What are you working on? If someone asks you that, are you excited to tell them the answer? If you’re not, you’re wasting away.
Life is like skiing. Just like skiing, the goal is not to get to the bottom of the hill. It’s to have a bunch of good runs before the sun sets.
Ideas in secret die. They need light and air or they starve to death.
Organizations that destroy the status quo win. Whatever the status quo is, changing it gives you the opportunity to be remarkable.
Good marketers tell a story.
You have to pay the price to be in the right place at the right time often enough that people tend to see you as the regular kind.
Choices lead to habits. Habits become talents. Talents are labeled gifts. You’re not born this way, you get this way.
Transformation al leaders don’t start by denying the world around them. Instead, they describe a future they’d like to create instead.
To make a product, to market an idea, to come up with any problem you want to solve that doesn’t have a constituency within otaku is almost impossible. There’s a hot sauce otaku, but there’s no mustard otaku.
In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.
The problem with taking offense is that it’s really hard to figure out what to do with it after you’re done using it. Better to just leave it on the table and walk away. Umbrage untaken quietly disappears.
What marketers used to do is make average products for average people. That’s what mass marketing is. They would ignore the geeks, and – God forbid – the laggards. It was all about going for the center. I don’t think that’s the strategy we want to use anymore.
One reason I encourage people to blog is that the act of doing it stretches your available vocabulary and hones a new voice.
Figure out the people part and the technology gets a whole lot simpler.
Own your dreams. There is no better way to make them happen.
So by giving people a tool that they can share and benefit from, it’s a form of media that isn’t controlled by Rupert Murdoch or the guys at Viacom. It is a form of media that is earned every single time it spreads.
Your audacious life goals are fabulous. We’re proud of you for having them. But it’s possible that those goals are designed to distract you from the thing that’s really frightening you – the shift in daily habits that would mean a re-invention of how you see yourself.
Getting picked is fine if it happens to you. But it’s not a plan. It’s a version of waiting and hoping.
A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stores and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.
Our job is to make change. Our job is to connect to people, to interact with them in a way that leaves them better than we found them, more able to get where they’d like to go. Every time we waste that opportunity, every page or sentence that doesn’t do enough to advance the cause is waste.