Risking the appearance of weakness takes strength. And the market knows it.
Great marketers don’t make stuff. They make meaning.
You can use social media to turn strangers into friends, friends into customers and customers into salespeople.
An organization filled with honest, motivated, connected, eager, learning, experimenting, ethical and driven people will always defeat the one that merely has talent. Every time.
Initiative is the privilege of picking yourself.
Great projects, like great careers and relationships that last, are gardens. They are tended, they shift, they grow. They endure over time, gaining a personality and reflecting their environment. When something dies or fades away, we prune, replant and grow again.
The way you make something happen is to do something that a fool could screw up.
It’s possible that your next frontier isn’t to get more efficient, it’s to get more brave.
Not changing your strategy merely because you’re used to the one you have now is a lousy strategy.
By my definition, most art has nothing to do with oil paint or marble. Art is what we’re doing when we do our best work.
The person who fails the most wins.
You can’t control other people, and giving them the power to decide if you will continue to produce good work is foolish.
Seizing new ground, making connections between people or ideas, working without a map-these are works of art, and if you do them, you are an artist, regardless of whether you wear a smock, use a computer, or work with others all day long.
The world doesn’t owe you a living, but just when you needed it, a door was opened for you to make a difference.
Self sufficiency appears to be a worthy goal, but it’s now impossible if you want to actually get anything done. All our productivity, leverage and insight comes from being part of a community, not apart from it. The goal, I think, is to figure out how to become more dependent, not less.
The real power of tribes has nothing to do with the Internet and everything to do with people.
Some people read business books looking for confirmation. I read them in search of disquiet. Confirmation is cheap, easy and ineffective. Restlessness and the scientific method, on the other hand, create a culture of testing and inquiry that can’t help but push you forward.
There are always limits, and opportunities. The ones we rehearse and focus on are the ones that shape our future.
If you’re not the best in the world at what you do, then you have to get better.
More than anything else, I think prospects, customers and citizens watch what you do more than they listen to what you say.