Entitlement is the opposite of enchantment.
Defy the crowd. The crowd isn’t always wise. It can also lead you down a path of silliness, sub-optimal choices, and downright destruction. Enchantment is as necessary for people to diverge from a crowd as it is to get people to join one.
When you give people too many choices it makes them hesitate and not buy stuff.
Accept diversity and don’t take any crap.
The record of what you do is forever recoverable because of Google. The lofty upside and scary downside makes reciprocity more important than ever. This is all good because it makes people think more before they do something that reduces their trustworthiness.
The hard part is implementing the decision, not making it.
It’s easy to say that entrepreneurs will create jobs and big companies will create unemployment, but this is simplistic. The real question is who will innovate.
This is the beauty of social media: it helps you find people and then you can contact them fast and inexpensively.
The desire to change the world is a tremendous advantage as you travel down the difficult path ahead because focusing on a lofty goal is more energizing and attracts more talent than simply making a buck.
If you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing. If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing.
Companies can add value and simultaneously promote themselves if their product or service truly improves the lives of their customers. I mean really improve lives, not wishful thinking, rationalization. That’s the acid test.
Money is not the sole or most powerful motivation for many people. A higher and tougher test is to look back and see how you’ve made the world a better place.
How fast you are moving is more important than where you are.
Create something, sell it, make it better, sell it some more and then create something that obsoletes what you used to make.
The mark of a good conversationalist is not that you can talk a lot. The mark is that you can get others to talk a lot. Thus, good schmoozer’s are good listeners, not good talkers.
My books are always tactical, bullet lists, this is what you need to do because I’m trying to appeal to people who are trying to change the world and they need checklists.
People are free or cheap. Marketing: using Twitter or blogs. Cheap or free. Infrastructure: call up Amazon, call up Rackspace, terabytes of data in the clouds, thousand dollars, two thousand dollars.
Some things need to be believed to be seen.
The jewelry business is a very, very tough business – tougher than the computer business. You truly have to understand how to take care of your customers.
If you have to put someone on a pedestal, put teachers. They are society’s heroes.