Andreesen Horowitz co-founder and career CEO/investor Ben Horowitz offers some great advice in this 2011 post at his personal blog.

The best part about it is that, while it’s aimed at aspiring CEOs and entrepreneurs, it really applies to any major life project.

Here is one piece of advice from Horowitz that stuck out to me:

The first problem is that everybody learns to be a CEO by being a CEO.

The best way and, in many cases, the only way, to truly learn anything is to do it, cataloging and routing around or mitigating damage from your mistakes as you go forward.

And another:

If she can separate the importance of the issues from how she feels about them, she will avoid demonizing her employees or herself.

Our emotional responses can be helpful, but there are many decisions which it is inappropriate to base solely on emotion. We need to learn when and how to make emotion secondary to logic, or at least find a Spock-like middle ground.

It’s definitely worth a read.