In the case of personality, most psychologists agree that there are five traits that are essential in how people look at us: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability.
Do What You Want; these are the 4 most frightening words brought to us by the Connection Revolution. If you want to sing, sing. If you want to lead, lead. If you want touch, connect, describe, disrupt, give, support, build, question – Do It. You will not be picked. But, if you want to pick yourself – go for it. The cost is that you own the results.
The web has made kicking ass easier to achieve, and mediocrity harder to sustain. Mediocrity now howls in protest.” The.
Successful people don’t just ride out the Dip. They don’t just buckle down and survive it. No, they lean into the Dip. They push harder, changing the rules as they go. Just because you know you’re in the Dip doesn’t mean you have to live happily with it. Dips don’t last quite as long when you whittle at them.
The mass market is dying. There is no longer one best song or one best kind of coffee. Now there are a million micromarkets, but each micromarket still has a best.
Short-term pain has more impact on most people than long-term benefits do, which is why it’s so important for you to amplify the long-term benefits of not quitting. You need to remind yourself of life at the other end of the Dip because it’s easier to overcome the pain of yet another unsuccessful cold call if the reality of a successful sales career is more concrete.
People don’t want what you make They want what it will do for them.
For the rest of us, it’s not about what you’re born with, it’s about what you do.
When access to information was limited, we needed to load student sup with facts. Now, when we have no scarcity of facts or the access to them, we need to load them up with understanding.
Why are you easily replaceable at one venue but not the other? Are you charming when you go on a date or meet a handsome guy at a party? But not at a meeting at work?
1. Providing a unique interface between members of the organization 2. Delivering unique creativity 3. Managing a situation or organization of great complexity 4. Leading customers 5. Inspiring staff 6. Providing deep domain knowledge 7. Possessing a unique talent.
A great school experience won’t keep you from being remarkable, but it’s usually not sufficient to guarantee that you will become so. There’s something else at work here.
Art, at least art as I define it, is the intentional act of using your humanity to create a change in another person.
We seek out experiences and products that deliver more value, more connection, and more experience, and change us for the better.
Faced with an infinite number of choices, many people pick the market leader.
Selling ice cream on the beach in the summer is easy. Raising people’s expectations, engaging in their hopes and dreams, helping them see further – that’s the difficult work we signed up for. From now on, your customers know more than you do about your competitors. And so your commodity work, no matter how much effort you put into it, is not enough.
A factory demands a compliant workforce in order to succeed. And so we’ve organized around this idea of compliance in all things – in school, in the foods we eat, in the way we respond to marketing. And it’s a dead end.
As we’ll see, the greatest shortage in our society is an instinct to produce.
People settle. They settle for less than they are capable of. Organizations settle too. For good enough instead of best in the world. If you’re not going to put in the effort to be my best possible choice, why bother?
Every day you stay is a bad strategic decision for your career because every day you get better at something that isn’t that useful – and you are another day behind others who are learning something more useful.