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.
I always said a prayer before I ran, and my prayer was to win. My prayer was that God would allow me to run my best on that day, or better than my best. So whatever the outcome is, I have to be satisfied with it if I know I gave it my best effort.
There are lots of good reasons to abandon a project. Having a little competition is not one of them.
Whatever your circumstances, whatever your past, the forces that determine your future are nowhere but within your own heart and mind. It is here that the star of your destiny shines.
For three things I thank God every day of my life: thanks that he has vouchsafed me knowledge of his works; deep thanks that he has set in my darkness the lamp of faith; deep, deepest thanks that I have another life to look forward to--a life joyous with light and flowers and heavenly song.
But yeah, Ann [Trason] insisted, running was romantic; and no, of course her friends didn't get it because they'd never broken through. For them, running was a miserable two miles motivated solely by size 6 jeans: get on the scale, get depressed, get your headphones on, and get it over with. But you can't muscle through a five-hour run that way; you have to relax into it, like easing your body into a hot bath, until it no longer resists the shock and begins to enjoy it.
We work day after day, not to finish things; but to make the future better ... because we will spend the rest of our lives there.
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