Once you have permission to talk to someone, finding new products or services for them is a smart way to grow.
Decide, before you start, that you're going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you're reading, find the three things and do it. The goal of the reading, then, isn't to persuade you to change, it's to help you choose what to change.
It's entirely possible that there won't be a standing ovation at the end of your journey. That's okay. At least you lived.
You gain converts by winning at something the existing provider didn't think was so important.
We're better in the rearview mirror than we are at predicting - 'cause you're never going to be right every time. You can handicap it. You can point to certain elements that make it work, and many of those elements come straight out of epidemiology, right?
That the horrible Zika virus or HIV, we can look at what it means to be patient zero, what it means to need not much contact to spread, and all of those things follow into the way ideas spread.
You know, if I look at an auditorium full of high school students and the big man on campus and his girlfriend are busy talking while the lecture's going on, the rest of the room is going to do it because they're powerful sneezers. They have influence. They reach out to a whole bunch of people in a way that makes the idea of being disrespectful spread.
Or, if I take that same auditorium and I make it much bigger and put more space between seats, it'll be quieter because it's much harder when you're not in physical contact with people to spread a virus from person-to-person, right? There are all sorts of patterns that we see in epidemiology that help us understand why something spreads.
When you think about Uber and Airbnb and the other companies that are turning things upside down, Uber isn't big 'cause 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.
I hope I'm better looking than Yoda, but - I'm really interested in people who have something to say, a change they want to make and can't figure out why they can't make it spread.
And it doesn't matter to me whether you're running a coffee shop or you're an intellectual or you're in business or flying hot air balloons. People who can spread ideas, regardless of what those ideas are, win. But consumers, they got way more choices than they used to and way less time.
And the reason is that until Wonder came along and figured out how to spread the idea of sliced bread, no one wanted it. That the success of sliced bread... is not always about what the patent is like, or what the factory is like - it's about can you get your idea to spread, or not.
Now, before sliced bread was invented in the 1910s I wonder what they said? Like the greatest invention since the telegraph or something. But... the thing about the invention of sliced bread is this - that for the first 15 years after sliced bread was available no one bought it; no one knew about it; it was a complete and total failure.
So by giving people a tool that they can share and benefit from, it's a form of media that isn't controlled by Rupert Murdoch or the guys at Viacom. It is a form of media that is earned every single time it spreads.
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.
What marketers used to do is make average products for average people. That's what mass marketing is. They would ignore the geeks, and - God forbid - the laggards. It was all about going for the center. I don't think that's the strategy we want to use anymore.
I've found that giving gifts is transformative. It makes me better. It clarifies my thinking and allows me to do better work.
I feel like I'm treating people as I'd like to be treated.
Great boss is challenging 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.
The only reason to buy a paper book any longer is to own it and cherish it and remember it and tell a story about it.
