You need the kind of objectivity that makes you forget everything you’ve heard, clear the table, and do a factual study like a scientist would. —STEVE
You must be able to explicitly say who you are building your thing for. You must know what you are aiming for—you’ll miss otherwise. You need to know this so you can make the decisions that go into pr...
You don’t convince people by challenging their longest and most firmly held opinions. You find common ground and work from there. Or you look for leverage to make them listen. Or you create an alterat...
You don't convince people by challenging their longest and most firmly held opinions. You find common ground and work from there.
You could say that failure always arrives uninvited, but through our ego, far too many of us allow it to stick around.
You can take the bite out of any tough situation by bringing a calm mind to it. By considering it and meditating on it in advance.
You can pay for influence the way you can pay for sex, but from what I understand neither is quite the same as when you get it the old-fashioned way. Just as earned media is always better than paid me...
You can always remind yourself: I am in control, not my emotions. I see what’s really going on here. I’m not going to get excited or upset.
Yet for years, this was a scenario that marketers tolerated and accepted as part of the job. We all told ourselves that you go to market with the product you have, not the one you want. And then we wo...
Yes, we are small. We are also a piece of this great universe and a process.
Working on improving your product until it screams Share me with everyone you know—that’s less fun than buying a back-page ad that everyone (who still reads newspapers) will see.
Work is finding yourself alone at the track when the weather kept everyone else indoors. Work is pushing through the pain and crappy first drafts and prototypes. It is ignoring whatever plaudits other...
Without an accurate accounting of our own abilities compared to others, what we have is not confidence but delusion. How are we supposed to reach, motivate, or lead other people if we can’t relate to...
With their aggression, intensity, self-absorption, and endless self-promotion, our competitors don’t realize how they jeopardize their own efforts (to say nothing of their sanity). We will challenge t...
With patience and resources, Mr. A would come to say often on his weekly calls with Peter, we can do almost anything. Tolstoy had a motto for Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov in War and Peace— Patience a...
Why bother getting mad at causes and forces far bigger than us? Why do we take these things personally? After all, external events are not sentient beings—they cannot respond to our shouts and cries—a...
While you’re sleeping, traveling, attending meetings, or messing around online, the same thing is happening to you. You’re going soft. You’re not aggressive enough. You’re not pressing ahead. You’ve g...
Whether you’re currently a marketing executive or a college grad about to enter the field—the first growth hackers have pioneered a new way. Some of their strategies are incredibly technical and compl...
Whether you live in the snake pit of Washington, D.C., work among the materialism of Wall Street, or grew up in a closed-minded small town, you can live well. Plenty of others have.
Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, your worst enemy already lives inside you: your ego.