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When you walk around braced for impact, you're dramatically decreasing your chances. Your chances to avoid the outcome you fear, your chances to make a difference, and your chances to breathe and connect.
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We don't need to be taught to make art, but sometimes we need permission to do so. Following instructions is overrated.
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Make enough mole hills, and eventually you will build a mountain.
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Measurement is fabulous. Unless you're busy measuring what's easy to measure as opposed to what's important
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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.
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Fire the committee. No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people. Not one. This is a deal breaker.
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Art is what we're doing when we do our best work.
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The job isn't to catch up to the status quo; the job is to invent the status quo.
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Forgive yourself for not being the richest, the thinnest, the tallest, the one with the best hair. Forgive yourself for not being the most successful, the cutest or the one with the fastest time. Forgive yourself for not winning every round. Forgive yourself for being afraid. But don’t let yourself off the hook, never forgive yourself, for not caring or not trying.
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The people who are the best in the world specialize at getting really good at the questions they don't know.
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You can't win by being more average than average.
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If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either.
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Little changes cost you. Big changes benefit you by changing the game, but only if you go first.
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Is it worth getting one more tweet out, or putting your phone down and doing something that is worth tweeting?
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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.
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Design is the last great competitive advantage.
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Be with the ones you love and the ones that love you. Ignore everyone else.
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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.
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More and more people now have jobs that require them to confront the risk of appearing stupid on a regular basis.
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Acknowledge to yourself that the factory job is dead. Having a factory job is not a natural state. It wasn't at the heart of being human until very recently. We've been culturally brainwashed.
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By the time there is a case study about your industry, you are already too late.
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The desire that we have to do something that’s never been done before means that the people who are around you generally will not encourage you to do it…if they were encouraging you to do it, then other people would be doing it already and it wouldn’t be unique.
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Stop trying to find the formula that will instantly make your idea into a winner. Instead of being scientists, the best marketers are artists. They realize that whatever is being sold is being purchased, because it creates an emotional want, not because it fills a simple need.
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The wettest, weirdest environment is human interaction. Whatever we build gets misunderstood, corroded and chronic, and it happens quickly and in unpredictable ways. That's one reason why the web is so fascinating-it's a collision between the analytic world of code and wet world of people.