I spent nine years at Apple. It’s the place where I finally grew up. I wasn’t just managing a team anymore. I was leading hundreds, thousands of people. It was a profound shift in my career and in who I was. After a decade of failure, I finally made something—actually two things—that people actually wanted. I finally got it right.

But it didn’t feel like success at first. Or even in the end. It was still work, every step of the way.

Makers often focus on the shiny object—the product they’re building—and forget about the rest of the journey until they’re almost ready to deliver it to the customer. But customers see it all, experience it all. They’re the ones taking the journey, step-by-step. And they can easily stumble and fall when a step is missing or misaligned.

Your company is an organism; its cells need to divide to multiply, they need to differentiate to become something new. Don’t worry about what you’re going to lose—think about what you’re going to become.

You don’t get a growth mindset by proclamation. You move toward it by taking a journey.

Many leadership transitions are made more turbulent than necessary because of misconstrued or misaligned expectations. We can’t stress enough how crucial aligning expectations is to getting off to the right start. Making sure everyone agrees on the important issues and priorities is literally the foundation to building the first hundred days pyramid - and your future success.