In the linchpin economy, the winners are once again the artists who give gifts. Giving a gift makes you indispensable. Inventing a gift, creating art – that is what the market seeks out, and the givers are the ones who earn our respect and attention.
Emotional labor is the task of doing important work, even when it isn’t easy. Emotional.
Make it easy to believe.
Average Is for Losers.
It doesn’t matter if anyone reads it, buys it, sponsors it or shares it. It matters that you show up.
It’s human nature to be weird, but also human to be lonely. This conflict between fitting in and standing out is at the core of who we are.
Generous and authentic leadership will always defeat the selfish efforts of someone doing it just because she can.
Expertise gives you enough insight to reinvent what everyone else assumes is the truth. Sure, it’s possible to randomly challenge the conventions of your field and luckily find a breakthrough. It’s far more likely, though, that you will design a great Web site or direct a powerful movie or lead a breakthrough product development if you understand the status quo better than anyone else. Beginner’s luck is dramatically overrated. Emotional.
Because frequency is free in an online permission program, and much more effective offline, the marketer has the luxury of riding the impact curve up without a matching cost curve.
Before a marketer can build trust, it must breed familiarity. But there’s no familiarity without awareness. And awareness – the science of letting people know you exist and getting them to understand your message – can’t happen effectively in today’s environment without advertising.
Managers manage a process they’ve seen before, and they react to the outside world, striving to make that process as fast and as cheap as possible. Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change that you believe in.
Marketing, more than a lake or a forest, is the landscape of our modern lives.
So we take the deal. We agree to do a job in exchange for a set of instructions. And for the hundred years that it led to increasing standards of living, it seemed like a very good deal.
I think most people have it upside down. Being charismatic doesn’t make you a leader. Being a leader makes you charismatic. There.
Marketing is the act of making change happen. Making is insufficient. You haven’t made an impact until you’ve changed someone.
What most people want in a leader is something that’s very difficult to find: we want someone who listens. Why.
Marketers make things better by making change happen.
If school is about postponing the day you have to stand up in front of the world and put yourself at risk, the resistance would like to stay there forever.
Most of the time, we deal with the obstacles by persevering. Sometimes we get discouraged and turn to inspirational writing, like stuff from Vince Lombardi: “Quitters never win and winners never quit.” Bad advice. Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.
Marketing is one of our greatest callings. It’s the work of positive change.