My highlights from the book:
1. Ted came to appreciate the considerable discipline and commitment it took to hone expertise.
2. He was an inspiration. Whatever you do, he taught me, do it to perfection.
3. You’re crazy to be a professor she told Ted. What you really want to do is draw.
4. The money he earned through his advertising work would buy him his artistic freedom. What would eventually become the Dr. Suess empire would be laid on a foundation built and paid for with Standard Oil money.
5. To his increasing distress, the responses were all negative. He would later recall being rejected by 27 publishers.
6. If you want to write good books spend a little time studying the bad ones.
7. Your capacity for healthy, silly, friendly laughter was smothered. You’d really grown up. You’d become adults. Adults—which is a word that means obsolete children.
8. Even after 9 books he still wasn’t earning enough from them to make a living.
9. I’m subversive as hell! I’ve always had a mistrust of adults. And one reason I dropped out of Oxford was that I thought they were taking life too damn seriously, concentrating too much on nonessentials.
10. For me, success means doing work that you love, regardless of how much you make. I go to my office almost every day and give it 8 hours. Though every day isn’t productive of course.
Learn more ideas from history's greatest entrepreneurs by listening to Founders podcast. Read more highlights.