Background Image

...

Success Is Really About Being Ready For The Good Opportunities That Come Before You. It's Not To Have A Detailed Plan Of Everything That You're Going To Do. You Can't Plan Innovation Or Inspiration, But You Can Be Ready For It, And When You See It, You Can Jump On It.

-Eric Schmidt

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Success Is Really About

Eric Schmidt

...

Success Is Really About Being Ready For The Good Opportunities That Come Before You. It's Not To Have A Detailed Plan Of Everything That You're Going To Do. You Can't Plan Innovation Or Inspiration, But You Can Be Ready For It, And When You See It, You Can Jump On It.

Views: 6

Topic

More From Eric Schmidt

If You Think About Youtube, Youtube Is A 'searching The World's Videos' Problem, Right? They All Have To Be There, But How Do You Find Them? What I Guess I'm Trying To Say Is That Search Is Still The Killer App.

There's Been Spying For Years, There's Been Surveillance For Years, And So Forth, I'm Not Going To Pass Judgement On That, It's The Nature Of Our Society.

Google Is More Than A Business. Google Is A Belief System. And We Believe Passionately In The Open Internet Model.

Each Country Makes A Different Decision On Adult Pornography, But The Good News Is That Even Governments You Hate, Hate Child Pornography.

I Believe That This Notion Of Self-publishing, Which Is What Blogger And Blogging Are Really About, Is The Next Big Wave Of Human Communication. The Last Big Wave Was Web Activity. Before That One It Was E-mail. Instant Messaging Was An Extension Of E-mail, Real-time E-mail.

We Want To Make Sure The Thing You're Looking For Is On Google 100 Percent Of The Time.

Ultimately, In The Internet, Openness Has Always Won. I Cannot Imagine That The Current Competitive Environment Would Reverse That.

For Those Who Say You're Thinking Too Big... Be Smart Enough Not To Listen. For Those Who Say The Odds Are Too Small ... Be Dumb Enough To Give It A Shot. And For Those Who Ask, How Can You Do That?... Look Them In The Eyes And Say, I'll Figure It Out.

If You Forgo Your Plan, You Also Have To Forgo Fear.

It's A Mistake To Predict The Size Of Markets That Are So New. This Model Has Shown No Signs Of Slowing Down. So We Are Going To Get As Much Of It As We Possibly Can, And When We Get Close To That We'll Figure Out Other Problems.

We Know That Google Earth And Google Maps Have Had A Tremendous Impact On Google Traffic, Users, Brand, Adoption, And Advertisers. We Also Know Google News, For Example, Which We Don't Monetize, Has Had A Tremendous Impact On Searches And On Query Quality. We Know Those People Search More. Because We've Measured It.

I've Never Met A Person Who Does Not Want A Safer World, Better Medical Care And Education For Their Children, And Peace With Their Neighbours. I Just Don't Meet Those People. What I Meet, Over And Over Again, As I Travel Around, Is That The Essential Human Condition Is Optimistic - In Every One Of These Places.

The Self Driving Car Is Not Self-aware. It's Just Driving; It's Not Thinking.

The Issues Of Wireless Versus Wireline Gets Very Messy. And That's Really An Fcc Issue, Not A Google Issue.

The Internet Is The First Thing That Humanity Has Built That Humanity Doesn't Understand, The Largest Experiment In Anarchy That We Have Ever Had.

By The Summer Of 2012, The Majority Of The Televisions You See In Stores Will Have Google Tv Embedded.

People Are Good At Intuition, Living Our Lives. What Are Computers Good At? Memory.

We Didn't See Any Statistically Significant Relationship Between Our Buzz And Our Short-term Sales...is That The End Of The Story? I Would Say No. This Is One Study On A Set Of Brands In A Particular Company Within A Certain Segment Of The Consumer-packag Ed-goods Industry. It Is By No Means A Generalized Result That Applies To All Industries.

In A World Where Everything Is Remembered And Everything Is Kept Forever, You Need To Live For The Future And Things You Really Care About.

We're About To See An Acceleration In Technological Platforms That, For Marketers, Will Be On A Scale Rivalled Only By The Arrival Of Color Tv.

I Do Want To Emphasize That We've Seen An Explosion In The Use Of Google Maps And Google Earth For Education. The Earth Is A Special Place. It Is Our Home And It's Why We're All Here. And The Ability To See What's Really Going On The Earth, The Good Stuff And The Bad Stuff, At The Level That You Can, Is Phenomenal.

Search Companies, Which I Won't Mention By Name, Tried To Do So Many Things At The Same Time, They Forgot All About Search. They Either Missed The Next Revolution Of Search Or They Created An Opening For A Google To Enter.

We Run The Company By Questions, Not By Answers.

Asking Questions

I Think Of Google As A Set Of Overlapping Things. It's A Consumer Platform, Consumer Phenomenon Of Which Search Is Its Fundamental Activity, But There Are Many Other Things You Can Do Than Search... I Think Of Google As An Advertising Company Who Services The Broader Advertising Industry In The Ways That You Know.

The Trend Has Been Mobile Was Winning. It's Now Won.

Bitcoin Is A Remarkable Cryptographic Achievement And The Ability To Create Something Which Is Not Duplicable In The Digital World Has Enormous Value

The Rise Of Google, The Rise Of Facebook, The Rise Of Apple, I Think Are Proof That There Is A Place For Computer Science As Something That Solves Problems That People Face Every Day.

In Many Countries Adult Pornography Legislation Is An Attempt To Legislate Something Else.

There Were 5 Exabytes Of Information Created Between The Dawn Of Civilization Through 2003, But That Much Information Is Now Created Every 2 Days.

I've Come To A View That Humans Will Continue To Do What We Do Well, And That Computers Will Continue To Do What They Do Very Well, And The Two Will Coexist, But In Different Spaces.

We Know Where You Are. We Know Where You've Been. We Can More Or Less Know What You're Thinking About.

I Had A Rule That I Had To Go To Bed Before The Sun Came Up. So I Used To Look Up The Sunrise Times Because I Thought It Would Be Bad Karma To Be Going To Bed As Dawn Was Arriving.

Ultimately, Application Vendors Are Driven By Volume, And Volume Is Favored By The Open Approach Google Is Taking. There Are So Many Manufacturers Working So Hard To Distribute Android Phones Globally That Whether You Like [android 4.0] Or Not, You Will Want To Develop For That Platform, And Perhaps Even First.

The Solution To Government Surveillance Is To Encrypt Everything.

Government Surveillance

We Don't Have A Traditional Strategy Process, Planning Process Like You'd Find In Traditional Technical Companies. It Allows Google To Innovate Very, Very Quickly, Which I Think Is A Real Strength Of The Company.

People Are Surprised To Find Out That An Awful Lot Of People Think That They're Idiots.

Brands Are The Solution, Not The Problem. Brands Are How You Sort Out The Cesspool.

If You Have Something That You Don't Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn't Be Doing It In The First Place.

I Think I Could Argue That The Press Has More Impact On Politics Than Corporations.

There Is A Science To Managing High Tech Businesses, And It Needs To Be Respected. One Of Them Is That In Technology Businesses, Leadership Is Temporary. It's Constantly Recycling. So The Asset Has Limited Lifetime.

Just Remember When You Post Something, The Computers Remember Forever.

The Best Thing That Would Happen Is For Facebook To Open Up Its Data. Failing That, There Are Other Ways To Get That Information.

It's Amazing To Me That We Let Humans Drive Cars... It's A Bug That Cars Were Invented Before Computers.

In A Networked World, Trust Is The Most Important Currency.

I'm Able To Bring Business Expertise But, More Importantly, Operating Experience. The People Here At Google Are Young. Every Day There Are Lots Of New Challenges. I Keep Things Focused. The Speech I Give Everyday Is: "this Is What We Do. Is What You Are Doing Consistent With That, And Does It Change The World?"

Even Though Google May Do Very Well, There Will Always Be An Alternative To What Google Is Doing, And People Will Always Have The Free Choice... Because There's No Way For Us To Prevent Them From Exercising That Choice. That Is One Of The Key Aspects Of Why The Internet Has Been So Successful. No Technologies Can Dominate.

At Google, Operations Are Not Just An Afterthought: They Are Critical To The Company's Success, And We Want To Have Just As Much Effort And Creativity In This Domain As In New Product Development.

The Biggest Mistake That I Made Was Not Anticipating The Rise Of The Social Networking Phenomenon.

Half Of Google's Revenue Comes From Selling Text-based Ads That Are Placed Near Search Results And Are Related To The Topic Of The Search. Another Half Of Its Revenues Come From Licensing Its Search Technology To Companies Like Yahoo.

It's Very Difficult For Governments To Dominate The Internet Because It's So Difficult To Control. People Want To Be Free. People Want To Hear Multiple Voices. They Want To Make Their Own Decisions. And People Who See Things Will Report Things.

The Adult Way To Run A Business Is To Run It More Like A Country. They Have Disputes, Yet They've Actually Been Able To Have Huge Trade With Each Other. They're Not Sending Bombs At Each Other.

When The Internet Publicity Began, I Remember Being Struck By How Much The World Was Not The Way We Thought It Was, That There Was Infinite Variation In How People Viewed The World.

Google Docs And Spreadsheets Don't Work If You're On An Airplane. But It's A Technical Problem That Is Going To Get Solved. Eventually You Will Be Able To Work On A Plane As If You Are Connected And, Then When You Get Reconnected To The Internet, Your Computer Will Just Synchronize With The Cloud.

People Who Bet Against The Internet, Who Think That Somehow This Change Is Just A Generational Shift, Miss That It Is A Fundamental Reorganizing Of The Power Of The End User. The Internet Brings Tremendous Tools To The End User, And That End User Is Going To Use Them.

The Internet Of Things Will Augment Your Brain.

I Used To Say That You'll Have 10 Ip Address On Your Body... And It Looks Like That's Going To Happen Through Medical Monitoring.

Mobile Use Is Growing Faster Than All Of Google's Internal Predictions.

If You're Going To Make A Law, Make A Law That Actually Works. It's Extraordinarily Difficult.

Technology Will Move Faster Than Governments, So Don't Legislate Before You Understand The Consequences.

Technology Is Always Evolving, And Companies.. Not Just Search Companies.. Can't Be Afraid To Take Advantage Of Change.

There Clearly Are Cases Where Evil People Exist, But You Don't Have To Violate The Privacy Of Every Single Citizen Of America To Find Them.

The Computing World Is Very Good At Things That We Are Not. It Is Very Good At Memory.

The Coach Doesn't Have To Play The Sport As Well As You Do. They Have To Watch You And Get You To Be Your Best.

Remember, When You Go To Youtube, You Do A Search. When You Go To Google, You Do A Search. As We Get The Search Integrated Between Youtube And Google, Which We're Working On, It Will Drive A Lot Of Traffic Into Both Places. So The Trick, Overall, Is Generating More Searches, More Uses Of Google.

When Companies Are Growing Quickly And They Are Having A Lot Of Impact, Careers Take Care Of Themselves.... If You’re Offered A Seat On A Rocket Ship, Don’t Ask What Seat. Just Get On.

Find A Way To Say Yes To Things. Say Yes To Invitations To A New Country, Say Yes To Meet New Friends, Say Yes To Learning A New Language, Picking Up A New Sport. Yes Is How You Get Your First Job, And Your Next Job, And Your Spouse, And Even Your Kids. Even If It's A Bit Edgy, A Bit Out Of Your Comfort Zone, Saying Yes Means That You Will Do Something New, Meet Someone New, And Make A Difference In Your Life. Yes Lets You Stand Out In A Crowd, Be The Optimist, To Stay Positive, Be The One Everyone Comes To. Yes Is What Keeps Us All Young.

We Have An Opportunity For Everyone In The World To Have Access To All The World's Information. This Has Never Before Been Possible. Why Is Ubiquitous Information So Profound? It's A Tremendous Equalizer. Information Is Power.

I Think It's Pretty Clear That The Internet As A Whole Has Not Had A Strong Notion Of Identity. And Identity Means, 'who Am I?' Fundamentally, What Facebook Has Done Has Built A Way To Figure Out Who People Are...

Google Is Very Much A Not-invented-here, Build-it-ourselves Culture.

It's Because Of This Fundamental Shift Towards User-generated Information That People Will Listen More To Other People Than To Traditional Resources.

If You Thought When You Got Your Job At 20 That It Would Never Change You Were Misinformed. Retrain Yourself To Be Curious.

Android Is Ahead Of The Iphone Now.

Twitter Can No More Produce Analysis Than A Monkey Can Type Out A Work Of Shakespeare.

I Worry That The Level Of Interrupt, The Sort Of Overwhelming Rapidity Of Information — And Especially Of Stressful Information — Is In Fact Affecting Cognition. It Is In Fact Affecting Deeper Thinking. I Still Believe That Sitting Down And Reading A Book Is The Best Way To Really Learn Something.  And I Worry That We’re Losing That.

In General In Technology, If You Own A Platform That's Valuable, You Can Monetize It.

Silicon Valley's Involvement With Washington Dates From One Event, Which Was John Scully - Who Was The Ceo Of Apple - Had Dinner With President Clinton And Vice President Gore In 1993. And We're All Going, Like, 'what's Going On? Why Would We Have Dinner With The President?'

Every Two Days Now We Create As Much Information As We Did From The Dawn Of Civilization Up Until 2003.

I Think To Some Degree One Of The Strengths Of The High Tech Industry Is That People Are Actually Willing To Tell You Things. When I Went To Novell, I Didn't Know How To Be A Ceo, So I Went In And I Called All Sorts Of Ceos I Knew. I Called In A Favor. I Wanted To Come By And Listen To Them Tell Me What It's Like To Be A Ceo.

Amazon Has Well Passed Any Expectations Of Its Ability To Change Distribution And Marketing.

I Actually Think Most People Don't Want Google To Answer Their Questions. They Want Google To Tell Them What They Should Be Doing Next.

I Use Google+, And I Find The Quality Of The Comments Are Very Sophisticated Because There Is More Trust Inside Of Google+ Than There Is Inside Of Twitter And Facebook, For Example.

A Lot Of The Google Inventions Came From Engineers Just Screwing Around With Ideas. And Then Management Would See Them, And We'd Say, 'boy, That's Interesting. Let's Add Some More Engineers.'

It Looks Like The Thing That Separates Out The Capable Students From The Really Successful Ones Is Not So Much Their Knowledge...but Their Persistence At Something.

To Me, What You Want To Do Is Find A Way To Let This Play Out Between The Virtual World And The Physical World...ultimately, I Think Society Will Get There. It Will Be Messy, But We'll Get There.

Around 400 Million People In The Last Year Got A Smartphone. If You Think That’s A Big Deal, Imagine The Impact On That Person In The Developing World.

Washington - Having Spent A Lot Of Time There, I Grew Up There And Have Spent A Lot Of Time There Recently - Is Largely Defined By Detailed Analytical Views And Policy Choices That Are Not Very Good. You Know, Each Policy Choice Has A Winner And A Loser, Right? Somebody's Ox Is Getting Gored.

It's A Bug That Cars Were Invented Before Computers.

If You Have A Child, You'll Notice They Have Two States: Asleep Or Online.

Show Us 14 Photos Of Yourself And We Can Identify Who You Are.

Photos Of Yourself

The More Broadband We Can Get Globally, The Better. It's Better For The World; It's Better For Our Advertisers; It's Better For Google.

A Mind Set In Its Ways Is Wasted. Don't Do It.

Within Search Results, Information Tied To Verified Online Profiles Will Be Ranked Higher Than Content Without Such Verification, Which Will Result In Most Users Naturally Clicking On The Top (verified) Results. The True Cost Of Remaining Anonymous, Then, Might Be Irrelevance.

You Can Understand Tunisia Revolution As A Failure To Censor The Internet. And Libya Had That Failure Too. It's Very Difficult For Governments That Are Autocratic And Don't Have Broad Popular Support To Be In Power When A Lot Of People Have These Devices. That Was What Arab Spring Was About, That People Could Express This And Lead To Revolution.

The Internet Is Fast Becoming A Cesspool Where False Information Thrives.

One Of The Unintended Negative Consequences Of Online Advertising Has Been The Loss Of Value In Traditional Classifieds. It's Simply Quicker, Simply Easier For An End User Who's Online, On A Broadband Connection, To Look Things Up And To Figure Out What They Want To Buy.

Find A Way To Say Yes To Things.

I Spend Most Of My Time Assuming The World Is Not Ready For The Technology Revolution That Will Be Happening To Them Soon.

Find A Way To Say “yes” To Things. Say Yes To Invitations To A New Country, Say Yes To Meet New Friends, Say Yes To Learning A New Language, Picking Up A New Sport. Yes Is How You Get Your First Job, And Your Next Job. Yes Is How You Find Your Spouse, And Even Your Kids.

The Thing That People Seem To Miss About Not Just Google, But Also Our Competitors, Yahoo, Ebay And So Forth, Is That There's An Awful Lot Of Communities That Have Never Been Served By Traditional Media.

Washington Is An Incumbent Protection Machine. Technology Is Fundamentally Disruptive.

The Internet Is Really About Highly Specialized Information, Highly Specialized Targeting.

Brands Are The Solution, Not The Problem. Brands Are How You Sort Out The Cesspool. ... Brand Affinity Is Clearly Hard Wired. It Is So Fundamental To Human Existence That It's Not Going Away. It Must Have A Genetic Component.

The Policy Of America To Deny Visas To Technically Trained People In The U.s. And Shipped To Other Countries, Where They Create Companies That Compete With America, Has To Be The Stupidest Policy Of All The U.s. Government Policies.

I Still Believe That Sitting Down And Reading A Book Is The Best Way To Really Learn Something.

One Person's Definition Of Evil Is Another Person's Different Definition.

You Have To Fight For Your Privacy Or You Lose It.

The Average American Doesnt Realize How Much Of The Laws Are Written By Lobbyists.

When You Use Google, Do You Get More Than One Answer? Of Course You Do. Well, That's A Bug. We Have More Bugs Per Second In The World. We Should Be Able To Give You The Right Answer Just Once. We Should Know What You Meant.

I Had Always Assumed That The Right Way To Do It Was To These Engineers, Put Them In Offices By Themselves With Doors That They Could Close So They Could Think Deep Thoughts. This Is A Terrible Idea.

Even If Is A Bit Edgy, A Bit Out Of Your Comfort Zone, Saying Yes Means That You Will Do Something New, Meet Someone New, And Make A Difference In Your Life, And Likely In Others' Lives As Well... Yes Is What Keeps Us All Young. Yes Is A Tiny Word That Can Do Big Things. Say It Often.

I Don't Believe Society Understands What Happens When Everything Is Available, Knowable And Recorded By Everyone All The Time.

Do Not Be Afraid To Fail, But Also, Do Not Be Afraid To Succeed.

Since I Have Access To Every, Every Crisis In The World Because It's Always Blaring At Me On Cable Television, That Doesn't Mean I Have To Worry About Every One Of Them. This Is Also Known As Knowing Where The 'off' Button Is.

Success Is Really About Being Ready For The Good Opportunities That Come Before You. It's Not To Have A Detailed Plan Of Everything That You're Going To Do. You Can't Plan Innovation Or Inspiration, But You Can Be Ready For It, And When You See It, You Can Jump On It.

The Core Problem Is That The World Is Full Of People Who Would Like To Take 99 Per Cent Of The Information That's On The Internet, And Eliminate 1 Per Cent. Everyone Has Their Own Thing They Don't Like.

People Are Building Communities Of People Who Use Video. They're Sharing Them. Youtube's Traffic Continues To Grow Very Quickly.

Mobile Is The Future, And There's No Such Thing As Communication Overload.

The Lack Of A Delete Button On The Internet Is A Significant Issue.

In A World Of Asynchronous Threats, It Is Too Dangerous For There Not To Be Some Way To Identify You. We Need A [verified] Name Service For People. Governments Will Demand It.

The Funny Thing About Advertising Is That It's Not A Zero-sum Game... Historically, In The Digital Ad World, Pie Has Gotten Larger And It's Possible For Everyone To Win, And It's Perfectly Possible That Will Continue To Be True For Quite Some Time.

Google Maps Are Phenomenal. Yep, Ask An Apple User.

The Characteristic Of Great Innovators And Great Companies Is They See A Space That Others Do Not. They Don't Just Listen To What People Tell Them; They Actually Invent Something New, Something That You Didn't Know You Needed, But The Moment You See It, You Say, 'i Must Have It.'

Trending Author

Cullen Hightower

Pierre De Fermat

Michel Foucault

Category