Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind by Biz Stone. It's been a while since I laughed so much reading a book. It feels good when a humble person like Biz succeeds. He is now working on a new venture called "Jelly" - good luck Biz !!
On Rags to Riches:
To me, all my friends were rich. It seemed that they assumed I came from a wealthy family, too, but at various times, we were on welfare. I remember the gigantic slabs of government-issued cheese. I was on a school lunch program for low-income families, which was good because it meant I didn’t need lunch money, but it was bad because of the way it worked.
At Google, when word got around that I was sleeping on the floor, some colleagues passed around a coffee can and raised eight hundred dollars for me to buy a bed. It was an amazingly kind gesture, and I was touched and grateful. However, I had no choice but to misallocate the funds and put them all toward my obscene car payments, which were several months overdue. As for the rest of our furniture, I brought home two garish, multicolor Google beanbag chairs. We sat in those beanbags and slept on the carpet for over a year— until I finally got some dough from Google.
At the time, we ourselves were caring for two rescue dogs, two rescue cats, and a rescue tortoise. At various times we also had foster bunnies, crows, and rodents of varying sizes and shapes. So we took all the money we’d saved and used it as a down payment. We bought a little eight-hundred-square-foot house that had been built as the maid’s quarters to a bigger house. Half that square footage was the garage.
On Creativity:
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.
Starting over is one of the hardest leaps to make in life. Security, stability, safety— it’s scary, if not downright irresponsible, to leave these behind. I was at Google in 2003 and I might still be there now. But I had faith in my future self. (After all, my once-future self had finally managed to pay off the Toyota Matrix.) I could help build something new.
Embrace your constraints, whether they are creative, physical, economic, or self-imposed. They are provocative. They are challenging. They wake you up. They make you more creative. They make you better.
What I’m suggesting is that you embrace the upside of fantastic, epic, earth-shattering, life-changing failure. It’s totally worth it if you succeed. And if you fail, you’ve got a great story to tell— and some experience that gives you a serious edge the next time you go for it. This is a good lesson for startups in general, and for otherwise going for what you truly want. It’s like there’s a natural force of equality at play. If you really want to succeed big, you have to be willing to risk crazy failure.
On Officially Becoming Rich:
Nothing really changed, except that I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. I’d grown up poor, and I’d spent almost my entire adult life in debt. Livy’s parents were freelance artists living from hand to mouth. Neither of us had been on the streets, but we were never financially secure. We had grown somewhat comfortable being uncomfortable. It seemed like only yesterday that Livy and I were pouring coins from a coffee can into a Coinstar machine and Livy was clapping because we hit one hundred dollars. The best thing I can say about having enough money after being in debt is that money is an immune system. When you’re in debt— and you have to pick which bills to pay and which to default on every month, for years— you’re always at the edge. Every little expense is bone on bone. Every choice can easily become an argument between you and your spouse.
If you have enough money— you don’t have to be rich, but if you have enough to meet your needs, pay your bills, and put a little in savings— the constant anxiety of just getting by disappears. The persistent worry you were carrying fades. The biggest effect money has had on me is that now, every day, I’m grateful for the relief from that anxiety.
The other thing I’ll say about money is that having a lot of it amplifies who you are. I have found this to be almost universally true. 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: “Why isn’t my soda at sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit?” You choose who you are no matter what, but I have to say that the anxiety of making ends meet gives you a bit of a pass. When you’re rich, you have no excuse.
On Twitter:
We didn’t set out to build a tool to help people make decisions about earthquakes. This would be our next lesson, the biggest that Twitter had to offer: even the simplest tools can empower people to do great things.
Twitter taught me that our behavior, as humans, is infinitely expandable. The technology of Twitter didn’t teach humans to flock. It exposed our latent ability to do so. Mind-blowing!
Flocking is a triumph of humanity. It can make things happen. Imagine if humanity could cooperate like an emergent life form— we could get things done in a single year that would otherwise take one hundred years to do. Imagine if all the world’s astrophysicists put their egos aside and collaborated on a Mars mission? Or all the environmental scientists worked as one on global warming? Or the world’s best oncologists took on cancer together, one type at a time? Only 114,000 people in the world have thirty million dollars or more in assets. What if they were in a Google group and decided to invest in one thing to change the course of history? Then there’s all of us, and together we are more powerful than any one thing. Can you imagine what we could get done?
On Twitter "HR":
We should always seek knowledge, even in the face of fear. And so I gave the Twitter employees a set of assumptions that I hoped would replace their fears, reminding them to keep their minds open, pursue knowledge, and see the bigger picture. When new employees joined Twitter, Evan and I met with them. We took the time to tell the story of how the company got started, and we shared and discussed the following six assumptions. Assumptions for Twitter Employees:
I’m not a genius, but I’ve always had faith in myself and, more important, in humanity. The greatest skill I possessed and developed over the years was the ability to listen to people: the nerds of Google, the disgruntled users of Twitter, my respected colleagues, and, always, my lovely wife. What that taught me, in the course of helping to found and lead Twitter for over five years, and during my time at startups before then, was that the technology that appears to change our lives is, at its core, not a miracle of invention or engineering. No matter how many machines we added to the network or how sophisticated the algorithms got, what I worked on and witnessed at Twitter was and continues to be a triumph not of technology but of humanity.
To me, all my friends were rich. It seemed that they assumed I came from a wealthy family, too, but at various times, we were on welfare. I remember the gigantic slabs of government-issued cheese. I was on a school lunch program for low-income families, which was good because it meant I didn’t need lunch money, but it was bad because of the way it worked.
At Google, when word got around that I was sleeping on the floor, some colleagues passed around a coffee can and raised eight hundred dollars for me to buy a bed. It was an amazingly kind gesture, and I was touched and grateful. However, I had no choice but to misallocate the funds and put them all toward my obscene car payments, which were several months overdue. As for the rest of our furniture, I brought home two garish, multicolor Google beanbag chairs. We sat in those beanbags and slept on the carpet for over a year— until I finally got some dough from Google.
At the time, we ourselves were caring for two rescue dogs, two rescue cats, and a rescue tortoise. At various times we also had foster bunnies, crows, and rodents of varying sizes and shapes. So we took all the money we’d saved and used it as a down payment. We bought a little eight-hundred-square-foot house that had been built as the maid’s quarters to a bigger house. Half that square footage was the garage.
On Creativity:
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.
Starting over is one of the hardest leaps to make in life. Security, stability, safety— it’s scary, if not downright irresponsible, to leave these behind. I was at Google in 2003 and I might still be there now. But I had faith in my future self. (After all, my once-future self had finally managed to pay off the Toyota Matrix.) I could help build something new.
Embrace your constraints, whether they are creative, physical, economic, or self-imposed. They are provocative. They are challenging. They wake you up. They make you more creative. They make you better.
What I’m suggesting is that you embrace the upside of fantastic, epic, earth-shattering, life-changing failure. It’s totally worth it if you succeed. And if you fail, you’ve got a great story to tell— and some experience that gives you a serious edge the next time you go for it. This is a good lesson for startups in general, and for otherwise going for what you truly want. It’s like there’s a natural force of equality at play. If you really want to succeed big, you have to be willing to risk crazy failure.
On Officially Becoming Rich:
Nothing really changed, except that I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. I’d grown up poor, and I’d spent almost my entire adult life in debt. Livy’s parents were freelance artists living from hand to mouth. Neither of us had been on the streets, but we were never financially secure. We had grown somewhat comfortable being uncomfortable. It seemed like only yesterday that Livy and I were pouring coins from a coffee can into a Coinstar machine and Livy was clapping because we hit one hundred dollars. The best thing I can say about having enough money after being in debt is that money is an immune system. When you’re in debt— and you have to pick which bills to pay and which to default on every month, for years— you’re always at the edge. Every little expense is bone on bone. Every choice can easily become an argument between you and your spouse.
If you have enough money— you don’t have to be rich, but if you have enough to meet your needs, pay your bills, and put a little in savings— the constant anxiety of just getting by disappears. The persistent worry you were carrying fades. The biggest effect money has had on me is that now, every day, I’m grateful for the relief from that anxiety.
The other thing I’ll say about money is that having a lot of it amplifies who you are. I have found this to be almost universally true. 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: “Why isn’t my soda at sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit?” You choose who you are no matter what, but I have to say that the anxiety of making ends meet gives you a bit of a pass. When you’re rich, you have no excuse.
On Twitter:
We didn’t set out to build a tool to help people make decisions about earthquakes. This would be our next lesson, the biggest that Twitter had to offer: even the simplest tools can empower people to do great things.
Twitter taught me that our behavior, as humans, is infinitely expandable. The technology of Twitter didn’t teach humans to flock. It exposed our latent ability to do so. Mind-blowing!
Flocking is a triumph of humanity. It can make things happen. Imagine if humanity could cooperate like an emergent life form— we could get things done in a single year that would otherwise take one hundred years to do. Imagine if all the world’s astrophysicists put their egos aside and collaborated on a Mars mission? Or all the environmental scientists worked as one on global warming? Or the world’s best oncologists took on cancer together, one type at a time? Only 114,000 people in the world have thirty million dollars or more in assets. What if they were in a Google group and decided to invest in one thing to change the course of history? Then there’s all of us, and together we are more powerful than any one thing. Can you imagine what we could get done?
On Twitter "HR":
We should always seek knowledge, even in the face of fear. And so I gave the Twitter employees a set of assumptions that I hoped would replace their fears, reminding them to keep their minds open, pursue knowledge, and see the bigger picture. When new employees joined Twitter, Evan and I met with them. We took the time to tell the story of how the company got started, and we shared and discussed the following six assumptions. Assumptions for Twitter Employees:
- We don’t always know what’s going to happen.
- There are more smart people out there than in here.
- We will win if we do the right thing for our users.
- The only deal worth doing is a win-win deal.
- Our coworkers are smart and they have good intentions.
- We can build a business, change the world, and have fun.
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