Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.
You are not your resume, you are your work.
The competitive advantages the marketplace demands is someone more human, connected, and mature. Someone with passion and energy, capable of seeing things as they are and negotiating multiple priorities as she makes useful decisions without angst. Flexible in the face of change, resilient in the face of confusion. All of these attributes are choices, not talents, and all of them are available to you.
The secret of being wrong isn’t to avoid being wrong! The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realizing that wrong isn’t fatal. The only thing that makes people and organizations great is their willingness to be not great along the way. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success.
We drink the can, not the beverage.
The easiest thing is to react. The second easiest thing is to respond. But the hardest thing is to initiate.
In your career, even more than for a brand, being safe is risky. The path to lifetime job security is to be remarkable.
Write like you talk. Often.
When our name is on a project, our ego pushes us over the hump and drives us to do even better work.
People settle. They settle for less than they are capable of.
It’s not time,” “Take it easy,” “Wait and see,” “It’s someone else’s turn” – none of these stalls are appropriate for a leader in search of change. There’s a small price for being too early, but a huge penalty for being too late. The longer you wait to launch an innovation, the less your effort is worth.
It’s extremely difficult to find smart people willing to start useful projects. Because sometimes what you start doesn’t work. The fact that it doesn’t work every time should give you confidence, because it means you’re doing something that frightens others.
Your job isn’t to do your job. Your job is to decide what to do next.
We believe what we want to believe, and once we believe something, it becomes a self-fulfilling truth.
Persistent, consistent, and frequent stories, delivered to an aligned audience, will earn attention, trust, and action.
All coping does is waste your time and misdirect your energy. If the best you can do is cope, you’re better off quitting.
Creating value through interaction is far more important than solving a consumer’s problem in thirty seconds.
If a product’s future is unlikely to be remarkable – if you can’t imagine a future in which people are once again fascinated by your product – it’s time to realize that the game has changed. Instead of investing in a dying product, take profits and reinvest them in building something new.
The linchpin has figured out that we get only a certain number of brain cycles to spend each day. Spending even one on a situation out of our control has a significant opportunity cost.
To be a superstar, you must do something exceptional. Not just survive the Dip, but use the Dip as an opportunity to create something so extraordinary that people can’t help but talk about it, recommend it, and, yes, choose it.