Mediocre is merely a failed attempt to be really good.
Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” David Packard.
If you can bring someone belonging, connection, peace of mind, status, or one of the other most desired emotions, you’ve done something worthwhile. The thing you sell is simply a road to achieve those emotions, and we let everyone down when we focus on the tactics, not the outcomes. Who’s it for and what’s it for are the two questions that guide all of our decisions.
Faith is underrated. Paradoxically, religion is vastly overrated.
If consumers have everything they need, there’s nothing left to buy except stuff that they want. And the reason they buy stuff they want is because of the way it makes them feel.
The most important lesson I can share about brand marketing is this: you definitely, certainly, and surely don’t have enough time and money to build a brand for everyone. You can’t. Don’t try. Be specific. Be very specific.
The next time you catch yourself being average when you feel like quitting, realize that you have only two good choices: Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.
Passion is caring enough about your art that you will do almost anything to give it away, to make it a gift, to change people.
Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn’t matter. The intent does. Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.
Great teachers are wonderful. They change lives. We need them. The problem is that most schools don’t like great teachers. They’re organized to stamp them out, bore them, bureaucratize them, and make them average. Why.
If all you do at work is hope to survive, your day can’t be much fun. We’re all working too hard. Putting in more hours than we’d like, nervous about the future, uncertain about our roles and our goals. We work too hard to hope for mere survival. Our goal must be to thrive and prosper, not just get by.
The only purpose of starting is to finish, and while the projects we do are never really finished, they must ship. Shipping means hitting the publish button on your blog, showing a presentation to the sales team, answering the phone, selling the muffins, sending out your references. Shipping is the collision between your work and the outside world.
The goal is to quit the tasks you’re doing because you’re hiding on behalf of the lizard brain and to push through the very tasks the lizard fears. Is.
For the frequent user, the impact of a cooler, better, easier-to-use input device is profound – so profound that many users are happy to proselytize to their peers. More sneezing of a Purple Cow.
You become a winner because you’re good at losing.
Going out of your way to find uncomfortable situations isn’t natural, but it’s essential.
She solves problems that people haven’t predicted, sees things people haven’t seen, and connects people who need to be connected.
Frequency led to awareness, awareness to familiarity, and familiarity to trust. And trust, almost without exception, leads to profit.
It doesn’t hurt to ask Actually, it does hurt. It does hurt to ask the wrong way, to ask without preparation, to ask without permission. It hurts because you never get another chance to ask right.
In unstable times, growth comes from leaders who create change and engage their organizations, instead of from managers who push their employees to do more for less.