By all means, fire the customers who aren’t worth the time and the trouble. But understand that the moment you insist the customer is wrong, you’ve just started the firing process.
A bully is playing a game, one that he or she enjoys and needs. You’re welcome to play this game if it makes you happy, but for most people, it will make you miserable.
The mistake so many marketers make is that they conjoin the urgency of making another sale with the timing to earn the right to make that sale. In other words, you must build trust before you need it. Building trust right when you want to make a sale is just too late.
I’m not proposing that you let the crowd dictate, or that you work hard to fit in. Far from it. I’m proposing that you know the impact your choices are having and act accordingly.
Genius is the act of solving a problem in a way no one has solved it before.
The sooner we realize that the world has changed, the sooner we can accept it and make something of what we’ve got. Whining isn’t a scalable solution.
Desire can’t be sated, because if it is, the longing disappears and then we’ve failed, because desire is the state we seek.
Choose your customers, choose your future.
Be relentlessly generous, without focusing on when it will come back to you.
Incrementalism ceases to be a good strategy when there’s a cliff on the route.
It turns out that the people who like their jobs the most are also the ones who are doing the best work, making the greatest impact, and changing the most.
Fitting in is a short-term strategy, standing out pays off in the long run.
It’s much easier to spend a lot of time making your microphone louder than it is working on making your message more compelling.
Once you have permission to talk to someone, finding new products or services for them is a smart way to grow.
One way to think about running a successful business is to figure out what the least you can do is, and do that.
The application process changes the list of who applies. Your applicants reflect your methods.
The ONLY thing leaders have in common is the shared decision to lead.
The job is not your work; what you do with your heart and soul is the work.
Positive thinking doesn’t guarantee results, all it offers is something better than negative thinking.
The problem with holding a grudge is that your hands are then too full to hold onto anything else. It might be the competition or a technology or the lousy things that someone did a decade ago. None of it is going to get better as a result of revisiting the grudge.