem from a new perspective. They’ll loan you some of their hard-fought advice so you can discover your own solution.

The only way for me to capture all of it—good ideas, priorities, roadblocks, the dates that people promised to deliver, and the major internal and external heartbeats ahead—was to take notes in every meeting. Longhand. Not on a computer. [See also: Figure 3.5.1, in Chapter 3.5.] Writing by hand was important for me. I wasn’t staring at a screen, ge