And the reason is that until Wonder came along and figured out how to spread the idea of sliced bread, no one wanted it. That the success of sliced bread is not always about what the patent is like or what the factory is like, it’s about can you get your idea to spread or not?
Fitting in is a short-term strategy that gets you nowhere. Standing out is a long-term strategy that takes guts and produces results.
And it doesn’t matter to me whether you’re running a coffee shop or you’re an intellectual or you’re in business or flying hot air balloons. People who can spread ideas, regardless of what those ideas are, win. But consumers, they got way more choices than they used to and way less time.
Transferring your passion to your job is far easier than finding a job that happens to match your passion.
Either you defend the status quo, or you invent the future.
Go ahead and act as if your decisions are temporary. Because they are. Be bold, make mistakes, learn a lesson, and fix what doesn’t work. No sweat, no need to hyperventilate.
You have brilliance in you, your contribution is valuable, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do, and you must.
People don’t believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves.
There’s a huge difference between being a replaceable cog on the assembly line and being the one who is missed, the one with a unique contribution, the one who made a difference.
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.
Your drudgery is another person’s delight. It’s only a job if you treat it that way. The privilege to do our work, to be in control of the promises we make and the things we build, is something worth cherishing.
If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.
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.