Things a Little Bird Told Me: Creative Secrets from the Co-Founder of Twitter by Biz Stone

BOOK REVIEWS BY BINOD

BINOD’S RATING: 6/10

My top 12 points (direct quotes):

1.     Your goals should be bigger than your ego.

2.     The determination that led me to create a new sports team taught me an important lesson: opportunity is manufactured.

3.     We lacked something that is the key to a successful startup. It was an emotional investment. If you don’t love what you’re building, if you’re not an avid user yourself, then you will most likely fail even if you’re doing everything else right.

4.     Fear in the absence of knowledge breeds irrationality. We should always seek knowledge, even in the face of fear.

5.     At least half the job of a CEO is communication.

6.     People shine when you give them the benefit of the doubt

7.     Having a lot of money amplifies who you are. If you’re a nice person, and then you get money, you become a wonderful philanthropist. But if you’re an asshole, with lots of money you can afford to be more of an asshole.

8.     Google has a strong focus on technology, and it serves them well. Obviously, they’re brilliant. It’s just that my priorities are flipped. People come before technology.

9.  Nobody is flawless, and when you act as if you are, it always rings false.

10. The point of a school after all isn’t to do homework. The point of school is to learn. When I realized this, I stopped caring about grades.

11. And sometimes you don’t even have the idea—just the supreme confidence that one day you will have an idea.

12. It wasn’t a matter of breaking the rules; it was about creating our own rules. I made Twitter into a company that was true to my beliefs.

He gets boringly preachy about capitalism, sustainability & humanity etc. but just towards the end. And you won’t find any lurid “confessions” here.

Overall entertaining, non-technical, upbeat, honest & insightful.