The essence of political change is almost always cultural change, and the culture changes horizontally. Person to person. Us to us.
The only purpose of starting is to finish, and while the projects we do are never really finished, they must ship.
Quit the wrong stuff. Stick with the right stuff. Have the guts to do one or the other.
Reality is the best reassurance of all.
We’re extremely adroit at hiding our fear. Most of our lives in public are spent papering over, rationalizing, and otherwise denying our fear. We go to war because we’re afraid, and we often go to spiritual events for the very same reason.
The obvious winners are the mid-sized and smaller companies looking to increase market share. These are the companies that have nothing to lose, but more important, they realize that they have a lot to gain by changing the rules of the game.
Instead of trying to use your technology and expertise to make a better product for your users’ standard behavior, experiment with inviting the users to change their behavior to make the product work dramatically better.
Eye contact, all by itself, is enough to throw your lizard brain into a tizzy. Imagine how scary it must be to set out to do something that will get you noticed, or perhaps even criticized.
A Timid Trapeze Artist Is a Dead Trapeze Artist.
In a competitive world, adversity is your ally. The harder it gets, the better chance you have of insulating yourself from the competition. If that adversity also causes you to quit, though, it’s all for nothing.
Differentiation is a zero-sum, advertising-based game.
Great teachers are precious. Lousy teachers cause damage that lasts forever. We need to reorganize our schools to free the great teachers from tests and reports and busywork, and to expel the lousy.
If you never fail, either you’re really lucky or you haven’t shipped anything.
What will make someone a linchpin is not a shortcut. It’s the understanding of which hard work is worth doing. The only thing that separates great artists from mediocre ones is their ability to push through the dip.
Expectations are the engine of our perceptions.
In creating an ideavirus, the advertiser creates an environment in which the idea can replicate and spread. It’s the virus that does the work, not the marketer.
The Cul-de-Sac and the Cliff Are the Curves That Lead to Failure If you find yourself facing either of these two curves, you need to quit. Not soon, but right now. The biggest obstacle to success in life, as far as I can tell, is our inability to quit these curves soon enough.
We’re all obsessed with ideas because ideas, not products, are the engine of our new economy.
Deadlines? Surely you know someone who is late all the time. Someone who can’t deliver anything of value unless they’ve stalled so much they’ve created an urgency, an emergency that requires mind-blowing effort and adrenaline to deliver. This is not efficient or reliable behavior, and yet they persist. The reason is simple: they can’t push through the common fear of completion unless they can create a greater fear of total failure.
Sure, ideas that spread, win, but ideas that don’t get spoken always fail.