Quotes About Milestones

For some reason our lives were marked by summers. . . . Summer was the time when our lives joined completely, when we all had our birthdays, when really important things happened

I had traveled 10 states and played over 50 cities by the time I was 4.

Every time one of my books sells a million copies in paperback, Pan Macmillan gives me a gold statuette of Pan. I have about 20 of them.

Today was the first day of summer, she realized, her spirits lifting like a kite. She loved milestones of any sort: birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, checks on the calendar, notches on a growth chart. Today would be special, brand new. She felt it deep inside. Summer was here with sunny days and balmy nights, the informality of barbecues and dips in the swimming pool. She was so relieved to have the grind of the school year finished. She missed playing with her children.

I forgot what we were celebrating. Because we were always celebrating something, a new job, a new poem, a new love, a new dream.

My dad said I couldn't drive until the weather cleared up, and it finally did a little bit yesterday. I made a mix tape for the occasion. It is called "The First Time I Drove." Maybe I'm being too sentimental, but I like to think that when I'm old, I will be able to look at all these tapes and remember those drives.

The middle [those rough patches that come before the completion of our milestones] is only a temporal place, never settle there or cut corners to get out!

There are exactly as many special occasions in life as we choose to celebrate.

Don't count the miles, count the I love you's!

The first ten thousand miles is the hardest to walk. -Johnny The Walker

I'm dreading it," says Corinne. "Somehow thirty-one sounds like you might only be just past thirty, still almost technically in your twenties. Thirty-two sounds ominously close to thirty-five.

The method I recommend is called innovation accounting, a quantitative approach that allows us to see whether our engine-tuning efforts are bearing fruit. It also allows us to create learning milestones, which are an alternative to traditional business and product milestones. Learning milestones are useful for entrepreneurs as a way of assessing their progress accurately and objectively; they are also invaluable to managers and investors who must hold entrepreneurs accountable.

For a report to be considered actionable, it must demonstrate clear cause and effect. Otherwise, it is a vanity metric. The reports that Grockit's team began to use to judge their learning milestones made it extremely clear what actions would be necessary to replicate the results.

David faced the difficult challenge of deciding whether to pivot or persevere. This is one of the hardest decisions entrepreneurs face. The goal of creating learning milestones is not to make the decision easy; it is to make sure that there is relevant data in the room when it comes time to decide.

Once a team is set up, what should it do? What process should it use? How should it be held accountable to performance milestones?

Innovation accounting. To improve entrepreneurial outcomes and hold innovators accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work. This requires a new kind of accounting designed for startups—and the people who hold them accountable.

Most tools from general management are not designed to flourish in the harsh soil of extreme uncertainty in which startups thrive. The future is unpredictable, customers face a growing array of alternatives, and the pace of change is ever increasing. Yet most startups—in garages and enterprises alike—still are managed by using standard forecasts, product milestones, and detailed business plans.

Unfortunately, standard accounting is not helpful in evaluating entrepreneurs. Startups are too unpredictable for forecasts and milestones to be accurate.

This is the kind of storytelling that takes place at most startup board meetings. Most milestones are built the same way: hit a certain product milestone, maybe talk to a few customers, and see if the numbers go up. Unfortunately, this is not a good indicator of whether a startup is making progress. How do we know that the changes we've made are related to the results we're seeing? More important, how do we know that we are drawing the right lessons from those changes?

focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work.

Milestones have never really meant a lot. They probably will mean more when I've finished playing and actually reflect on what I have achieved.

Our best hits are real-estate stories, going back to our first, JoJo in 1991.

There still aren't many black women on prime-time TV. Times are changing, but it's interesting: we're in 2013 and still experiencing firsts... Hopefully, in the next 100 years, things will balance even more.

It's so crazy to look at your life and see how far you've come.