I have tried in my role of being one of the first women at Google, let alone the first woman to have a baby, to really try to set the tone that this is a great place to work for diversity reasons.
Susan WojcickiRead
Rarely are opportunities presented to you in a perfect way. In a nice little box with a yellow bow on top. 'Here, open it, it's perfect. You'll love it.' Opportunities -- the good ones -- are messy, confusing and hard to recognize. They're risky. They challenge you.
Interpretation
Opportunities often come unexpectedly and may not appear perfect at first glance.
This quote by Susan Wojcicki emphasizes that genuine opportunities are rarely delivered in a straightforward, flawless manner. Instead, they tend to be complex and may involve risks and challenges, requiring us to recognize their potential despite the initial confusion or messiness they present.
In practice
When inspiring your team to take on challenging projects, you might say this quote to illustrate the nature of opportunities.
I have tried in my role of being one of the first women at Google, let alone the first woman to have a baby, to really try to set the tone that this is a great place to work for diversity reasons.
Though we do need more women to graduate with technical degrees, I always like to remind women that you don't need to have science or technology degrees to build a career in tech.
Underrepresented employees already have to overcome discriminatory barriers in their careers; they shouldn't be expected to volunteer their time to help their companies do the same.
Coding is like writing, and we live in a time of the new industrial revolution. What's happened is that maybe everybody knows how to use computers, like they know how to read, but they don't know how to write.
I think about my own career, and when I graduated from college, the Internet didn't really exist yet. And so not having a specific plan, being able to be opportunistic at the end, is what enabled me to make some of my best decisions, which is to go to places that were growing but that I didn't plan to have happen.
Unless we make computer science a priority, we risk making gender, class, and racial disparities worse as jobs flow to those with a computer science background.
We are faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words ‘Too Late’.
If you write a hundred short stories and they're all bad, that doesn't mean you've failed. You fail only if you stop writing.
Whenever there is a challenge, there is also an opportunity to face it, to demonstrate and develop our will and determination.
I didn't have any money. I had a sense of terrible loss. But what I also had was a fire in my belly. I wasn't going to go back to waiting tables. I felt I had to be better at fronting a band.
I used to believe, like many people who come from poor backgrounds, that it gave me an edge, but I think that's just something we have to tell ourselves to get by sometimes. I don't believe that anymore. Children of privilege can be just as talented and clever as anybody else.
I believe that things are always going to work out, even if in the beginning it doesn't look like they are working out. I know in the long run they are going to work out, and it's going to be fine.
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