The most important lesson I’ve learned for developing new products: You don’t have to be the first person to come up with a product idea. In fact, that will rarely be the case. But you can almost always make an existing idea better. And that’s when you get the big wins.
I asked Kelly about the tradeoffs of focusing on a single thing if you want to be great (which is what I had been getting at before). “Greatness is overrated,” he said, and I perked up. “It’s a form of extremism, and it comes with extreme vices that I have no interest in. Steve Jobs was a jerk. Bob Dylan is a jerk.”
Walter Isaacson on the link between suffering and greatness and those with happy childhoods:
“We grow up with fewer demons but we grow up with less drive. We end being Boswell and not Johnson. We end up being the observer and not the doer. Respect those who are in the arena…”
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