Quote collection
920 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Marketing yourself to a new person often involves being charismatic, clever and quick-but most jobs and most relationships are about being consistent, persistent and brave."
"I wonder why anyone would hesitate to be generous with their writing. I mean, if you really want to make a living, go to Wall Street and trade oil futures ... We're writers. We're doing something that is inherently a generous act. We're exposing ourselves to the muse and to the things that frighten us. Why do that if you're not willing to be generous? And paradoxically, almost ironically, it turns out that the more generous you are, the more money you make. But that's secondary. For me, the privilege of being generous is why I get to do this."
"Mass marketing means appealing to the masses which means appealing to the average."
"You cannot buy your way to share of voice today; you cannot buy attention anymore."
"I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace."
"The tragedy is that society (your school, your boss, your government, your family) keeps drumming the genius part out. The problem is that our culture has engaged in a Faustian bargain, in which we trade our genius and artistry for apparent stability."
"Is it worth getting one more tweet out, or putting your phone down and doing something that is worth tweeting?"
"Entertainment has seduced us into believing that we have a chance to live the life they live in the movies. Even the people in the movies don't live that life. It doesn't take 135 minutes to make a life, it takes almost a century. Everything doesn't depend on what happens in the next ninety seconds. Ever."
"No, the only way to know what people think is to watch what they do, not what they say. Do they come back for more? Do you cause them to change their behavior? Can you make them smile?"
"While you may have made money doing something a certain way yesterday, there's no reason to believe you'll succeed at it tomorrow."
"I think that the economics of book publishing favor hits with long book runs. You make all your money on the last bunch of books, not the first."
"Acknowledge to yourself that the factory job is dead. Having a factory job is not a natural state. It wasn't at the heart of being human until very recently. We've been culturally brainwashed."
"I intentionally abandoned the hard stuff early on because not only do I think it's useless, I think it's a distraction."
"Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed. They want to be missed the day they don't show up. They want to be missed when they're gone."
"Do the emotional labor of working on things that others fear."
"...the greatest shortage in our society is an instinct to produce. To create solutions and hustle them out the door. To touch the humanity inside and connect to the humans in the marketplace."
"There's no map for being an artist."
"If the game is designed for you to lose, don't play that game. Play a different one."
"Trust is precious and easily wasted, and guessing is a lousy foundation for future progress."
"If you're working with a spreadsheet or a thread of correspondence or a set of data, I'm not sure you're doing your best work if you're doing it on an iPhone."