Marissa Mayer is reinventing Yahoo. During her tenure at Google, Mayer has been described as being a key influencer on products such as Gmail, Google Maps and Google’s minimalist search page. She joined Yahoo! as CEO and president in July 2012. Mayer has acquired over 35 startups in 20 months, including the $1.1 billion purchase of David Karp’s blogging service Tumblr; overhauled the photo-sharing site Flickr; and redesigned Yahoo’s home page and logo. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is one of the tech industry’s most influential women.
On time management/productivity
1. “I just make a to-do list every day in priority order from most important to least important and celebrate the fact that I’d never get to the bottom of it, because if I did, I would have spent a bunch of time doing relatively unimportant things.’–Advice from her college friend.
She comments: “I thought that was really profound; a lot of people say, ‘Gosh, I’d never get it all done’, and when they see all the work they could never get done, they get really overwhelmed by it. But the other thing you could do is just embrace it. That frame of mind really has helped me because there are times when I’m like, ‘wait, I’m kind of looking at something unimportant. Should there be something else higher on my to-do list?” spotted on Business Insider
2. “I actually have a very different philosophy about burnout,” she told BuzzFeed. “I don’t think that burnout comes from not getting enough sleep or not eating enough square meals. I think that burnout comes from resentment. … It is possible to work ‘too hard,’ but you need to figure out what things it really is you need to stay fueled up, to stay energized, to not get resentful.”
On perseverance
3. “I always did something I was a little not ready to do. I think that’s how you grow. When there’s that moment of ‘Wow, I’m not really sure I can do this,’ and you push through those moments, that’s when you have a breakthrough. Sometimes that’s a sign that something really good is about to happen. You’re about to grow and learn a lot about yourself,” she told CNN in April
On career and pursuit of ambition
4. “I have a theory that burnout is about resentment. And you beat it by knowing what it is you’re giving up that makes you resentful. I tell people: Find your rhythm. Your rhythm is what matters to you so much that when you miss it you’re resentful of your work…So find your rhythm, understand what makes you resentful, and protect it. You can’t have everything you want, but you can have the things that really matter to you. And thinking that way empowers you to work really hard for a really long period of time,” said Mayer in Bloomberg Businessweek
5. “Do things that you’re not quite ready to do,” Mayer says, summing up the career philosophy that led her to take the top job at Yahoo. She believes that to succeed, you should “get in over your head” — and carefully manage your ambition. she advises.
6. “It’s really wonderful to work in an environment with a lot of smart people. One, I think because it challenges you to think and work on a different level,” she said during a talk at Stanford University’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Speaker Series.
On creativity
7. People think of creativity as this sort of unbridled thing, but engineers thrive on constraints. They love to think their way out of that little box: ‘We know you said it was impossible, but we’re going to do this, this, and that to get us there,” Mayer said in an interview with Fast Company
On taking risks
8. “I always did something I was a little not ready to do,” she said while speaking on her best decisions in a talk with NPR Correspondent Laura Sydell. “That feeling at the end of the day, where you’re like, ‘what have I gotten myself into?’ I realized that sometimes when you have that feeling and you push through it, something really great happens.”
On gender and work
9. “I don’t think that I would consider myself a feminist. I certainly believe in equal rights, I believe that women are just as capable, if not more so, in a lot of different dimensions. But I don’t I think have sort of the militant drive, and sort of the chip on the shoulder that sometimes comes with that,” she said in PBS and AOL’s “Makers” documentary, launching a debate about her remarks.
10. “If you can find something that you’re really passionate about, whether you’re a man or a woman comes a lot less into play. Passion is a gender-neutralizing force.”
Image courtesy, Fortune Live Media (Flickr).