Best Business Advice Received By Fortune's '40 Under '40 - Strategy With RS

Friends I take pleasure in sharing with you a selection of curated best business advice received by Fortune’s '40 under 40'. The success that these high flyers have achieved - they attribute to the fact that they lived by these advise. Do take time out to read, savour and if you find them relevant then take a pledge to live by them.

1. “Focus on building knowledge, experience and confidence first. Rewards will come later.” - Karen Fang, Managing director at Bank of America

2. “When pursuing your first job, focus on working with great people, and not the job with the highest pay check.”
- Kevin Chou, Co-founder and CEO of Kabam

3. “Don’t be afraid to make heroic failures.”
- Tor Myhren, Vice president of marketing communications of Apple

4. “Under promise, over deliver.”
- Clara Shih, Co-founder and CEO of Hearsay Social

5. “Be curious. Ask questions. Find and express your passionate enthusiasm for whatever you believe in.”
- Rio Caraeff, Chief content officer at Magic Leap and founder of VEVO

6. “Avoid bad meetings and the tempting ‘inbox zero.’ Skip email on occasion, pick up the phone, and have a wonderful conversation from time to time. Memories count.”
- Ashifi Gogo, CEO of Sproxil

7. In Eleanor Roosevelt’s words, “Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.”
- Jessica Alba, Founder of The Honest Company

8. “You have to create the quiet to be able to listen to the very faint voice of your intuition.”
- Michael Dubin, Co-founder and CEO of Dollar Shave Club

9. “Find a life partner better than yourself. I would not be where I am without my wife Srishti.”
- Vas Narasimhan, Global head of development at Novartis Pharmaceuticals

10. “Take time to master your discipline. Take the nitty-gritty jobs early in your professional life. You will benefit.”
- Dolf van den Brink, President and CEO, Heineken Mexico

11. “Things are not ever as risky as they seem. People always overweigh risk.”
- Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator

12. “Anytime you have a difficult decision, imagine yourself as a 90-year-old looking back at this moment. What decision would you wish that you would have made? Go forward and look backward.”
- Nick Woodman, Founder and CEO of GoPro

13. “Construct your own definition of success, don’t let the world do it for you. Just because someone puts a carrot in front of you doesn’t mean you have to chase after it.”
- Michael Patterson, Partner at Highbridge Principal Strategies

Did any of these advise resonate with you? Also, do share an advise which you may have received, which has transformed you into a world class professional? We will all gain from it.     ----------- About The Author: In this series, Rajesh Srivastava, Business Strategist and Visiting Faculty at IIM Indore gives you a regular dose of strategy case studies to help you think and keep you one step ahead as a professional as compared to your peers. Rajesh is an alumnus of IIM Bangalore and IIT Kanpur and has over 2 decades of experience in the FMCG industry. All previous Strategy with RS posts can be found here.