Trust is precious and easily wasted, and guessing is a lousy foundation for future progress.
I’ll confess that I don’t watch the Olympics, but you’d have to be living under a rock to be unaware of the corruption and the expense. An amorphous organization with no transparency, unclear lines of responsibility, huge amounts of politics and a great deal of unearned power.
Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you’re reading, find the three things and do it. The goal of the reading, then, isn’t to persuade you to change, it’s to help you choose what to change.
Success comes from doing the hard part. When the hard part is all you’ve got, you’re more likely to do it. And this is precisely why it’s difficult to focus. Because focusing means acknowledging that you just signed up for the hard part.
Marketing tells a story that spreads. Sales overcomes the natural resistance to say yes.
Learn. Ceaselessly. Learn to code, to write persuasively, to understand new technologies, to bring out the best in your team, to find underused resources and to spot patterns.
Piracy is not the problem, obscurity is.
If you hear my idea but don’t believe it, that’s not your fault; it’s mine. If you see my new product but don’t buy it, that’s my failure, not yours. If you attend my presentation and you’re bored, that’s my fault too.
The mirror we hold up to the person next to us is one of the most important pictures she will ever see.
One way to work the system is to work the system. The other way is to refuse to work it.
Following the well-lit path, offers little in the way of magic.
I don’t think there’s a shortage of remarkable ideas. I think your business has plenty of great opportunities to do great things. Nope, what’s missing isn’t the ideas. It’s the will to execute them.
You can’t fool all the people, not even most of the time. And people, once unfooled, talk about the experience.
When the room brightens when you walk in, you matter.
You can’t shrink your way to greatness!
If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader.
Bullhorns are overrated: having ten times as many Twitter followers generates approximately zero times as much value.
But this is a remarkable egg, an egg worth talking about, an egg worth crossing the street for, an egg worth writing about.
It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.
In our desire to please everyone, it’s very easy to end up being invisible or mediocre.