- “Think big. Start small.”
- “Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress.”
- “The only thing worse than starting something and failing is not starting something.”
- “Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.”
- “Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.”
- “Don’t waste time looking for a better pencil: learn to write better.”
- “If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.”
- “I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance.”
- “No organization ever created an innovation. People innovate, not companies.”
- “Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.”
- “Be genuine. Be remarkable. Be worth connecting with.”
- “The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.”
- “Be bold, make mistakes, learn a lesson, and fix what doesn’t work.”
- “How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?”
- “If failure is not an option, then neither is success.”
- “If you measure it, it will improve.”
- “Soon is not as good as now.”
- “You can raise the bar or you can wait for others to raise it, but it’s getting raised regardless.”
- “You are not your resume, you are your work.”
- “The future of marketing is leadership.”
- “Just start. Start now. Fail often. Enjoy the ride.”
- “Go ahead, do something impossible.”
- “You win by trying. And failing. Test, try, fail, measure, evolve, repeat, persist…”
- “Change is not a threat, it’s an opportunity. Survival is not the goal, transformative success is.”
- “Connect, create meaning, make a difference, matter, be missed.”
- “You don’t need more time in your day. You need to decide.”
- “Flexible in the face of change, resilient in the face of confusion. All of these attributes are choices, not talents, and all of them are available to you.”
- “Everyone is not your customer.”
- “Playing safe is very risky.”
- “The big win is when you refuse to settle for average or mediocre.”
- “Please stop waiting for a map. We reward those who draw maps, not those who follow them.”
- “Dig your well before you’re thirsty.”
- “Here’s the thing: The book that will most change your life is the book you write.”
- “You can use social media to turn strangers into friends, friends into customers and customers into salespeople.”
- “Communication is the transfer of emotion.”
- “Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.”
- “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”
- “The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.”
- “Facts are irrelevant. What matters is what the consumer believes.”
- “You have everything you need to build something far bigger than yourself.”
- “Criticism comes to those who stand out.”
- “The reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is that you haven’t given them anything else to care about.”
- “Keep starting until you finish.”
- “Not adding value is the same as taking it away.”
- “Change almost never fails because it’s too early. It almost always fails because it’s too late.”
- “How do I dance with the fear? Fear is not the enemy. Paralysis is the enemy.”
- “Art is a personal act of courage.”
- “The less people know, the more they yell.”
- “If I fail more than you do, I win.”
- “Content marketing is the only marketing left.”
- “Transformational leaders don’t start by denying the world around them. Instead, they describe a future they’d like to create instead.”
- “Choices lead to habits. Habits become talents. Talents are labeled gifts. You’re not born this way, you get this way.”
- “A dialogue leads to connection, which leads to trust, which leads to engagement.”
- “The first step toward becoming extraordinary is, of course, to stop being ordinary.”
- “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.”
- “There’s no shortage of remarkable ideas, what’s missing is the will to execute them.”
- “Dreams are difficult to build and easy to destroy.”
- “You don’t win an Olympic gold medal with a few weeks of intensive training.”
- “Either you defend the status quo, or you invent the future.”
- “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.”
- “Every activity worth doing has a learning curve.”
- “Marketing is a contest for people’s attention.”
- “Transferring your passion to your job is far easier than finding a job that happens to match your passion.”
- “In other words, if you don’t take action, you won’t get any results. You are not your resume, you are your work.”
- “I don’t think we have any choice. I think we have an obligation to change the rules, to raise the bar, to play a different game, and to play it better than anyone has any right to believe is possible.”
- “People are not afraid of failure, they’re afraid of blame.”
- “Why waste a sentence saying nothing?”
- “Anyone who says failure is not an option has also ruled out innovation.”
- “The only purpose of customer service is to change feelings.”
- “A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.”
- “An organization filled with honest, motivated, connected, eager, learning, experimenting, ethical and driven people will always defeat the one that merely has talent. Every time.”
- “If you wait until you are ready, it is almost certainly too late.”
- “The purpose of an elevator pitch is to describe a situation or solution so compelling that the person you’re with wants to hear more even after the elevator ride is over.”
- “If you hesitate to map out your future, to make a big plan or to set a goal, you’ve just gone ahead and mapped your future anyway.”
- “Plans are great, but missions are better.”
- “Anything worth achieving in life has a dip.”
- “Art is the work of a human, an individual seeking to make a statement, to cause a reaction, to connect. Art is something new, every time, and art might not work, precisely because it’s new, because it’s human, and because it seeks to connect.”
- “Learning is not done to you, it is something you choose to do.”
- “If the game is designed for you to lose, don’t play that game. Play a different one.”
- “If we can fall in love with serving people, creating value, solving problems, building valuable connections and doing work that matters, it makes it far more likely we’re going to do important work.”
- “Go ahead and act as if your decisions are temporary. Because they are. Be bold, make mistakes, learn a lesson, and fix what doesn’t work. No sweat, no need to hyperventilate.”
- “If failure isn’t an option, then success isn’t either. Success is just failure repeated until it works.”
- “Cheap is the last refuge of a product developer or marketer who is out of great ideas.”
- “Not changing your strategy merely because you’re used to the one you have now is a lousy strategy.”
- “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.”
- “Data is not useful until it becomes information.”
- “It’s never too late to start heading in the right direction.”
- “Choose your customers, choose your future.”
- “Great work is the result of seeking out tension, not avoiding it.”
- “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.”
- “It’s human nature to quit when it hurts. But it’s that reflex that creates scarcity.”
- “The easier it is to quantify, the less it’s worth.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “Organizations that destroy the status quo win. Whatever the status quo is, changing it gives you the opportunity to be remarkable.”
- “Fitting in is a short-term strategy, standing out pays off in the long run.”
- “By definition, remarkable things get remarked upon.”
- “If you work in an urgent-only culture, the only solution is to make the right things urgent.”
- “We are leaving the industrial economy and entering the connection economy.”
- “Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people.”
- “Good ideas come from bad ideas, but only if there are enough of them.”
- “Most people have been brainwashed into believing that their job is to copyedit the world, not to design it.”
- “Practice works because practice gives us a chance to relax enough to make smart choices.”
- “You can’t shrink your way to greatness!”
- “Don’t be different just to be different. Be different to be better.”
- “What I learned: Shun nonbelievers. Ignore critics. Do your best for people who want to dance with you.”
- “You don’t have to settle. It’s a choice you get to make every day.”
- “Whining isn’t a scalable solution.”
- “Go do something interesting. Ask if you need help.”
- “Anticipated, personal, and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.”
- “How was your day? If your answer was ‘fine,’ then I don’t think you were leading.”
- “Surprise and delight and connection are remarkable.”
- “Following the well-lit path offers little in the way of magic.”
- “If you want to dig a big hole, you need to stay in one place.”
- “Earn trust, earn trust, earn trust. Then you can worry about the rest.”
- “People rarely buy what they need. They buy what they want.”
- “Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change you believe in.”
- “Successful people fail often, and, worth noting, learn more from that failure than everyone else.”
- “Your audacious life goals are fabulous. We’re proud of you for having them. But it’s possible that those goals are designed to distract you from the thing that’s really frightening you – the shift in daily habits that would mean a re-invention of how you see yourself.”
- “Anxiety is practicing failure in advance. Anxiety is needless and imaginary. It’s fear about fear, fear that means nothing.”
- “The person who fails the most wins.”
- “Measurement is fabulous. Unless you’re busy measuring what’s easy to measure as opposed to what’s important.”
- “Excellence isn’t about working extra hard to do what you’re told. It’s about taking the initiative to do work you decide is worth doing.”
- “Set up a life you don’t need to escape from.”
- “You have brilliance in you, your contribution is valuable, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do, and you must.”
- “The YouTube video maker gets more out of making a video than you get out of watching it.”
- “Busy does not equal important. Measured doesn’t mean mattered.”
- “If you wait until there is another case study in your industry, you will be too late!”
- “The problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win.”
- “Gifts are not favors. If you expect something in return, it’s not a gift.”
- “Two different things: A crowd is a tribe without a leader. A crowd is a tribe without communication. Most organizations spend their time marketing to the crowd. Smart organizations assemble the tribe.”
- “The devil doesn’t need an advocate. The brave need supporters, not critics.”
- “Great bosses challenge people in the right way. Leading, not managing. Supporting them by giving them both a platform they can count on and expectations they can stretch for.”
- “Initiative is the privilege of picking yourself.”
- “Being aware of your fear is smart. Overcoming it is the mark of a successful person.”
- “Leaders have followers, managers have employees. Managers make widgets, leaders make change.”
- “A brand that stands for what all brands stand for stands for nothing much.”
- “The object isn’t to be perfect. The goal isn’t to hold back until you’ve created something beyond reproach. I believe the opposite is true. Our birthright is to fail and to fail often, but to fail in search of something bigger than we can imagine. To do anything else is to waste it all.”
- “The only long-term motivation is self-motivation. So hire people who are self-motivated and get out of their way.”
- “If you’re not proud of where you work, go work somewhere else.”
- “Permission marketing is marketing without interruptions.”
- “Denigrating art you don’t understand doesn’t hurt the art – it reveals something about your willingness to learn.”
- “The key to success is to find a way to stand out – to be the purple cow in a field of monochrome Holsteins.”
- “Art isn’t only a painting. Art is anything that is creative, passionate, and personal. Art is the unique work of a human being created to touch another. Art is created to have an impact, to change someone else.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.”
- “Excellence isn’t about meeting the spec; it’s about setting the spec. It defines what the consumer sees as quality right this minute, and tomorrow, if you’re good, you’ll reset that expectation again.”
- “It’s not an accident that successful people read more books.”
- “No more than six words on a slide. Ever. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken.”
- “The job isn’t to catch up to the status quo; the job is to invent the status quo.”
- “Marketing management is now tribal leadership.”
- “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.”
- “The challenge of our time is to find a journey worthy of your heart and your soul.”
- “Saying no to loud people gives you the resources to say yes to important opportunities.”
- “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.”
- “Real content marketing isn’t repurposed advertising; it is making something worth talking about.”
- “My best advice: win little battles. Get in the habit of winning, of shipping, of having customers that can’t live without you. Once you’ve demonstrated you know how to do the art, then go after the windmills.”
- “The fatigue was there, but some people understood that putting it aside was the single most important factor in succeeding.”
- “Saying ‘no’ or even ‘stop’ is the hallmark of the professional you want on your team.”
- “Don’t fix me; Love me for what’s broken.”
- “Great leaders don’t try to please everyone. Great leaders don’t water down their message in order to make the tribe a bit bigger. Instead, they realize that a motivated, connected tribe in the midst of a movement is far more powerful than a larger group could ever be.”
- “Somewhere in the world, someone is doing something that you decided couldn’t be done.”
- “Just because something is easy to measure doesn’t mean it’s important.”
- “There’s nothing wrong with having a plan. Plans are great. But missions are better. Missions survive when plans fail, and plans almost always fail.”
- “When you think about Uber and Airbnb and the other companies that are turning things upside down, Uber isn’t big because they ran a lot of ads. They’re big because someone took out their iPhone and said to their friend, ‘watch this,’ and pressed a button, and a car pulled up.”
- “What tribes are, is a very simple concept that goes back 50 million years. It’s about leading and connecting people and ideas. And it’s something that people have wanted forever.”
- “No niche is too small if it’s yours.”
- “Networking that matters is helping people achieve their goals.”
- “The answer to the question ‘where do good ideas come from’ is always the same: they come from bad ideas. If you come up with 20 bad ideas, you get one good one.”
- “Pain is the truth of art. Art is not a hobby or a pastime. It is the result of an internal battle royal, one between the quest for safety and the desire to matter.”
- “Selling is about a transference of emotion, not a presentation of facts.”
- “Ideas that spread win.”
- “The combination of passion and art is what makes someone a linchpin.”
- “The Dip is the long slog between starting and mastery. A long slog that’s actually a shortcut, because it gets you where you want to go faster than any other path.”
- “You’re competing against people in a state of flow, people who are truly committed, people who care deeply about the outcome.”
- “Just because the tide is out, doesn’t mean there is less water in the ocean.”
- “Dreamers don’t have special genes. They find circumstances that amplify their dreams.”
- “Effort is its own reward if you allow it to be.”
- “Don’t save the canary. Fix the coal mine.”
- “The best marketing strategy is to destroy your industry before your competition does.”
- “The job is not your work; what you do with your heart and soul is the work.”
- “Living and breathing an authentic story is the best way to survive in a conversation-rich world.”
- “Change isn’t made by asking permission. Change is made by asking for forgiveness, later.”
- “Products that are remarkable get talked about.”
- “Surprise comes from defying expectations.”
- “Fear for a linchpin is a clue that you’re getting close to doing something important.”
- “Attention is a bit like real estate, in that they’re not making any more of it. Unlike real estate, though, it keeps going up in value.”
- “Persistent people are able to visualize the idea of light at the end of the tunnel when others can’t see it.”
“The enemy of fear is creativity.” - “You can listen to what people say, sure. But you will be far more effective if you listen to what people do.”
- “If it were any other way, it would be easy. And if it were any other way, everyone would do it and your work would ultimately be devalued. The yin and yang are clear: without people pushing against your quest to do something worth talking about, it’s unlikely it would be worth the journey. Persist.”
- “Average feels safe but it’s not. It’s invisible.”
- “All the creativity books in the world aren’t going to help you if you’re unwilling to have lousy, lame, and even dangerously bad ideas.”
- “The world doesn’t owe you a living, but just when you needed it, a door was opened for you to make a difference.”
- “Defending mediocrity is exhausting.”
- “Good marketers tell a story.”
- “When the room brightens when you walk in, you matter.”
- “Great work is always shunned at first.”
- “There’s no map for being an artist.”
- “I don’t like offending people, and it’s easy to offend people when you don’t know as much as they do. This group knows more about what it takes to lead in this way than I ever will. My goal is to push people, but I need to do it from a place of respect.”
- “Permission marketing turns strangers into friends and friends into loyal customers. It’s not just about entertainment – it’s about education. Permission marketing is curriculum marketing.”
- “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.”
- “If you don’t know how it works, find out. If you’re not sure if it will work, try it. If it doesn’t make sense, play with it until it does. If it’s not broken, break it. If it might not be true, find out.”
- “It takes three years to be an overnight success, sometimes more.”
- “If it’s work, we try to figure out how to do less. If it’s art, we try to figure out how to do more.”
- “We’re all born creative; it takes a little while to become afraid.”
- “Ideas in secret die. They need light and air or they starve to death.”
- “Sharing an idea you care about is a generous way to change your world for the better.”
- “The time to look for a new job is when you don’t need one. The time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable.”
- “In a long-distance race, everyone gets tired. The winner is the runner who figures out where to put the tired, figures out how to store it away until after the race is over. Sure, he’s tired. Everyone is. That’s not the point.
- The point is to run.”
- “Are you copying others? People won’t pay extra for that. You won’t be followed for that.”
- “We believe what we want to believe, and once we believe something, it becomes a self-fulfilling truth.”
- “All artists are entrepreneurs. All entrepreneurs are artists.”
- “There are always limits and opportunities. The ones we rehearse and focus on are the ones that shape our future.”
- “Caring, it turns out, is a competitive advantage, and one that takes effort, not money.”
- “You don’t have to settle for the status quo, for being good enough, forgetting by, for working all night.”
- “We’ve greatly exaggerated the risk of sinking, without celebrating the value of swimming.”
- “Marketing tells a story that spreads. Sales overcomes the natural resistance to say yes.”
- “Gratitude and opportunity create more of the same.”
- “Most people are searching for a path to success that is both easy and certain. Most paths are neither.”
- “Basically, you create your experience through your beliefs about yourself and the nature of reality. Another way to understand this is to realize that you create your experiences through your expectations.”
- “You have to pay the price to be in the right place at the right time often enough that people tend to see you as the regular kind.”
- “You can risk being wrong or you can be boring.”
- “Positive thinking doesn’t guarantee results; all it offers is something better than negative thinking.”
- “Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations.”
- “Learning is not watching a video; learning is taking action and seeing what happens.”
- “Art is the act of navigating without a map.”
- “What people want is the extra, the emotional bonus they get when they buy something they love.”
- “Seek out habits that help you overcome fear or inertia. Destroy those that do the opposite.”