"I think there is nothing that can replace your emotional response. The biggest mistakes I have ever made in my life are when people told me, "You really should produce this. It's a guaranteed hit." I would read the material and I would go, "I don't get it, but okay, I'll produce it." You're giving up that much of your life, your time with family and friends, to something that you're not really committed to - and they did not pan out the way everyone said they would, even though I worked just as hard."

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Probably the biggest mistake that I made personally is I knew early on that I wanted to go into start-ups and creating kind of software that could help change the lives of millions of people. And basically what I did is I kind of went, okay, well, I need a set of titles and I need a checklist of skills, and I ran through all that, and that wasn't a useless thing, but what I didn't realize, and, you know, and no one gave me the right advice for doing this, is that actually your network, in essentially, is your career.

— Reid Hoffman