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.
Waiting isn’t easy, which is precisely why it is so effective when engaging with other people.
The reason Steve Herrell’s shop did so well is that it was famous for having a line! People brought folks from out of town to have the experience.
Instead of being scientists, the best marketers are artists.
Linchpins are the essential building blocks of tomorrow’s high-value organizations. They don’t bring capital or expensive machinery, nor do they blindly follow instructions and merely contribute labor. Linchpins are indispensable, the driving force of our future.
Wouldn’t it be great to be gifted? In fact... It turns out that choices lead to habits. Habits become talents. Talents are labeled gifts. You’re not born this way, you get this way.
Ten times as much polishing is definitely not ten times as good. Whether you’re polishing a piece of furniture or an idea, the benefits diminish quickly. The polishing turns into stalling.
Fear of criticism is a powerful deterrent because the criticism doesn’t actually have to occur for the fear to set in. Watch a few people get criticized for being innovate, and it’s pretty easy to convince yourself that the very same thing will happen to you if you’re not careful.
Permission Marketing is just like dating. It turns strangers into friends and friends into lifetime customers. Many of the rules of dating apply, and so do many of the benefits.
It’s more about a five- or ten- or fifteen-year process where you start finding your voice, and finally you begin to realize that the safest thing you can do feels risky and the riskiest thing you can do is play it safe.