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It's much easier to spend a lot of time making your microphone louder than it is working on making your message more compelling.
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You win by trying. And failing. Test, try, fail, measure, evolve, repeat, persist.
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We are too focused on avoiding criticism and not enough on making a difference.
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As creators, our pursuit of perfection might be misguided, particularly if it comes at the expense of the things that matter.
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That's why there's lots and lots of kinds of hot sauces, and not so many kinds of mustard. Not because it's hard to make interesting mustard - you could make interesting mustard - but people don't, because no one's obsessed with it, and thus no one tells their friends.
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The key to success is to find a way to stand out--to be the purple cow in a field of monochrome Holsteins.
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Two elements of successful leadership: a willingness to be wrong and an eagerness to admit it.
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Tribes makes our lives better, and leading a tribe is the best life of all.
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The goal in blogging/ business/ inspiring non-fiction is to share a truth, or at least a truth as the writer sees it. To not just share it, but to spread it and to cause change to happen. You can do that in at least three ways: with research (your own or reporting on others), by building and describing conceptual structures, or with stories that resonate.
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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.
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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.
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The organizations of the future are filled with smart, fast, flexible people on a mission
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Fitting in is a short-term strategy that gets you nowhere. Standing out is a long-term strategy that takes guts and produces results.
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Teaching young people to sell is a priceless gift.
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The sooner we realize that the world has changed, the sooner we can accept it and make something of what we've got. Whining isn't a scalable solution.
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If you think cat food is for cats, how come it doesn't come in mouse flavor?
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If it's worth listening to, it's worth questioning until you understand it.
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Seek out habits that help you overcome fear or inertia. Destroy those that do the opposite.
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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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You don't have enough time to be both unhappy & mediocre. It's not just pointless; it's painful.
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The question is not Will you succeed? but rather, Will you matter?
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We notice what we choose to notice.
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What makes someone an artist? I don't think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artist who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.
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Sooner or later, the ones who told you that this isn't the way it's done, the ones who found time to sneer, they will find someone else to hassle. Sooner or later, they stop pointing out how much hubris you've got, how you're not entitled to make a new thing, how you will certainly come to regret your choices. Sooner or later, your work speaks for itself. Outlasting the critics feels like it will take a very long time, but you're more patient than they are.