Top 100 Biz Stone Quotes
#1. Embrace constraint. What you get in return is the art and craft of editing your own life, weeding out what is and isn't necessary.
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#2. If I had one piece of advice to tell an entrepreneur, I always say, 'You have to have emotional investment in what you're working on.' That's what we lacked at Odeo.
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#3. I think Twitter has brought something totally new to the table.
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#4. You curate information that you want to receive. It's a lot different because I'm not asking you if it's okay, I'm just saying I'm following your updates. That's why I don't think of Twitter as a social network.
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#5. Balancing family and work is a top priority for me, and I treat it as such. Meaning, I actually put specific family time and events in my calendar so that precious time is dedicated and properly blocked off from any work that may try to sneak its way into my schedule.
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#6. Obviously, working at Google wasn't a mistake. I used to just walk around. I don't know if I was supposed to, but I'd just open doors and see what people were doing.
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#7. The two things I use the most are the MacBook Air and my iPhone. Those are my two most-used gadgets that are dented, scratched and smashed.
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#8. You have to have an emotional investment in what you're doing. If you don't love what you're doing, failure is pretty much guaranteed.
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#9. I never even graduated college. I never finished learning, as it were, and I have a psychological need to be in a learning environment at all times.
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#10. Success isn't guaranteed, but failure is certain if you aren't truly emotionally invested in your work.
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#11. It's important to credit the brave people that take chances to stand up to regimes. They're the star.
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#12. I think we definitely want to focus on the simplicity aspect because it's something that's built into the culture even here at Twitter. Constraints inspire creativity.
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#13. We can break news really fast. When an earthquake happens, there are people Twittering about it.
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#14. When you think about Twitter, there are people all around the world reporting twenty-four seven, every second. They're reporting what they're seeing and what's happening around them. So there's a lot of potential for breaking news.
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#15. The most rewarding thing for me has been this affirmation for me that people are basically good and smart, and if you give them a simple tool that allows them to exhibit that behavior, they'll prove it to you every single day.
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#16. If people are passionate about your product, whether it's because they're hating or loving it, those are both good scenarios.
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#17. If you take an idea and just hold it in your head, you unconsciously start to do things that advance you toward that goal.
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#18. I realized that a company can build a business, do good in society, and have fun. These three goals can run alongside one another, without being dominated by the bottom line.
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#19. Hell yeah! Twitter was proof that leaderless self-organizing systems could be true agents of change.
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#20. I still blog, but I do think blogging will become obsolete, as there are more ways of interacting on the Web with low barriers to entry for people to engage and participate.
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#21. There's no such thing as a superhero, but together we can world in a new direction.
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#22. I'd dropped out of college to start design thing.
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#23. This idea that the open exchange of information can have a positive global impact is being proven over and over again around the world nearly on a daily basis - and for Secretary Clinton to recognize that, I think, is a huge step.
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#24. Everything I've done, I've made up. Some of that might have been right; most of it was probably wrong.
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#25. I started out as an artist, and I continue to think of myself as an artist first, and a technologist and entrepreneur after that.
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#26. Think about your work situation. Do you treat your creativity like a fossil fuel - a limited resource that must be conserved - or have you harnessed the unending power of the sun? Are you in an environment where creativity thrives? Is there room for new ideas every day? Can you make room?
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#27. I haven't been paying attention to politics long enough to have really smart opinions.
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#28. A feeling I got from working at Google was that technology could solve any problem. Yes, it's fantastic, but what I realized later was there's technology, and there's people. Google had its list ordered: Technology. People. And I think the right order is: People. Technology.
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#29. Willingness to take risks is the path to success.
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#30. I think of Twitter as a messaging system that you didn't know you needed until you had it. Think about when cell phones first started coming out. People said, "Why would I carry my phone around?" And now you'll drive back to your house thirty miles if you forget your cell phone.
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#31. Fear in the absence of knowledge breeds irrationality.
We should always seek knowledge, even in the face of fear.
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#32. You have to think for an email. What's the subject? What's it about? It takes two seconds to think about that. So you have to think, Is this a work thing or a social thing? Which? Then you get into a situation that you don't want to be in, because then people are thinking about it too much.
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#33. Positive culture comes from being mindful, and respecting your coworkers, and being empathetic.
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#34. A personal belief is that if you're not personally invested in what you're working on, you'll fail.
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#35. For me, I've learned about what it means to focus on a culture, to build social responsibility, and the idea of a company as a super-organism.
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#36. Design is a career where you learn creative decision making.
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#37. Creativity comes from constraint.
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#38. The future of marketing is philanthropy,
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#39. Embrace your constraints. They are provocative. They are challenging. They wake you up. They make you more creative. They make you better,
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#41. We focus a lot on culture specifically at Twitter because of this spotlight, and of the fact that we don't want to end up like the child actor who found success early and grew up all weird and freaky.
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#42. Even though running is physically straining, it's mentally refreshing. Especially when you feel like you've accomplished something.
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#43. We didn't have anything before Twitter that allowed a group of people roaming around a city to communicate instantly, in real time, and in a coordinated way, in a group.
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#44. I've seen people twitter in haiku only.
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#45. I've probably overused this analogy of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight, but, in reality, it's so simple, real time communication of individuals that allow for this super organism type of organism to happen.
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#46. We lacked something that is the key to a successful startup, and it was bigger than sound quality. It was 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.
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#47. If this book were limited to 140 pages, it would end here.
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#48. With Twitter, it's as easy to unfollow as it is to follow.
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#49. Creativity is a renewable resource. Challenge yourself every day. Be as creative as you like, as often as you want, because you can never run out. Experience and curiosity drive us to make unexpected, offbeat connections. It is these nonlinear steps that often lead to the greatest work.
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#50. Have confidence in your ideas before they even exist,
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#51. Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.
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#52. Twitter provides a great amount of timely information, but we still need those people to fill out the rest of the story and the context.
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#53. We actually created Twitter and Odeo at the same time. When we realized we didn't really want to be running Odeo anymore we looked around for anyone who wanted to buy Odeo, but not acquire us as a technology. But people aren't as interested in that.
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#54. I thought I was going to stay at Google, because it was a great place to work.
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#55. I love Sherlock Holmes, but I love any of these old stories where the writer was paid by the word, so the adventures just continue forever. They are almost like they were meant to be read out loud.
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#56. Understand that you dont have all the answers, you just have to start somewhere and keep an open mind.
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#57. The normal press cycle is to put a company on a pedestal and then knock it down. It's much more interesting that way.
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#58. I got an idea: people like news why don't we write the news down on a piece of paper, and we'll gas them up and drive them to everyone's house. I mean, if you were going to say that now, it doesn't sound like a great idea, because there are other ways you can distribute the news.
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#59. Trust your instincts, know what you want, and believe in your ability to achieve it.
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#60. The smallest, earliest gifts forever alter your trajectory for doing good. This is what I mean by the compound interest of altruism. Start early to maximize the compound interest in your efforts.
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#61. At least half the job of CEO is communication - because of human nature. People fear what they don't know. If the board wasn't hearing that things were going well, they assumed that things must be going badly.
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#62. The reason I really started running was for meditative purposes. I would pick some problem to have in my head while running.
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#63. Constraint inspires creativity
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#64. Inventing your dream is the first and biggest step toward making it come true.
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#65. We can figure it out, it's not like we all have a disease.
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#66. You can provide a short-format content, and it can grow, and it can spread virally across the entire Twitter system, and it can contain within it a link to something that's much longer, that's a long essay or that's a video.
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#67. I thought about tennis. But the more I thought about the whole thing - lessons, equipment, going to the courts - I said screw it, I'm just going to go buy a pair of sneakers and go running.
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#68. The international limit on mobile texting, or SMS, is 160 characters. We wanted Twitter to be entirely readable and writable on every single one of the over five billion mobile phones on this planet, because they all have SMS built in. So we said it has to be within 160 characters, all the tweets.
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#69. I'm still kinda old-school. We're twittering, and we're all twitterers. And we write tweets. The only thing I don't love is twits.
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#70. Essentially, you become a top tweet because so many people are engaging with that tweet. They're either retweeting it, or they're favoriting it; they're doing one of many things to indicate to us that that tweet is interesting and engaging to users.
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#71. I was writing and developing software for alumnae to be able to connect and communicate.
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#72. In a job where you're on a computer all day, and we cater lunch and we put snacks in the kitchen, well, we all started gaining weight, even though we try to pick healthy stuff, but inevitably you find the cashews.
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#73. Investors are employees you can never hire. We made sure to pick investors that thought like us.
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#74. Your goals should be bigger than your ego,
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#76. I don't think of Twitter as a social network. I think of it as a messaging system that has a lot of social components to it.
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#77. A Twitter update is simple and fast and gets the information and news, and it spreads it very quickly, and it can contain links so you can then link to this whole context of information.
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#78. We did Twitter, and Twitter grew so fast, and in 2006 we spun it out into Twitter, Inc.
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#79. Plain hard work is good and important, but it is ideas that drive us, as individuals, companies, nations, and a global community. Creativity is what makes us unique, inspired, and fulfilled.
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#80. Constraint inspired creativity. Blank spaces are difficult to fill, but the smallest prompt can send us in fantastic new directions
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#81. If we probe what's behind our assumptions, what we find isn't knowledge or wisdom. It's fear. We're afraid that other people's ideas will make us look less than. We're afraid that if we make a change, a product won't come in on time.
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#82. Both my wife and I have a lot of compassion for animals in general.
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#83. In any leadership position, you're always going to be disappointing somebody.
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#84. Doing startups is all about making mistakes.
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#85. I think when people twitter 20 or 30 times per day, that's too much. They are boxing everyone else out, and people stop following them because they need a break.
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#86. Failure was part of the path. It was worth the risk. In fact, it was a critical component of growth. By sharing it with our users, we were showing our ultimate confidence in ourselves and our success. We weren't quitting, and we hoped our faith would inspire theirs.
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#87. Our promise was to deliver value before profit, ...
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#88. I think it's a really big deal to be able to meet people outside the context of something like a conference room or someplace where everything feels like it's formal talk.
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#89. I believe that the open exchange of information can have a positive global impact.
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#90. The thing that excites me, and the thing that excited me about Twitter, is the idea of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight.
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#91. Creativity is an infinitely renewable resource - you are not going to run out of it - so don't be afraid to use it.
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#92. When a plane lands in the Hudson and there's a Twitter user on the ferry taking a picture of it, Boom. That's it. The water is still splashing. Here's the photo of the thing.
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#93. When I studied graphic design, I learned a valuable lesson: There's no perfect answer to the puzzle, and creativity is a renewable resource.
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#94. The determination that led me to create a new sports team taught me an important lesson: opportunity is manufactured.
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#95. I'm convinced that there's a new way to define capitalism, and that the definition should include three ingredients - that we love our work, that we are building a traditionally successful business, and that we are having some positive impact in the world, whether it's local or global.
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#96. I mean just look at haiku, the idea of it. We want to focus on that singularity, on that simplicity, but we still want to add features and add value, but we want to do it in a way that fits in with that mentality of simplicity. You have to spend a lot of time thinking about it.
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#97. I'm curious about writing in the age of online publishing. Because nobody cares about good writing online.
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#98. The ability to listen,watch and draw lessons from obvious and unlikely places breeds originality and growth
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#99. My personal view about how people should use Twitter is less relevant than our goal to provide the infrastructure for a new kind of communication and then support the creativity that emerges.
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#100. People first. Technology second.
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