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I Was Amplifying The Negative At The Expense Of The Positive, Not To Serve Any Useful Function, Not To Make My Writing Better, But To Destroy It. The Lizard Brain, So Attuned To People Laughing Behind Our Backs, Was On High Alert For This Sort Of Criticism And Would Do Anything It Could To Stop Me From Writing Again. I Haven't Sought Out And Read A Review Or A Tweet Since.

-Seth Godin

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I Was Amplifying The

Seth Godin

...

I Was Amplifying The Negative At The Expense Of The Positive, Not To Serve Any Useful Function, Not To Make My Writing Better, But To Destroy It. The Lizard Brain, So Attuned To People Laughing Behind Our Backs, Was On High Alert For This Sort Of Criticism And Would Do Anything It Could To Stop Me From Writing Again. I Haven't Sought Out And Read A Review Or A Tweet Since.

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It's Not Reckless, Because When We Leap, When We Dive In, When We Begin, Only Begin, We Bring Our True Nature To The Project, We Make It Personal And Urgent. And It's Not Abandon, Not In The Sense That We've Abandoned Our Senses Or Our Responsibility. In Fact, Abandoning The Fear Of Fear That Is Holding Us Back Is The Single Best Way Not To Abandon The Work, The Pure Execution Of The Work. Later, There's Time To Backpedal And Water Down. But Right Now, Reckless Please.

If The Game Is Designed For You To Lose, Don't Play That Game. Play A Different One.

Doing Justice To The Work Is Your Task, Not Setting A World Record.

If You Can't Be Remarkable, Perhaps You Should Consider Doing Nothing Until You Can.

That's Your Opportunity - To Approach Your Work In A Way That Generates Unique Learning And Interactions That Are Worth Sharing.

The Combination Of Fear And Ignorance (two Sides Of The Same Coin) Can Be Paralyzing.

Marketers Want To Get Their Messages In Front Of You. They Must Get Their Messages In Front Of You, Just To Survive. The Only Problem Is-do You Really Want More Marketing Messages?

The Market And The Consumer And Idea Trump The System.

If You're A Marketer Who Doesn't Know How To Invent, Design, Influence, Adapt, And Ultimately Discard Products, Then You're No Longer A Marketer. You're Deadwood.

Who Gets To Decide What You Want?

If I Fail More Than You Do, I Win.

Be Bold, Make Mistakes, Learn A Lesson, And Fix What Doesn't Work.

Making Mistakes

Reputation Is What People Expect Us To Do Next. It's Their Expectation Of The Quality And Character Of The Next Thing We Produce Or Say Or Do. We Control Our Actions (even When It Feels Like We Don't) And Our Actions Over Time (especially When We Think No One Is Looking) Earn Our Reputation.

Seizing New Ground, Making Connections Between People Or Ideas, Working Without A Map-these Are Works Of Art, And If You Do Them, You Are An Artist, Regardless Of Whether You Wear A Smock, Use A Computer, Or Work With Others All Day Long.

Inspirational Life

Our Job Is Obvious: We Need To Get Out Of The Way, Shine A Light, And Empower A New Generation To Teach Itself And To Go Further And Faster Than Any Generation Ever Has.

So Sure, Start With A Slogan. But Don't Bother Wasting Any Time On It If You're Merely Going For Catchy. Aim For True Instead.

Perhaps Marketing Is About To Transition To A New Kind Of Profession, One That Requires Insight, Dedication And Smarts.

The Reason Social Media Is So Difficult For Most Organizations: It’s A Process, Not An Event.

The Way To Get Unstuck Is To Start Down The Wrong Path, Right Now.

Reject The Tyranny Of Picked. Pick Yourself.

Mind Your Own Business

Human Nature Is To Need A Map. If You’re Brave Enough To Draw One, People Will Follow.

Nobody Says, 'yeah, I'd Like To Set Myself Up For Some Serious Criticism!' And Yet, The Only Way To Be Remarkable Is To Do Just That.

If Failure Is Not An Option, Neither Is Success. Innovation Is Just Repeated Failure Till You Come Up With Something That Works.

Everyone We Interact With Is Changed Forever. The Only Questions Are: How Will They Be Different (and How Different Will They Be), And How Will We Be Different (and How Different Will We Be) As A Result?

Art Is The Act Of Doing Work That Matters While Dancing With The Voice In Your Head That Screams For You To Stop.

The Goal Of A Marketing Interaction Isn't To Close The Sale, Any More Than The Goal Of A First Date Is To Get Married. No, The Opportunity Is To Move Forward, To Earn Attention And Trust And Curiosity And Conversation.

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.

The First Rule Of Doing Work That Matters: Go To Work On A Regular Basis.

We Long To Connect, All Of Us. We Long To Be Noticed, To Be Cared For, To Matter. Generosity Is The Invisible Salve On Our Wound Of Loneliness, One That Benefits Both Sides, Over And Over Again.

Great Work Is Always Shunned At First.

Competent People Are The Most Resistant To Change

That The Horrible Zika Virus Or Hiv, We Can Look At What It Means To Be Patient Zero, What It Means To Need Not Much Contact To Spread, And All Of Those Things Follow Into The Way Ideas Spread.

The Way To Work With A Bully Is To Take The Ball And Go Home. First Time, Every Time. When There's No Ball, There's No Game. Bullies Hate That. So They'll Either Behave So They Can Play With You Or They'll Go Bully Someone Else.

Surprise And Differentiation Have Far More Impact Than Noise Does.

Differentiation

The Digital Asset That Matters Is Trust. Awareness First, Then Interaction, And Maybe A Habit, But All Three Mean Nothing If They Don't Lead To Permission And Trust. The Privilege Of Connection. Everything Else Is Slippery.

The Goal, Then, Isn't To Draw Some Positioning Charts And Announce That You Have Differentiated Your Product. No, The Opportunity Is To Actually Create Something That People Choose To Talk About, Regardless Of What The Competition Is Doing.

When Kids Grow Up Wanting To Be You, You Matter.

Skepticism Doesn't Help You Hear.

Sure, Compare. But Compare The Things That Matter To The Journey You're On. The Rest Is Noise.

Developing Expertise Or Assets That Are Not Easily Copied Is Essential; Otherwise You're Just A Middleman.

The Application Process Changes The List Of Who Applies. Your Applicants Reflect Your Methods.

Once You Have Permission To Talk To Someone, Finding New Products Or Services For Them Is A Smart Way To Grow.

Perfect Can't Possibly Be The Goal, We're Left With Generous, Important And Human Instead.

The Goal Is To Be On The Hook, Not To Let Someone Else Do The Scary Parts.

If You Have A Book To Write, Write It. If You Want To Record An Album, Record It. No Need To Wait For Someone In A Cubicle Halfway Across The Country To Decide If You're Worthy.

The Secret To Being Wrong Isn't To Avoid Being Wrong! The Secret Is Being Willing To Be Wrong. The Secret Is Realizing That Wrong Isn't Fatal.

It's Almost Impossible To Have Fun Playing Ping Pong With Someone Who Doesn't Care, Won't Try Or Isn't Any Good.

I Don’t Think The Shortage Of Artists Has Much To Do With The Innate Ability To Create Or Initiate. I Think It Has To Do With Believing That It’s Possible And Acceptable For You To Do It. We’ve Had These Doors Open Wide For Only A Decade Or So, And Most People Have Been Brainwashed Into Believing That Their Job Is To Copyedit The World, Not To Design It.

If Failure Isn't An Option, Then Success Isn't Either. Success Is Just Failure Repeated Until It Works.

Self Sufficiency Appears To Be A Worthy Goal, But It's Now Impossible If You Want To Actually Get Anything Done. All Our Productivity, Leverage And Insight Comes From Being Part Of A Community, Not Apart From It. The Goal, I Think, Is To Figure Out How To Become More Dependent, Not Less.

After You Produce You Can Select. You Can Curate. You Can Censor. But For Now, Have Bad Ideas, Lots And Lots Of Bad Ideas.

The People Who Are The Best In The World Specialize At Getting Really Good At The Questions They Don't Know.

Connect, Create Meaning, Make A Difference, Matter, Be Missed.

Making A Difference

At Least At First, The New Thing Is Rarely As Good As The Old Thing Was. If You Need The Alternative To Be Better Than The Status Quo From The Very Start, You'll Never Begin.

More And More People Now Have Jobs That Require Them To Confront The Risk Of Appearing Stupid On A Regular Basis.

Rehearsing Failure Is Simply A Bad Habit, Not A Productive Use Of Your Time. When You Choose To Visualize The Path That Works, You're More Likely To Shore It Up And Create An Environment Where It Can Take Place.

Your Success Is No Longer About Your Ability To Do What You Are Told, And Do It Well.

Competition Validates You. It Creates A Category. It Permits The Sale To Be This Or That, Not Yes Or No.

Way More Productive, I Think, To Push Yourself To Be More In The World, Not To Encourage Yourself To Hide.

Most Of Your Competition Spend Their Days Looking Forward To Those Rare Moments When Everything Goes Right. Imagine How Much Leverage You Have If You Spend Your Time Maximizing Those Common Moments When It Doesn't.

The Mirror We Hold Up To The Person Next To Us Is One Of The Most Important Pictures She Will Ever See.

No One Is As Smart As All Of Us.

Increasingly, There Are Only Two Kinds Of Companies: Brave And Dead.

If You Can’t State Your Position In Eight Words, You Don’t Have A Position.

The Cost Of Being Wrong Is Less Than The Cost Of Doing Nothing.

If You Demand That Everything That Happens Be Something You Are Adequately Prepared For, I Wonder If You’ve Chosen Never To Leap In Ways That We Need You To Leap. Once We Embrace This Chasm, Then For The Things For Which We Can Never Be Prepared, We Are Of Course, Always Prepared.

You Can Be Right Or You Can Have Empathy. You Can't Do Both.

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Why Waste A Sentence Saying Nothing?

When We Think Of Design, We Usually Imagine Things That Are Chosen Because They Are Designed. Vases Or Comic Books Or Architecture... It Turns Out, Though, That Most Of What We Make Or Design Is Actually Aimed At A Public That Is There For Something Else. The Design Is Important, But The Design Is Not The Point. Call It "public Design"... Public Design Is For Individuals Who Have To Fill Out Our Tax Form, Interact With Our Website Or Check Into Our Hotel Room Despite The Way It's Designed, Not Because Of It.

The Conversation Is Happening About Your Brand Whether You're A Part Of It Or Not.

Not Adding Value Is The Same As Taking It Away.

Don't Find Customers For Your Products, Find Products For Your Customers.

Loyal Customers

Competence Is No Longer Scarce.

Just As We Don't Spend A Lot Of Time Worrying About How All Those Poets Out There Are Going To Monetize Their Poetry, The Same Is True For Most Bloggers.

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People Talking About You Is Far More Effective Than Talking About Yourself.

Set A Goal, And In Small, Consistent Steps, Work To Reach It. Get Support From Your Peers When You Start Flagging. Repeat. You Will Change.

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.

Marketing Yourself To A New Person Often Involves Being Charismatic, Clever And Quick-but Most Jobs And Most Relationships Are About Being Consistent, Persistent And Brave.

Normal Is Fading Away. Governments And Industries And Schools Like Normal, Because It's Easier, It Scales And It's Profitable. But People Don't Like It - We Want To Be Who We Are, Not Who Some Marketer Tells Us To Be.

The Only Reason To Build A Website Is To Change Someone. If You Can't Tell Me The Change And You Can't Tell Me The Someone, Then You're Wasting Your Time.

Wasting Your Time

Laptop Computers Dramatically Increased The Time People Spend Doing Work. (the Internet Dramatically Decreased It, So We're Even).

What People Want Is The Extra, The Emotional Bonus They Get When They Buy Something They Love.

Here's The Thing: The Book That Will Most Change Your Life Is The Book You Write.

Isn't The Drawing Board The Place Where All The Best Work Happens? It's Not A Bad Thing To Go Back There. It's The Entire Point.

Deadlines Have A Lousy Name. Call Them Live-lines Instead. That´t What They Are.

Do You Know What People Want More Than Anything? They Want To Be Missed. They Want To Be Missed The Day They Don't Show Up. They Want To Be Missed When They're Gone.

The Key To Getting A Reputation For Being Brilliant Is Actually Being Brilliant, Not Just Acting Like You Are.

Embracing The Fear Of Freedom, Deciding To Determine Your Own Path, This Is The Work Of A Grownup.

Making An Average Pitch To Average People, Or Having An Average Gala For Average People Isn't Going To Scale Anymore. You've Got To Find The People Who Care. Those People Are Worth All Of Your Time.

I'll Confess That I Don't Watch The Olympics, But You'd Have To Be Living Under A Rock To Be Unaware Of The Corruption And The Expense. An Amorphous Organization With No Transparency, Unclear Lines Of Responsibility, Huge Amounts Of Politics And A Great Deal Of Unearned Power.

Fear Is The Dream Killer, The Silent Voice That Pushes Us To Lose Our Passion In A Vain Attempt To Seek Safety.

Shame Must Be Accepted To Be Effective.

No One Can Be Responsible For Where Or How We Each Begin. No One Has The Freedom To Do Anything Or Everything, And All Choices Bring Consequences. What We Choose To Do Next, Though, How To Spend Our Resources Or Attention Or Effort, This Is What Defines Us.

Today, Not Starting Is Far, Far Worse Than Being Wrong. If You Start, You've Got A Shot At Evolving And Adjusting To Turn Your Wrong Into A Right. But If You Don't Start, You Never Get A Chance.

Think Big. Start Small.

It Takes Three Years To Be An Overnight Success, Sometimes More.

There Are Lots Of Good Reasons To Abandon A Project. Having A Little Competition Is Not One Of Them.

Winners Quit All The Time. They Just Quit The Right Stuff At The Right Time.

Excellence Isn't About Meeting The Spec, It's About Setting The Spec.

The Innovator Creates A Business Where They Are Making Money, Even When They Sleep.

I Was Amplifying The Negative At The Expense Of The Positive, Not To Serve Any Useful Function, Not To Make My Writing Better, But To Destroy It. The Lizard Brain, So Attuned To People Laughing Behind Our Backs, Was On High Alert For This Sort Of Criticism And Would Do Anything It Could To Stop Me From Writing Again. I Haven't Sought Out And Read A Review Or A Tweet Since.

The Resistance Is Not Something To Be Avoided, It's Something To Seek Out.

But This Is A Remarkable Egg, An Egg Worth Talking About, An Egg Worth Crossing The Street For, An Egg Worth Writing About.

The Opportunity Is Not In Being Momentarily Popular With The Anonymous Masses. It's In Being Missed When You're Gone, In Doing Work That Matters To The Tribe You Choose.

People Watch What You Do More Than Listen To What You Say.

And It Turns Out That Tribes, Not Money, Not Factories, That Can Change Our World, That Can Change Politics, That Can Align Large Numbers Of People. Not Because You Force Them To Do Something Against Their Will. But Because They Wanted To Connect.

Personalizatio N Wasn't Supposed To Be A Cleverly Veiled Way To Chase Prospects Around The Web, Showing Them The Same Spammy Ad For The Same Lame Stuff As Everyone Else Sees. No, It Is A Chance To Differentiate At A Human Scale, To Use Behavior As The Most Important Clue About What People Want And More Important, What They Need.

You Succeed Because You've Chosen To Be Confident. It's Not Really Useful To Require Yourself To Be Successful Before You're Able To Become Confident.

The First Step Toward Becoming Extraordinary Is, Of Course, To Stop Being Ordinary.

A Well-defined Backup Plan Is Sabotage Waiting To Happen. Why Push Through The Dip, Why Take The Risk, Why Blow It All When There's The Comfortable Alternative Instead? The People Who Break Through Usually Have Nothing To Lose, And They Almost Never Have A Backup Plan.

I Think That The Economics Of Book Publishing Favor Hits With Long Book Runs. You Make All Your Money On The Last Bunch Of Books, Not The First.

Without A Specific Reason For The Consumer To Behave, Without A Reward Or Benefit, The Overwhelmed Consumer Will Refuse.

Fitting In Is A Short-term Strategy That Gets You Nowhere. Standing Out Is A Long-term Strategy That Takes Guts And Produces Results.

The Market ... Demands A Signal From You That You're Serious, Powerful, Accepted, And Safe.

Don’t Do It Because It’s Your Job, Do It Because You Can.

It Always Feels Too Soon To Leap. But You Have To. Because That's The Moment Between You And Remarkable.

You Can Risk Being Wrong Or You Can Be Boring.

Your Positions On Everything Are Based On The Story You Tell Yourself And Not Some Universal Fact From The Universal Fact Database.

We Live In A Vague World. And It Gets Vaguer All The Time. In This Environment, The Power Of The Specific, Measurable And Useful Promise Made And Kept Is Difficult To Overstate.

Yes, I Think It's Okay To Abandon The Big, Established, Stuck Tribe. It's Okay To Say To Them, "you're Not Going Where I Need To Go, And There's No Way I'm Going To Persuade All Of You To Follow Me. So Rather Than Standing Here Watching The Opportunities Fade Away, I'm Heading Off. I'm Betting Some Of You, The Best Of You, Will Follow Me.

Most Of The Time, Creative Entrepreneurs Lose Interest Long Before Their Marketing Message Loses Its Power.

By My Definition, Most Art Has Nothing To Do With Oil Paint Or Marble. Art Is What We're Doing When We Do Our Best Work.

Faith In Yourself, In Your Friends, In Your Colleagues And Most Of All, Faith In Your Ability To Impact Our Future Is The Best Strategy I Know.

Studying Entrepreneurshi P Without Doing It... Is Like Studying The Appreciation Of Music Without Listening To It.

Make More Decisions. That's The Only Way To Get Better At It.

The Most Successful Givers Aren’t Doing It Because They’re Being Told To. They Do It Because Doing It Is Fun. It Gives Them Joy.

Optimism Is The Most Important Human Trait, Because It Allows Us To Evolve Our Ideas, To Improve Our Situation, And To Hope For A Better Tomorrow.

Remarkable Visions And Genuine Insight Are Always Met With Resistance. And When You Start To Make Progress, Your Efforts Are Met With Even More Resistance. Products, Services, Career Paths... Whatever It Is, The Forces For Mediocrity Will Align To Stop You, Forgiving No Errors And Never Backing Down Until It's Over

The Problem With Putting It All On The Line Is That It Might Not Work Out. The Problem With Not Putting It All On The Line Is That It Will Never (ever) Change Things For The Better. Not Much Of A Choice, I Think.

In Contemporary Art Or Movies, It Makes Perfect Sense To Be Focused On The Bleeding Edge, On The New Idea That's Never Been Previously Contemplated. But When We're Discussing Our Goals, Our Passion And The Way We Interact With The Culture, It Seems To Me That What Works Is Significantly More Important Than What's New.

Now For The First Time, You Can Choose Yourself. You Can Be Responsible For What You Do And How You Do It. You Have To Do The Hard Work Of Finding And Pleasing An Audience.

You Market When You Hire And When You Fire. You Market When You Call Tech Support, And You Market Every Time You Send A Memo.

A Book Is A Souvenir Of An Idea.

Art Is A Personal Act Of Courage.

Acts Of Courage

It's Pretty Easy To Decide To Roll With The Punches, To Look At The Enormity Of Natural Disaster And Choose To Hunker Down And Do Less. It's More Important Than Ever, I Think, To Persist And Make A Dent In The Universe Instead. We've All Been Offered Access To So Many Tools, So Many Valuable Connections, So Many Committed People. What An Opportunity.

If You Hear My Idea But Don't Believe It, That's Not Your Fault; It's Mine. If You See My New Product But Don't Buy It, That's My Failure, Not Yours. If You Attend My Presentation And You're Bored, That's My Fault Too.

Anxiety Is Experiencing Failure In Advance. Tell Yourself Enough Vivid Stories About The Worst Possible Outcome Of Your Work And You'll Soon Come To Believe Them. Worry Is Not Preparation, And Anxiety Doesn't Make You Better.

Sometimes, We're So Focused On Being Consistent That We Also Lower The Bar On Amazing. After All, The Thinking Goes, If We Can't Be Amazing All The Time, Better To Reset The Expectation To Merely Good. Which Robs Us Of The Ability To (sometimes) Be Amazing.

It's Easy To Pretend Expertise When There's No Data To Contradict You.

The Best Favors Are Worth Doing For The Doing, Not Because We'll Ever Get Paid Back Appropriately.

The Question Is Not Will You Succeed? But Rather, Will You Matter?

It's Entirely Possible That There Won't Be A Standing Ovation At The End Of Your Journey. That's Okay. At Least You Lived.

If You're Remarkable, Then It's Likely That Some People Won't Like You. That's Part Of The Definition Of Remarkable. Nobody Gets Unanimous Praise - Ever. The Best The Timid Can Hope For Is To Be Unnoticed. Criticism Comes To Those Who Stand Out. Playing It Safe. Following The Rules. They Seem Like The Best Ways To Avoid Failure. Alas, That Pattern Is Awfully Dangerous. The Current Marketing “rules” Will Ultimately Lead To Failure. In A Crowded Marketplace, Fitting In Is Failing. In A Busy Marketplace, Not Standing Out Is The Same As Being Invisible.

You're Competing Against People In A State Of Flow, People Who Are Truly Committed, People Who Care Deeply About The Outcome.

Empathy Requires Something Extremely Difficult: Accepting The Fact That We Are Not And Never Will Be In The Other Person's Shoes. There's No Rational, Universal Course Because Individuals Have Different Goals, Different Worldviews And Different Experiences.

Different Experiences

People Rarely Buy What They Need. They Buy What They Want.

Art...is The Intentional Act Of Using Your Humanity To Create A Change In Another Person...passion Is Caring Enough About Your Art That You Will Do Almost Anything To Give It Away, To Make It A Gift, To Change People.

Caring, It Turns Out, Is A Competitive Advantage, And One That Takes Effort, Not Money.

I Think It's Fascinating To Note That Some Of The Most Successful Organizations Of Our Time Got There By Focusing Obsessively On Service, Viewing Compensation As An Afterthought Or A Side Effect. As Marketing Gets More And More Expensive, It Turns Out That Caring For People Is A Useful Shortcut To Trust, Which Leads To All The Other Things That A Growing Organization Seeks.

The Ladder Of Success Isn't A Ladder. It's A Series Of Steps With Leaps Interspersed Along The Way.

Do You Believe In What You Do? Every Day? It Turns Out That Belief Happens To Be A Brilliant Strategy.

If You Think Your Organization Needs A Bigger Marketing Budget, Maybe You Just Need To Be Less Average Instead.

Most People Are Searching For A Path To Success That Is Both Easy And Certain. Most Paths Are Neither.

Leaders Have Followers, Managers Have Employees. Managers Make Widgets, Leaders Make Change.

The Only Path To Amazing Runs Directly Through Not-yet-amazing

The Joy Of Art Is Particularly Sweet, Though, Because It Carries With It The Threat Of Rejection, Of Failure, And Of Missed Connections. It's Precisely The High-wire Act Of "this Might Not Work" That Makes Original Art Worth Doing.

Your Art Is The Act Of Taking Personal Responsibility, Challenging The Status Quo, And Changing People.

The Next Thing You Do Today Will Be The Most Important Thing On Your Agenda, Because, After All, You're Doing It Next. Well, Perhaps It Will Be The Most Urgent Thing. Or The Easiest. In Fact, The Most Important Thing Probably Isn't Even On Your Agenda.

Mass Attention Is Almost Unattainable And It's Not Clear That You Want It.

The First Step To Getting Good Is Admitting That You Aren't (yet).

The Tragedy Is That Society (your School, Your Boss, Your Government, Your Family) Keeps Drumming The Genius Part Out. The Problem Is That Our Culture Has Engaged In A Faustian Bargain, In Which We Trade Our Genius And Artistry For Apparent Stability.

Marketing Is The Art Of Seeing (and Then Creating) What Might Be Interesting To More Than Our Friends

You Don't Need More Time In Your Day. You Need To Decide.

We’ve Been Trained To Prefer Being Right To Learning Something, To Prefer Passing The Test To Making A Difference, And Most Of All, To Prefer Fitting In With The Right People, The People With Economic Power. Now It’s Your Turn To Stand Up And Stand Out.

Making A Difference

What People Are Afraid Of Isn't Failure. It's Blame. Criticism.

We Notice What We Choose To Notice.

Great Work Is The Result Of Seeking Out Tension, Not Avoiding It.

You Don't Have To Settle For The Status Quo, For Being Good Enough, For Getting By, For Working All Night.

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.

You Cannot Create A Piece Of Art Merely For Money. Doing It As Part Of Commerce So Denudes Art Of Wonder That It Ceases To Be Art.

Perhaps Your Challenge Isn't Finding A Better Project Or A Better Boss. Perhaps You Need To Get In Touch With What It Means To Feel Passionate. People With Passion Look For Ways To Make Things Happen.

I Look At Starbucks, Howard Schultz Has Made Many Brilliant Decisions, And One Of The Things That They Did Was They Invented The Third Space. It's Not Work, It's Not Home. That's One Of The Engines Of Its Spread. But At The Same Time He Was Doing That, He Bet The Farm To Open More And More Stores In Any Given Town, And Making It Ubiquitous Made It Much Easier To Say To Your Friend, I'll Meet You At Starbucks.

Being Aware Of Your Fear Is Smart. Overcoming It Is The Mark Of A Successful Person.

Teaching Young People To Sell Is A Priceless Gift.

Your Biggest Failure Is The Thing You Dreamed Of Contributing But Didn't Find The Guts To Do.

If You Are Wiling To Do Something That Might Not Work, You Are Closer To Being An Artist.

Incrementalism Ceases To Be A Good Strategy When There's A Cliff On The Route.

I Have Something To Say. I Know How To Do Something. I’m Doing It. If You Want Me To Do It With You, Raise Your Hand.

Our Job Is To Make Change. Our Job Is To Connect To People, To Interact With Them In A Way That Leaves Them Better Than We Found Them, More Able To Get Where They'd Like To Go. Every Time We Waste That Opportunity, Every Page Or Sentence That Doesn't Do Enough To Advance The Cause Is Waste.

Gratitude And Opportunity Create More Of The Same.

Don't Fix Me; Love Me For What's Broken.

A Brand Is The Set Of Expectations, Memories, Stores And Relationships That, Taken Together, Account For A Consumer's Decision To Choose One Product Or Service Over Another.

Networking That Matters Is Helping People Achieve Their Goals.

The Secret Of Leadership Is Simple: Do What You Believe In. Paint A Picture Of The Future. Go There. People Will Follow.

The Best Time To Start Promoting Your Book Is Three Years Before It Comes Out. Three Years To Build A Reputation, Build A Permission Asset, Build A Blog, Build A Following, Build Credibility And Build The Connections You'll Need Later.

As Our Society Gets More Complex And Our People Get More Complacent, The Role Of The Jester Is More Vital Than Ever Before. Please Stop Sitting Around. We Need You To Make A Ruckus.

You Can Define Advertising As The Science Of Creating And Placing Media That Interrupts The Consumer And Then Gets Him Or Her To Take Some Action.

Competence Is The Enemy Of Change!

If You're In The Idea Business, It Doesn't Matter Where You're From. It Matters If We Care About The Change You're Making.

In A Crowded Marketplace, Fitting In Is A Failure. In A Busy Marketplace, Not Standing Out Is The Same As Being Invisible.

Nine Years Of Experience Is Very Different From One Year Of Experience, Nine Times.

Viewing The Web As A Platform For Generosity Is Very Different Than Seeing An Opportunity To Turn It Into An Atm Machine.

Instead Of Working Hard To Keep Their Share Of A Shrinking Pie, Or Working Even Harder To Make Sure The Industry Stays As Is, I Think The Most Essential Thing Legacy Book Industry Players Can Do Is Set Up Independent Ventures With Great People And Little Interference And Work Really Hard To Put Themselves Out Of Business By Starting At The Bottom, Not By Reinforcing The Top.

Average Feels Safe But It's Not. It's Invisible.

You Don't Have Enough Time To Be Both Unhappy & Mediocre. It's Not Just Pointless; It's Painful.

Defending Mediocrity Is Exhausting.

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