There are a few prerequisites to inventing…. You have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to think long term. You have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time. If you can’t do those three things, you need to limit yourself to sustaining innovation…. You typically don’t get misunderstood for sustaining innovation.
- Jeff Bezos (via tedr)
]]>]]>Your products are predictable. Your insights are recycled. You don’t bring surprise with you when you enter a room.
That’s why people are ignoring you.
Which used to be fine, because you could just buy attention for your brand or your company or your sales efforts. But that half-price sale on attention is now over.
This is one of the things I love about entrepreneurship. You’re encountering new challenges, and you have to learn at a very fast rate.
]]>This is a curious rule and it took me a long time to learn because in fact at the beginning of my practice I felt the opposite. Professionalism required that you didn’t particularly like the people that you worked for or at least maintained an arms length relationship to them, which meant that I never had lunch with a client or saw them socially. Then some years ago I realised that the opposite was true. I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection. I am talking about a client and you sharing some common ground. That in fact your view of life is someway congruent with the client, otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle.
- Milton Glaser: Ten Things I Have Learned
]]>]]>Very Hard is the extreme of hard problems. You’ll often see both words capitalised for emphasis, even in the middle of a sentence. Indexing the entire World Wide Web and providing relevant search results in millisecond response times is a Very Hard problem. Breaking commercial-grade encryption within practical hardware and time limitations is a Very Hard problem. Peace in the Middle East is a Very Hard problem.
]]>Leverage your core competencies by off-loading jargon.
If you think you are beaten, you are. If you think you dare not, you don’t! If you want to win, but think you can’t, It’s almost a cinch you won’t. If you think you’ll lose, you’re lost; For out in the world we find Success begins with a fellow’s will; It’s all in the state of the mind. Life’s battles don’t always go To the stronger and faster man, But sooner or later the man who wins Is the man who thinks he can.
– Walter D. Wintle
]]>I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.
- Gilda Radner
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