Maynard Webb: Dream big, execute bigger.
Maynard Webb: Dream big, execute bigger.
Maynard Webb/Linkedin
"If you are willing to dream and then work hard and execute well, you can achieve more than you ever imagined."
That's what the Yahoo chairman wishes he'd known at 22.
After his father passed away unexpectedly when Webb was a young child, the family fell on hard times, and Webb's world seemed to shrink. "We lost the air conditioner, hot water, and TV, and we also lost the opportunity to dream about what could be as we were too caught up trying to get by," he writes.
At 22, he was a recent college grad working as an IBM security guard. "My biggest dream," he recalls, "was to become an IBM manager and own a home." He didn't have a concept of how much higher he could reach. But "a pedigree, while a good stepping stone, was not the only way to get where you need to go," he realized. "The only way to get where you need to go was to actually go for it — to show up, and knock on the door, and then run through it."