Your business has to work when it’s small in order to survive to the point where it gets big.
We choose not to be remarkable because we’re worried about criticism.
Everyone has a little voice inside of their head that’s angry and afraid.
A life without attachment and stress can give you the freedom to see things as they are and call them as you see them. If you had this skill, what an asset you would be to any organization.
In an era of grassroots change, the top of the pyramid is too far away from where the action is to make much of a difference. It.
Something remarkable is worth talking about. Worth noticing. Exceptional. New. Interesting. It’s a Purple Cow.
The thermostat, on the other hand, manages to change the environment in sync with the outside world. Every organization needs at least one thermostat. These are leaders who can create change in response to the outside world, and do it consistently over time.
The mistake that’s so easy to make is to get greedy as you choose your hive, to say, “this product is for everyone” or “anyone can benefit from this idea.” Well, there are seven billion people on the planet, so it’s unlikely your comment is correct; even if it is, there’s little chance that a virus would spread across a hive that big.
The killer: our anxiety not only makes us miserable, but ruins the interaction. People smell it on you. They react to it. They’re less likely to hire you or buy from you or have fun at your party. The very thing you are afraid of occurs, precisely because you are afraid of it, which of course makes the shenpa cycle even worse.
Consumers with otaku are the sneezers you seek. They’re the ones who will take the time to learn about your product, take the risk to try your product, and take their friends’ time to tell them about it. The flash of insight is that some markets have more otaku-stricken consumers than others. The task of the remarkable marketer is to identify these markets and focus on them to the exclusion of lesser markets – regardless of relative size.
There are “only two choices” in life: being criticized or “being ignored”.
Tearing others down is never as helpful to a movement as building your followers up.
Whatever the status quo is, changing it gives you the opportunity to be remarkable.
Simple: If you can’t make it through the Dip, don’t start.
People yearn for change, they relish being part of a movement, and they talk about things that are remarkable, not boring.
Bullet points are not the point.
You weren’t born to be a cog in the giant industrial machine. You were trained to become a cog. There’s an alternative available to you.
The biggest secret of the Internet is that it is inherently a direct marketing medium. In fact, the Internet is the greatest direct marketing medium of all time.
If you want to be a superstar, then you need to find a field with a steep Dip – a barrier between those who try and those who succeed.
When our responses turn into reactions and we set out to teach people a lesson, we lose. We lose because the act of teaching someone a lesson rarely succeeds at changing them, and always fails at making our day better, or our work more useful.