Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day. (Location 318)
Growth is frightening for a lot of people. It brings change and the opportunity for public failure. So if the astrological signs aren’t right or the water is too cold or we’ve got a twinge in our elbow, we find an excuse. We decide to do it later, or not at all. (Location 439)
Delete the outliers—the people who are hit by a bus or win the lottery, the people who luck out in a big way—and we’re left with everyone else. And for everyone else, effort is directly related to success. Not all the time, but as much as you would expect. Smarter, harder-working, better-informed, and better-liked people do better than other people, most of the time. (Location 454)
And that’s the key to the paradox of effort: while luck may be more appealing than effort, you don’t get to choose luck. Effort, on the other hand, is totally available, all the time. (Location 466)
Delete 120 minutes a day of “spare time” from your life. This can include watching TV, reading the newspaper, commuting, wasting time in social networks, and going to meetings. Up to you. Spend the 120 minutes doing this instead: Exercise for 30 minutes. Read relevant nonfiction (trade magazines, journals, business books, blogs, etc.). Send three thank-you notes. Learn new digital techniques (spreadsheet macros, Firefox shortcuts, productivity tools, graphic design, HTML coding). Volunteer. Blog for five minutes about something you learned. Give a speech once a month about something you don’t currently know a lot about. Spend at least one weekend day doing absolutely nothing but being with people you love. For one year, spend money on only the things you absolutely need to get by. Save the rest of your money, relentlessly. (Location 470)
Loving what you do is almost as important as doing what you love, especially if you need to make a living at it. (Location 498)
Do You Deserve It? Do you deserve the luck you’ve been handed? The place you were born, the education you were given, the job you’ve got? Do you deserve your tribe, your customer base, your brand? Not at all. “Deserve” is such a loaded word. Most of us don’t deserve the great opportunities we have, or the lucky breaks that got us here. The question shouldn’t be “Do you deserve it?” I think it should be “What are you going to do with it now that you’ve got it?” (Location 644)
Start a blog. (Location 684)
Learn to be a killer presenter. (Location 687)
Become a gadfly and tell the truth about your industry. (Location 693)
Get an RSS reader and read a lot more blogs. (Location 698)
Go offline for longer than you thought possible. (Location 699)
Write five thank-you notes every day. (Location 699)
Teach yourself Java, HTML, Flash, PHP, and SQL. Not a little, but to the point of mastery. (Location 710)
Start, run, and grow an online community. (Location 714)
Write a regular newsletter or blog about an industry you care about. (Location 715)
Learn a foreign language fluently. Write three detailed business plans for projects in the industry you care about. (Location 716)
Run a marathon. (Location 717)
The real growth and development and the foundations for the next era are laid during the chaotic times, the times that come after the leaders have stumbled. (Location 727)
So people lie to us. So we lie to ourselves. No, everything is not going to be okay. It never is. It isn’t okay now. Change, by definition, changes things. It makes some things better and some things worse. But everything is never okay. (Location 742)
“Honey, how was your day?” “Oh, I was busy, incredibly busy.” “I get that you were busy. But did you do anything important?” Busy does not equal important. Measured doesn’t mean mattered. (Location 753)
Simple Five-Step Plan for Just About Everyone and Everything The number of people you need to ask for permission keeps going down: Go, make something happen. Do work you’re proud of. Treat people with respect. Make big promises and keep them. Ship it out the door. (Location 824)
Simple example: start a blog and post once a day on how your favorite company can improve its products or its service. Do it every day for a month; post one new, actionable idea each and every day. Within a few weeks, you’ll notice the change in the way you find, process, and ship ideas. (Location 866)
Reasons to Work For the money To be challenged For the pleasure/calling of doing the work For the impact it makes on the world For the reputation you build in the community To solve interesting problems To be part of a group and to experience the mission To be appreciated (Location 899)
Once you understand that there are problems just waiting to be solved, once you realize that you have all the tools and all the permission you need, then opportunities to contribute abound. No one is going to pick you. Pick yourself. (Location 959)
Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better. I believe that everyone should write in public. Get a blog. Or use Squidoo or Tumblr or a microblogging site. Use an alias if you like. Turn off comments, certainly—you don’t need more criticism, you need more writing. Do it every day. Every single day. Not a diary, not fiction, but analysis. Clear, crisp, honest writing about what you see in the world. Or want to see. Or teach (in writing). Tell us how to do something. (Location 1024)
When you increase your discernment, maximize your awareness of the available options, and then go ahead and ship work that scares others—that’s when you succeed. (Location 1038)
An alternative is to be happy wherever you are, with whatever you’ve got, but always hungry for the thrill of creating art, of being missed if you’re gone, and, most of all, of doing important work. (Location 1109)
Make promises, keep them, avoid surprises. That’s what most people (and the profitable people) want. (Location 1227)
you buy my product but don’t read the instructions, that’s not your fault; it’s mine. If you read a blog post and misinterpret what I said, that’s my choice, not your error. If you attend my presentation and you’re bored, that’s my failure. If you are a student in my class and you don’t learn what I’m teaching, I’ve let you down. (Location 1239)
You’re right, I can see that you are annoyed. You’re right, that is frustrating. You’re right, with the expectations you had, it’s totally understandable to feel the way you do. You’re right, and we’re really sorry that you feel that way. (Location 1268)
You Matter When you love the work you do and the people you do it with, you matter. When you are so gracious and generous and aware that you think of other people before yourself, you matter. When you leave the world a better place than you found it, you matter. When you continue to raise the bar on what you do and how you do it, you matter. When you teach and forgive and teach more before you rush to judge and demean, you matter. When you touch the people in your life through your actions (and your words), you matter. When kids grow up wanting to be you, you matter. When you see the world as it is, but insist on making it more like it could be, you matter. When you inspire a Nobel Prize winner or a slum dweller, you matter. When the room brightens when you walk in, you matter. And when the legacy you leave behind lasts for hours, days, or a lifetime, you matter. (Location 1327)
Eight Questions and a Why Whom are you trying to please? What are you promising? How much money are you trying to make? How much freedom are you willing to trade for opportunity? What are you trying to change? What do you want people to say about you? Which people? Do we care about you? (Location 1392)
These organizations have people who will try to patch problems over after the fact, instead of motivated people eager to delight on the spot. (Location 1471)
It comes down to this: only people can have ethics. Ethics, as in doing the right thing for the community even though it might not benefit you or your company financially. Pointing to the numbers (or to the boss) is an easy refuge for someone who would like to duck the issue, but the fork in the road is really clear. Either you do work you are proud of, or you work to make the maximum amount of money. (It would be nice if those goals overlapped every time, but they rarely do.) (Location 1575)
Lightning rarely strikes. Instead, achievement is often the result of stepwise progress, of doing something increasingly difficult until you get the result you seek. (Location 1610)
Repeating easy tasks again and again gets you not very far. Attacking only steep cliffs where no progress is made isn’t particularly effective, either. No, the best path is an endless series of difficult (but achievable) hills. (Location 1614)
There are plenty of obvious reasons why we avoid picking the right interim steps, why we either settle for too little or foolishly shoot for too much. Mostly it comes down to fear and impatience. The craft of your career comes in picking the right hills. Hills just challenging enough that you can barely make it over. A series of hills becomes a mountain, and a series of mountains is a career. (Location 1620)
Economists tell us that the reason to care is that it increases customer retention, profitability, and brand value. For me, though, that’s beside the point (and even counter to the real goal). Caring gives you a compass, a direction to head in, and most of all, a reason to do the work you do in the first place. (Location 1649)
Doesn’t matter what you market. Human beings want: totems and icons meters (put a real-time mpg or CO2 meter in every car and watch what happens) fashion stories and pictures (Location 1704)
A landing page (in fact, every page) can cause one of five actions: Get a visitor to click (to go to another page, on your site or someone else’s). Get a visitor to buy. Get a visitor to give permission for you to follow up (by email, phone, etc.). This includes registration, of course. Get a visitor to tell a friend. (and the more subtle) Get a visitor to learn something, an action which could even include posting a comment or giving you some sort of feedback. (Location 1717)
Top 10 Secrets of the Marketing Process Don’t run out of money. It always takes longer and costs more than you expect to spread your idea. You can budget for it or you can fail. You won’t get it right the first time. Your campaign will need to be reinvented, adjusted, or scrapped. Count on it. Convenient choices are not often the best choices. Just because an agency, an asset, or a bizdev deal is easy to do doesn’t mean that it is your best choice. Irrational, strongly held beliefs of close advisors should be ignored. It doesn’t matter if they don’t like your logo. If it makes you nervous, it’s probably a good idea. If you’re sure you’re right, you probably aren’t. Focusing obsessively on one niche, one feature, and one market is almost always a better idea than trying to satisfy everyone. At some point, you’re going to have to either stick to your convictions or do what the market tells you. It’s hard to do both. Compromise in marketing is almost always a bad idea. Extreme A could work. Extreme B could work. The average of A and B will almost never work. Test, measure, and optimize. Figure out what’s working and do it more. Read and learn. There are a million clues, case studies, books, and proven tactics out there. You can’t profitably ignore them until you know them, and you don’t have the time or the money to make the same mistake someone else made last week. It’s cheaper and faster to read about it than it is to do it. (Location 1855)
If everyone knows your trademark, it means that your idea has spread. It means that people are interested in what you sell and may very well decide to buy it from you. (Location 1884)
People take action (mostly) based on one of three emotions: Fear Hope Love (Location 2130)
Never mind the Ps. Marketing has five elements: Data Stories Products (services) Interactions Connection (Location 2195)