As Marc Andreessen—the entrepreneur behind Netscape, Opsware, and Ning who, in addition to running a major venture capital fund, happens to be on the board of directors for Facebook, eBay, and HP—expl...
And that’s what is so insidious about talk. Anyone can talk about himself or herself. Even a child knows how to gossip and chatter. Most people are decent at hype and sales. So what is scarce and rare...
An employee in your company makes a careless mistake that costs you business. This can be exactly what you spend so much time and effort trying to avoid. Or, with a shift in perception, it can be exac...
Almost without exception, this is what life does: it takes our plans and dashes them to pieces. Sometimes once, sometimes lots of times.
All of us waste precious life doing things we don’t like, to prove ourselves to people we don’t respect, and to get things we don’t want.
All of us waste precious life doing things we don’t like, to prove ourselves to people we don’t respect, and to get things we don’t want. Why
Advertising is just a slightly more scalable form of creating demand than door-to-door sales.
Advertising can add fuel to a fire, but rarely is it sufficient to start one.
Action is commonplace, right action is not. As a discipline, it’s not any kind of action that will do, but directed action. Everything must be done in the service of the whole. Step by step, action by...
A podium and a prison is each a place, one high and the other low, but in either place your freedom of choice can be maintained if you so wish. —EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 2.6.25
A good person dyes events with his own color . . . and turns whatever happens to his own benefit.
1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually i...
You’ve got to do something very difficult. Don’t focus on that. Instead break it down into pieces. Simply do what you need to do right now. And do it well. And then move on to the next thing. Follow t...
You must reclaim the ability to abstain because within it is your clarity and self-control.
The world can control our bodies—we can be thrown in jail or be tossed about by the weather. But the mind? That’s ours. We must protect it. Maintain control over your mind and perceptions, they’d say....
The strategic goal was the same: to reach people in an effective, scalable, and data-driven way.
The only thing you truly possess is your ability to make choices (and to use reason and judgment when doing so).
The old Celtic saying tells us, See much, study much, suffer much, that is the path to wisdom.
The Stoic maxim: sustine et abstine. Bear and forbear. Acknowledge the pain but trod onward in your task.
That it seems wrong to take it slow. This is just our impatience. This is our inability to see that burning ourselves out or blowing ourselves up isn’t going to hurry the journey along.