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.
There’s a huge difference between being childlike and being childish. When we embrace joy and look at the world with fresh eyes we’re being childlike. When we demand instant gratification and a guarantee that everything will be ok, we’re only being childish.
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.
Initiating is really and truly difficult, and that’s what leaders do. They see something others are ignoring and they jump on it. They cause the events that others have to react to. They make change.
Marketing is our quest to make change on behalf of those we serve, and we do it by understanding the irrational forces that drive each of us.
Passion isn’t project-specific. It’s people-specific.
The relentless pursuit of mass will make you boring, because mass means average, it means the center of the curve, it requires you to offend no one and satisfy everyone.
The linchpin feels the fear, acknowledges it, then proceeds. I can’t tell you how to do this; I think the answer is different for everyone. What I can tell you is that in today’s economy, doing it is a prerequisite for success.
The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success.
Skill and attitude are essential. Authority is not. In fact, authority can get in the way.
Selling is about a transference of emotion, not a presentation of facts.