Great CEOs face the pain.

Great CEOs face the pain. 

They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweats, and what my friend the great Alfred Chuang (legendary cofounder and CEO of BEA Systems) calls “the torture.”

Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it.

Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations.

The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers.

They all say, “I didn’t quit.”

-- Ben Horowitz