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

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.

Just know before you go what you want to learn and the experiences you need for your next chapter.

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.

What you do matters. Where you work matters. Most importantly, who you work with and learn from matters. Too many people see work as a means to an end, as a way to make enough money to stop working. But getting a job is your opportunity to make a dent in the world. To put your focus and energy and your precious, precious time toward something meani

But the messaging architecture is only the first step. For every version of the Nest story, we wrote down the most common objections and how we’d overcome them—what stats to use, what pages of the website to send people to, what partnerships to mention or testimonials to point to. We figured out which story we could put on a billboard all the way d

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

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.

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.

I needed to learn. And the best way to do that was to surround myself with people who knew exactly how hard it was to make something great—who had the scars to prove it. And if it turned out to be the wrong move, well, making a mistake is the best way to not make that mistake again. Do, fail, learn. The critical thing is to have a goal. To strive f