Nice commencement speech address by Jerry Yang the c0 founder of yahoo. Nice list, read the whole thing guys!
Point two: You get out of life what you put into it.
Success doesn’t come from a high IQ or innate talent. It takes a willingness to work hard. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, he introduced the “10,000 hour rule,” which holds that it takes about 10,000 hours of hard work and practice — or ten years — to become a world-class expert in anything. The difference between a good violinist and a virtuoso comes down to ambition and having the discipline to put in the requisite time. As someone once said, in golf as in life, it is the follow through that makes the difference.
My mother taught me the rules of perseverance. While I’ve certainly faced challenges since founding Yahoo!, they were nothing compared to what my mother faced coming to the US as a single parent from Taiwan, with two young boys and a few suitcases. I was ten at the time, and the only English word I knew was the word “shoe.” It could have been very easy to feel discouraged. But I worked hard, studied hard, and played hard along the way. Yes, good timing and some luck played a role in my starting Yahoo!, but there is just no substitute for hard work and relentless preparation.
via Advice in Interesting Times.