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.
How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?
When you think about Uber and Airbnb and the other companies that are turning things upside down, Uber isn’t big ’cause they ran a lot of ads. They’re big because someone took out their iPhone and said to their friend, watch this, and pressed a button and a car pulled up.
The challenge of our time is to find a journey worthy of your heart and your soul.
You have everything you need to build something far bigger than yourself.
The librarian isn’t a clerk who happens to work in a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.
We’re better in the rearview mirror than we are at predicting – ’cause you’re never going to be right every time. You can handicap it. You can point to certain elements that make it work, and many of those elements come straight out of epidemiology, right?
When we intentionally seek out the difficult tasks, we’re much more likely to actually create value.
That the horrible Zika virus or HIV, we can look at what it means to be patient zero, what it means to need not much contact to spread, and all of those things follow into the way ideas spread.
The challenge with being an initiator of projects is that you are never, ever done.