Famous Sales Quotes

Because “extra-difficult popular physics books” scare publishers half to death. Hawking famously said that every equation halves the sale of a popular book.

Inside we found the TV rooms packed, because a jury had found Martha Stewart guilty on four counts of obstructing justice and lying to investigators about a well-timed stock sale. The style diva was going to have to do fed time. Her case had been followed with keen interest at Danbury—most prisoners thought she was being targeted because she was a famous female: “Guys get away with that shit all the time.

When the doctrine of the Resurrection ceased to commend itself to the critical faculties which God had given me, I openly rejected it. I preached my famous sermon. I defied the whole chapter. I took every risk.’ ‘What risk? What was at all likely to come of it except what actually came—popularity, sales for your books, invitations, and finally a bishopric?

I'm not famous, but some people know me by name. Other people know me by number. That number is four.

I want to scrape earwax out of your ears like the last of the chunky peanut butter in a jar. I’d love it if you ate one of my world famous Listening Sandwiches.

If my name were Isaac Newton, would I be a famous no name? I’d have worldwide and historical name recognition, yet I’d be anonymous.

For men, money, like sex, is something that nearly everybody wants more of, and unless you are famous or influential, you probably have to work hard to get any.

My sales trainer friend, the famous (late) Cavett Robert, said to sell life insurance or cemetery plots, you have to make your customer see the hearse backed up to the door. That may sound a little grisly, but it's true.

In his early twenties, a man started collecting paintings, many of which later became famous: Picasso, Van Gogh, and others. Over the decades he amassed a wonderful collection. Eventually, the man’s beloved son was drafted into the military and sent to Vietnam, where he died while trying to save his friend. About a month after the war ended, a young man knocked on the devastated father’s door. “Sir,” he said, “I know that you like great art, and I have brought you something not very great.” Inside the package, the father found a portrait of his son. With tears running down his cheeks, the father said, “I want to pay you for this.ℍ “No,” the young man replied, “he saved my life. You don’t owe me anything.ℍ The father cherished the painting and put it in the center of his collection. Whenever people came to visit, he made them look at it. When the man died, his art collection went up for sale. A large crowd of enthusiastic collectors gathered. First up for sale was the amateur portrait. A wave of displeasure rippled through the crowd. “Let’s forget about that painting!” one said. “We want to bid on the valuable ones,” said another. Despite many loud complaints, the auctioneer insisted on starting with the portrait. Finally, the deceased man’s gardener said, “I’ll bid ten dollars.ℍ Hearing no further bids, the auctioneer called out, “Sold for ten dollars!” Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. But then the auctioneer said, “And that concludes the auction.” Furious gasps shook the room. The auctioneer explained, “Let me read the stipulation in the will: “Sell the portrait of my son first, and whoever buys it gets the entire art collection. Whoever takes my son gets everything.ℍ It’s the same way with God Almighty. Whoever takes his Son gets everything.

Funnel The family story tells, and it was told true, of my great-grandfather who begat eight genius children and bought twelve almost-new grand pianos. He left a considerable estate when he died. The children honored their separate arts; two became moderately famous, three married and fattened their delicate share of wealth and brilliance. The sixth one was a concert pianist. She had a notable career and wore cropped hair and walked like a man, or so I heard when prying a childhood car into the hushed talk of the straight Maine clan. One died a pinafore child, she stays her five years forever. And here is one that wrote- I sort his odd books and wonder his once alive words and scratch out my short marginal notes and finger my accounts. back from that great-grandfather I have come to tidy a country graveyard for his sake, to chat with the custodian under a yearly sun and touch a ghost sound where it lies awake. I like best to think of that Bunyan man slapping his thighs and trading the yankee sale for one dozen grand pianos. it fit his plan of culture to do it big. On this same scale he built seven arking houses and they still stand. One, five stories up, straight up like a square box, still dominates its coastal edge of land. It is rented cheap in the summer musted air to sneaker-footed families who pad through its rooms and sometimes finger the yellow keys of an old piano that wheezes bells of mildew. Like a shoe factory amid the spruce trees it squats; flat roof and rows of windows spying through the mist. Where those eight children danced their starfished summers, the thirty-six pines sighing, that bearded man walked giant steps and chanced his gifts in numbers. Back from that great-grandfather I have come to puzzle a bending gravestone for his sake, to question this diminishing and feed a minimum of children their careful slice of suburban cake.

So why was Kim Kardashian famous? Because she was very good at marketing herself, that was all - and today, that was enough. Corporations are now people and people are now products, known as "brands". At a time when the 1 percent was getting richer, the 99 percent was suddenly trying to Keep up with the Kardashians.

Marcus Brutus was the original tragic hero of the play ‘Julius Caesar’, Aditya concluded. Perhaps, Shakespeare should have named his play ‘Marcus Brutus’. But then again, it all must have boiled down to saleability and marketing; Julius Caesar being the more famous and thus bankable name. Ironical it was, Aditya smiled. The same Shakespeare had once said-‘What’s in a name...

Deep down, Story Easton knew what would happen if she attempted to off herself—she would fail It was a matter of probability. This was not a new thing, failure. She was, had always been, a failure of fairy-tale proportion. Quitting wasn’t Story’s problem. She had tried, really tried, lots of things during different stages of her life—Girl Scours, the viola, gardening, Tommy Andres from senior year American Lit—but zero cookie sales, four broken strings, two withered azalea bushes, and one uniquely humiliating breakup later, Story still had not tasted success, and with a shriveled-up writing career as her latest disappointment, she realized no magic slippers or fairy dust was going to rescue her from her Anti-Midas Touch. No Happily Ever After was coming. So she had learned to find a certain comfort in failure. In addition to her own screw-ups, others’ mistakes became cozy blankets to cuddle, and she snuggled up to famous failures like most people embrace triumph. The Battle of Little Bighorn—a thing of beauty. The Bay of Pigs—delicious debacle. The Y2K Bug—gorgeously disappointing fuck-up. Geraldo’s anti-climactic Al Capone exhumation—oops! Jaws III—heaven on film. Tattooed eyeliner—eyelids everywhere, revolting. Really revolting. Fat-free potato chips—good Lord, makes anyone feel successful.

The “German problem” after 1970 became how to keep up with the Germans in terms of efficiency and productivity. One way, as above, was to serially devalue, but that was beginning to hurt. The other way was to tie your currency to the deutsche mark and thereby make your price and inflation rate the same as the Germans, which it turned out would also hurt, but in a different way. The problem with keeping up with the Germans is that German industrial exports have the lowest price elasticities in the world. In plain English, Germany makes really great stuff that everyone wants and will pay more for in comparison to all the alternatives. So when you tie your currency to the deutsche mark, you are making a one-way bet that your industry can be as competitive as the Germans in terms of quality and price. That would be difficult enough if the deutsche mark hadn’t been undervalued for most of the postwar period and both German labor costs and inflation rates were lower than average, but unfortunately for everyone else, they were. That gave the German economy the advantage in producing less-than-great stuff too, thereby undercutting competitors in products lower down, as well as higher up the value-added chain. Add to this contemporary German wages, which have seen real declines over the 2000s, and you have an economy that is extremely hard to keep up with. On the other side of this one-way bet were the financial markets. They looked at less dynamic economies, such as the United Kingdom and Italy, that were tying themselves to the deutsche mark and saw a way to make money. The only way to maintain a currency peg is to either defend it with foreign exchange reserves or deflate your wages and prices to accommodate it. To defend a peg you need lots of foreign currency so that when your currency loses value (as it will if you are trying to keep up with the Germans), you can sell your foreign currency reserves and buy back your own currency to maintain the desired rate. But if the markets can figure out how much foreign currency you have in reserve, they can bet against you, force a devaluation of your currency, and pocket the difference between the peg and the new market value in a short sale. George Soros (and a lot of other hedge funds) famously did this to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, blowing the United Kingdom and Italy out of the system. Soros could do this because he knew that there was no way the United Kingdom or Italy could be as competitive as Germany without serious price deflation to increase cost competitiveness, and that there would be only so much deflation and unemployment these countries could take before they either ran out of foreign exchange reserves or lost the next election. Indeed, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was sometimes referred to as the European “Eternal Recession Mechanism,” such was its deflationary impact. In short, attempts to maintain an anti-inflationary currency peg fail because they are not credible on the following point: you cannot run a gold standard (where the only way to adjust is through internal deflation) in a democracy.

Dwarf things. Small things. Little things in relation to the norm. Insignificant things. Things with different dimensions. Curiously, the stories I like the most are made up of trivialities. Details. Trifles. These days, people look to what's big. The big picture, big sales figures, success. Bright lights, interviews, breaking news. Whatever's famous. Importance judged by fame. Maybe small things are subversive. Living on a modest scale compared to the norm. Maybe the dwarf is the hero of our time.

Equally, I learned that most people don’t really know exactly what they want, or if they do it’s only from what they know, what is available or possible at the time. As Henry Ford said, famously, if he had asked American farmers what they wanted in terms of future transport, they would have answered ‘faster horses’. You need to show them new possibilities, new ideas and new products and explain these as lucidly as possible. Dyson advertising focuses on how our products are engineered and how they work, rather than on gimmicks and snappy sales lines.

Misogyny now has become so normalized,” says Paul Roberts, the Impulse Society author. “We can’t even see the absurdity and the inequity of it, it’s so pervasive. When the male gaze was digitized, it was almost as if it was internalized. With smartphones and social media, girls had the means of producing the male gaze themselves, and it was as if they turned it on themselves willingly in order to compete in a marketplace in which sex was the main selling point. And the social media companies aren't going to do anything about it, as long as it's driving traffic.

If you want waiters in tuxedos with white linen cloths over their arms, menus with unpronounceable words all over them, and high-priced wines served in silver ice buckets when you go out for Italian food, our little restaurant is not the place to come. But if you mostly want good, solid, home-cooked pasta with tasty sauces made with real vegetables and spices by a real Italian Mama and will trade white linen for red-and-white checked plastic tablecloths, you'll like our place just fine. If you're okay with a choice of just two wines, red or white, we'll give you as much of it as you want, from our famous bottomless wine bottle — free with your dinner. This restaurant owner took competitive disadvantages and turned them into a good, solid, “fun” selling story.

He called back with an incredible report: there were people lined up around the store already. Wow, I thought. Wow! Wow didn’t begin to cover it. People lined up on two floors of the store to talk to Chris and get their books signed, hours before he was even scheduled to arrive. Chris was overwhelmed when he got there, and so was I. The week before, he’d been just another guy walking down the street. Now, all of a sudden he was famous. Except he was still the same Chris Kyle, humble and a bit abashed, ready to shake hands and pose for a picture, and always, at heart, a good ol’ boy. “I’m so nervous,” confided one of the people on the line as he approached Chris. “I’ve been waiting for three hours just to see you.” “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Chris. “Waitin’ all that time and come to find out there’s just another redneck up here.” The man laughed, and so did Chris. It was something he’d repeat, in different variations, countless times that night and over the coming weeks. We stayed for three or four hours that first night, far beyond what had been advertised, with Chris signing each book, shaking each hand, and genuinely grateful for each person who came. For their part, they were anxious not just to meet him but to thank him for his service to our country-and by extension, the service of every military member whom they couldn’t personally thank. From the moment the book was published, Chris became the son, the brother, the nephew, the cousin, the kid down the street whom they couldn’t personally thank. In a way, his outstanding military record was beside the point-he was a living, breathing patriot who had done his duty and come home safe to his wife and kids. Thanking him was people’s way of thanking everyone in uniform. And, of course, the book was an interesting read. It quickly became a commercial success beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, including the publisher’s. The hardcover debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list, then rose to number one and stayed there for more than two months. It’s remained a fixture on the bestseller lists ever since, and has been translated into twenty-four languages worldwide. It was a good read, and it had a profound effect on a lot of people. A lot of the people who bought it weren’t big book readers, but they ended up engrossed. A friend of ours told us that he’d started reading the book one night while he was taking a bath with his wife. She left, went to bed, and fell asleep. She woke up at three or four and went into the bathroom. Her husband was still there, in the cold water, reading. The funny thing is, Chris still could not have cared less about all the sales. He’d done his assignment, turned it in, and got his grade. Done deal.

If love were a collection of collections, would your relationship be banged-up baseball cards, or famous art? My love for you is famous art. You just have to wait for my death so my work can be honored posthumously, bringing in money precisely when I can’t spend it.

Salespeople are famous for lack of discipline and losing focus. They attempt to call on an account (once), but don’t get anywhere. Instead of sharpening their weapons and continuing to attack the same strategically selected targets, they turn and pursue a new set of prospects. This constant change of direction becomes their death knell because they never gain traction against the defined target set.

Dear KDP Author, Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year. With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion. Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive. Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers. The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books. Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive. Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.

Experimentation also proved serendipitous for Greg Koch and Steve Wagner, when they were putting together the Stone Brewing Co. in Escondido, California, north of San Diego. It was destined to become one of the most successful brewing startups of the 1990s. In The Craft of Stone Brewing Co. Koch and Wagner confess that the home-brewed ale that became Arrogant Bastard Ale and propelled Stone to fame in the craft brewing world, started with a mistake. Greg Koch recalls that Wagner exclaimed “Aw, hell!” as he brewed an ale on his brand spanking new home-brewing system. “I miscalculated and added the ingredients in the wrong percentages,” he told Koch. “And not just a little. There’s a lot of extra malt and hops in there.” Koch recalls suggesting they dump it, but Wagner decided to let it ferment and see what it tasted like. Greg Koch and Steve Wagner, founders of Stone Brewery. Photograph © Stone Brewing Co. They both loved the resulting hops bomb, but they didn’t know what to do with it. Koch was sure that nobody was “going to be able to handle it. I mean, we both loved it, but it was unlike anything else that was out there. We weren’t sure what we were going to do with it, but we knew we had to do something with it somewhere down the road.”20 Koch said the beer literally introduced itself as Arrogant Bastard Ale. It seemed ironic to me that a beer from southern California, the world of laid back surfers, should produce an ale with a name that many would identify with New York City. But such are the ironies of the craft brewing revolution. Arrogant Bastard was relegated to the closet for the first year of Stone Brewing Co.’s existence. The founders figured their more commercial brew would be Stone Pale Ale, but its first-year sales figures were not strong, and the company’s board of directors decided to release Arrogant Bastard. “They thought it would help us have more of a billboard effect; with more Stone bottles next to each other on a retail shelf, they become that much more visible, and it sends a message that we’re a respected, established brewery with a diverse range of beers,” Wagner writes. Once they decided to release the Arrogant Bastard, they decided to go all out. The copy on the back label of Arrogant Bastard has become famous in the beer world: Arrogant Bastard Ale Ar-ro-gance (ar’ogans) n. The act or quality of being arrogant; haughty; Undue assumption; overbearing conceit. This is an aggressive ale. You probably won’t like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth. We would suggest that you stick to safer and more familiar territory—maybe something with a multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at convincing you it’s made in a little brewery, or one that implies that their tasteless fizzy yellow beverage will give you more sex appeal. The label continues along these lines for a couple of hundred words. Some call it a brilliant piece of reverse psychology. But Koch insists he was just listening to the beer that had emerged from a mistake in Wagner’s kitchen. In addition to innovative beers and marketing, Koch and Wagner have also made their San Diego brewery a tourist destination, with the Stone Brewing Bistro & Gardens, with plans to add a hotel to the Stone empire.

Peter Minuit Plaza near the Staten Island Ferry terminal. Still, most have no idea that he was the Dutchman who purchased the famous island from the Canarsee band of Indians of the Algonkuin-Delaware Federation in 1626 for $24, beads and chatskas. It would be a story of how a white man got the island for a bargain from the unsuspecting Indian tribe. Details may prove otherwise. A hasty note in a logbook was the only evidence of the sale and the British who came after the Dutch never received official documentation of the transaction; but according to Canarsee legend, there was never a sale. The Indians leased the land to Minuit for $2.40 per year and received an advance payment of twenty-four dollars for the first ten years. Compounded annually at 7.5%, the city of New York owed the Canarsee Indians about seven trillion dollars in back rent.

Our Organization Carrara Car Mart is one of the famous and successful used car yards on the Gold Coast. Our motive to enables us in choosing the best used cars for our valuable customers.

Between the carnival barker nature of our society—in which the winner, winner, winners are pronounced and paraded about with great fanfare so as to perpetuate the dream—and our overt obsession with wealth as a society, it appears as though more than half the people in our lives are rich. And yes, clearly, we can consciously separate the reality of those that we interact with personally from those whom we merely watch from a distance. But make no mistake, the American Dream appears alive and well when half of the people that you can name are millionaires, and it doesn’t matter whether you know any of them personally. Really, this illusion is probably worse now than ever, because we live in a world in which Facebook allows us to hoard past acquaintances like trinkets in the junk drawer. These people have about as much direct interaction with us as the millionaires who are trotted before us on the newsstands, on the radio, on the television, at the stadium, in the movies, in the bookstore, and of course, in Congress. The fact of the matter is, you can almost certainly name more winners of the American Dream than you can personal friends, even if you include all of your acquaintances. This means, every time we see yet another famous person on TV, we are likely watching someone who is the beneficiary of the American Dream. And some of those Dreamers may even have a good story about how they rose from poverty to achieve their accomplishments, which is often held up as evidence that you, no matter who you are, or from whence you came, with hard work, can become a bona fide multimillionaire. No, you really can’t. It’s a mirage. A charade. A farce. An illusion, in which a long shot is presented as if it’s even odds.

Before he became the most brilliant and famous man in the ad business, David Ogilvy sold ovens door-to-door. Because of that, he never forgot that advertising is just a slightly more scalable form of creating demand than door-to-door sales.

Meredith Etherington-Smith Meredith Etherington-Smith became an editor of Paris Vogue in London and GQ magazine in the United States during the 1970s. During the 1980s, she served as deputy and features editor of Harpers & Queen magazine and has since become a leading art critic. Currently, she is editor in chief of Christie’s magazine. She is also a noted artist biographer; her book on Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, was an international bestseller and was translated into a dozen languages. Her drawing room that morning was much like any comfortable, slightly formal drawing room to be found in country houses throughout England: the paintings, hung on pale yellow walls, were better; the furniture, chintz-covered; the flowers, natural garden bouquets. It was charming. And so was she, as she swooped in from a room beyond. I had never seen pictures of her without any makeup, with just-washed hair and dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt. She looked more vital, more beautiful, than any photograph had ever managed to convey. She was, in a word, staggering; here was the most famous woman in the world up close, relaxed, funny, and warm. The tragic Diana, the royal Diana, the wronged Diana: a clever, interesting person who wasn’t afraid to say she didn’t know how an auction sale worked, and would it be possible to work with me on it? “Of course, ma’am,” I said. “It’s your sale, and if you would like, then we’ll work on it together to make the most money we can for your charities.” “So what do we do next?” she asked me. “First, I think you had better choose the clothes for sale.” The next time I saw her drawing room, Paul Burrell, her butler, had wheeled in rack after rack of jeweled, sequined, embroidered, and lacy dresses, almost all of which I recognized from photographs of the Princess at some state event or gala evening. The visible relics of a royal life that had ended. The Princess, in another pair of immaculately pressed jeans and a stripy shirt, looked so different from these formal meringues that it was almost laughable. I think at that point the germ of an idea entered my mind: that sometime, when I had gotten to know her better and she trusted me, I would like to see photographs of the “new” Princess Diana--a modern woman unencumbered by the protocol of royal dress. Eventually, this idea led to putting together the suite of pictures of this sea-change princess with Mario Testino. I didn’t want her to wear jewels; I wanted virtually no makeup and completely natural hair. “But Meredith, I always have people do my hair and makeup,” she explained. “Yes ma’am, but I think it is time for a change--I want Mario to capture your speed, and electricity, the real you and not the Princess.” She laughed and agreed, but she did turn up at the historic shoot laden with her turquoise leather jewel boxes. We never opened them. Hair and makeup took ten minutes, and she came out of the dressing room looking breathtaking. The pictures are famous now; they caused a sensation at the time. My favorite memory of Princess Diana is when I brought the work prints round to Kensington Palace for her to look at. She was so keen to see them that she raced down the stairs and grabbed them. She went silent for a moment or two as she looked at these vivid, radiant images. Then she turned to me and said, “But these are really me. I’ve been set free and these show it. Don’t you think,” she asked me, “that I look a bit like Marilyn Monroe in some of them?” And laughed.

How do you feel when you want to stand and you see yourself on the floor? Sometimes what God will ask you to do will knock you down. What do you do when God says rise and He pushes you down? How do you feel when very many will become I alone? How do you feel when all the people you told your secrets sale you out? How do you feel when your confidant becomes your betrayal? How do you feel when the person you thought will push you forward told you, I know you will fail? Do you still remember that the bible says that not even a hair will pull of you without being noticed by God? Have you not heard that the steps of a righteous man are ordered by God? How do you handle disappointments? In every situation you find yourself, give God the glory.

Some of the choices that Chinese consumers made did not translate easily to outsiders. A brand of stylish eyeglass frames appeared on the market, named “Helen Keller.” Reporters asked the company why it had chosen to advertise its eyeglasses with the world’s most famous blind person. The company replied that Chinese schools teach the story of Helen Keller primarily as an icon of fortitude, and sure enough, sales of the frames were brisk. Helen Keller glasses were selling under the slogan “You see the world, and the world sees you.

Education-based marketing is our No. 1 marketing rule: It wins, time after time, and always will. Focus your attention on adding tremendous value to your network, not on trying to “sell them.” Be 100 percent focused on solving problems for your prospective clients. Lead with the problem, meet your prospect in their hurt, and showcase your solutions to bridge the gap between where they are today and where they want to be tomorrow.

Reversing Hegel's famous maxim, I noted as long ago as 1967 that 'in a world that has really been turned upside down, truth is a moment of falsehood'. In the intervening years, this principle has encroached upon each specific domain, without exception. Thus in an era when contemporary art can no longer exist, it becomes difficult to judge classical art. Here as elsewhere, ignorance is only created in order to be exploited. As the meanings of history and taste are lost, networks of falsification are organised. It is only necessary to control the experts and auctioneers, which is easy enough, to arrange everything, since in this kind of business - and at the end of the day in every other kind - it is the sale which authenticates the value.

Traditionally, reaching the state of illumination symbolized by the center bestows a different fate from that of the ordinary person who accepts salvation. For the latter, life after death will persist in many different planes of being — higher ones, no doubt, where existence is less painful and burdensome and where spiritual aspiration faces less resistance. But those who attain gnosis are freed from this spiral entirely. They can choose to return to manifestation for a special purpose or can dwell in absorption into God — known in the Christian tradition as the “beatific vision.” They are, to use T. S. Eliot’s famous words in Four Quartets, “at the still point of the turning world.” In the Gospels, one name for this still point is “the eye of the needle.” As Christ says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25). This means that the “I” has to be very fine and subtle to reach this still center of being. A “rich man” — one who is encumbered not only with property but with the heavy baggage of a pompous self-image — is too big to make it through. Obviously, this is an inner condition and so does not necessarily refer to all rich people, though in practice it probably applies to most. Francis de Sales, a Catholic spiritual teacher of the early seventeenth century, observes: A man is rich in spirit if his mind is filled with riches or set on riches. The kingfisher shapes its nests like an apple, leaving only a little opening at the top, builds it on the seashore, and makes it so solid and tight that although waves sweep over it the water cannot get inside. Keeping always on top of the waves, they remain surrounded by the sea and are on the sea, and yet are masters of it. Your heart . . . must in like manner be open to heaven alone and impervious to riches and all other transitory things. Money — “mammon,” as Christ called it — is only one of the forms the force of the world takes. There are people for whom money holds no allure but who are beguiled by sex, pleasure, or power. And for those who are indifferent even to these temptations, there is always the trap of apathy (accidie or acedia, derived from a Greek word meaning “not caring,” are names sometimes used in the tradition). There are many variations, which will take on slightly different forms in everyone. Freeing oneself from the world requires overcoming these drives in oneself, however they appear.

The Instagram versus Hipstamatic story is perhaps the canonical example of a strategy made famous by Chris Dixon’s 2015 essay “Come for the tool, stay for the network.” Chris writes: A popular strategy for bootstrapping networks is what I like to call “come for the tool, stay for the network.” The idea is to initially attract users with a single-player tool and then, over time, get them to participate in a network. The tool helps get to initial critical mass. The network creates the long term value for users, and defensibility for the company.40 There are many other examples across many sectors beyond photo apps: The Google Suite provides stand-alone tools for people to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, but also network features around collaborative editing, and comments. Games like Minecraft or even classics like Street Fighter can be played in single-player mode where you play against the computer, or multiplayer mode where you play with friends. Yelp started out effectively as a directory tool for people to look up local businesses, showing addresses and phone numbers, but the network eventually built out the database of photos and reviews. LinkedIn started as a tool to put your resume online, but encouraged you to build up your professional network over time. “Come for the tool, stay for the network” circumvents the Cold Start Problem and makes it easier to launch into an entire network—with PR, paid marketing, influencers, sales, or any number of tried-and-true channels. It minimizes the size requirement of an atomic network and in turn makes it easy to take on an entire network. Whether it’s photo-sharing apps or restaurant directories, in the framework of the Cold Start Theory, this strategy can be visualized. In effect, a tool can be used to “prop up” the value of the network effects curve when the network is small.

In 1988, NDTV got a good contract from Doordarshan to produce a famous weekly show called The World This Week, which was anchored by the owner Prannoy Roy. As per records, Doordarshan granted Rs.2 lakhs ($6000[1]) per episode to NDTV, which was a princely sum in those days. Incidentally the head of Doordarshan at that time was Bhaskar Ghose and his son-in-law journalist Rajdeep Sardesai became the No. 2 in NDTV. The Congress Party was in power then and showed all possible support to NDTV and provided a red-carpet welcome to the private media unit to enjoy the national resources of Doordarshan. Every resource and infrastructure of Doordarshan was used for NDTV’s growth. In fact, in the early days (1995-1997), it is this tax payer money (Doordarshan contract) that got him personal gains again when he did “sweet” private equity deals (for sale of personal stake belonging to him and his wife) to a few global private equity funds. Thus, he built a business from patronage (government money) and then created value and cashed some of it by selling to private equity investors such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Alliance Capital, Jardine Fleming etc.

The availabilty heuristic may be interpreted as “ Being famous IS being persuasive

Famous sales coach and dear friend Jack Daly suggests, “Why don’t you throw people a party when they start, instead of when they leave?” Sydney-based software firm Atlassian sends each new employee, whatever his or her position, to a resort spa the weekend before the start date as a way to celebrate the new job. The spouse or a guest gets to go along — making both new employees and their spouses raving Atlassian fans.

If you feel like you need to behave like a famous salesperson in a movie to be a great salesperson, you are wrong. Especially in our current world where people want truth and authenticity, showing up as yourself is the best sales advantage.

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses,” said Henry Ford famously.

If Vespasian had a vice, it was greed. The emperor and his favorites had shamelessly exploited their positions to accrue enormous wealth, treating the Roman state as a moneymaking scheme for insiders. Vespasian famously put a tax on the city’s latrinae, claiming a share of the money made by the sale of urine to fullers, who used it to clean wool. Thus the saying, “Even when you piss, the emperor takes a percentage.

Thomas Watson from IBM famously said: “Nothing happens until a sale is made.

their own stamps. Then how,” Macgowan’s face darkened, “did Donald come to have this Foochow local?” They were silent for a while as the taxi threaded its way among the pillars of Sixth Avenue. Then Ellery drawled: “By the way, how valuable is the Foochow?” “Valuable?” Macgowan repeated absently. “That depends. In all cases of rarities the price is a variable consideration, depending upon how much it has brought at its last sale. The famous British Guiana of 1856—the one-cent magenta listed by Scott’s as Number 13—which is in the possession of the Arthur Hind estate is worth $32,500.00, as I remember it—I may be wrong in my recollection, but it cost Hind that or somewhere around that. It’s catalogued at $50,000.00, which means nothing. It’s worth $32,500.00 because that’s approximately what Hind paid for it at the Ferrary auction in Paris. … This Foochow set me back a cool ten thousand.” “Ten thousand dollars!” Ellery whistled. “But you’d no idea what it had brought previously, since it’s not been generally known before. So how could you—” “That’s the figure Varjian set, and stuck to, and that’s the amount I made out my check for. It’s worth the money, although it’s a pretty stiff price. Since, as far as I know, it’s the only one of its kind in existence—and especially considering the peculiar nature of the error—I could probably turn it over for a profit today if I put it up at auction.” “Then you weren’t victimized, at any rate,” murmured Ellery. “Kirk didn’t try to soak you, if that’s any consolation. … Here we are.” As they were removing their coats in the foyer of the Kirk suite, they heard Donald Kirk’s voice from the salon.

Building a Blockbuster How to write compelling content that sells The term “blockbuster” has unsettling military origins, but is now used to mean a film that has blown the box office away. It usually has high production costs and budget, but (hopefully) earns it all back and more with ticket sales. Blockbusters are usually BIG movies, large in scope, scale, and budget. They tell a big story, and reach a big audience. They’re also usually “high concept,” meaning that they can be described in a single sentence. (The most famous high concept pitch was for the movie Alien which they pitched as, “Jaws in space.”)

Shaneika knew from bills of sale stored in her office safe that as soon as some of her relatives got their freedom, they ventured to Cheapside to buy a slave of their own before the Union boys shut the market down. Sometimes a free black person would buy a white person who had sold himself into slavery, as he was no longer able to fend for himself. The most famous case of this was Aunt Charlotte and William King Solomon in the 1830s.

Are you trying to drive sales to your business? Would you like to build an audience? Is your goal to become famous? Do you want to build a community around your favorite hobby? Do you simply want to use it as a creative outlet? Define what you want to get out of YouTube and make that the foundation of your channel.

The fall of Circuit City and another famous failure, the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, illustrate why business, when practised in the absence of wealth secrets, produces fire sales more often than fortunes.

For an illustration of business drift, rational and opportunistic business drift, take the following. Coca-Cola began as a pharmaceutical product. Tiffany & Co., the fancy jewelry store company, started life as a stationery store. The last two examples are close, perhaps, but consider next: Raytheon, which made the first missile guidance system, was a refrigerator maker (one of the founders was no other than Vannevar Bush, who conceived the teleological linear model of science we saw earlier; go figure). Now, worse: Nokia, who used to be the top mobile phone maker, began as a paper mill (at some stage they were into rubber shoes). DuPont, now famous for Teflon nonstick cooking pans, Corian countertops, and the durable fabric Kevlar, actually started out as an explosives company. Avon, the cosmetics company, started out in door-to-door book sales. And, the strangest of all, Oneida Silversmiths was a community religious cult but for regulatory reasons they needed to use as cover a joint stock company.

Jacquetta Hawkes famously wrote that 'Every age gets the Stonehenge it deserves', by which she meant that Stonehenge has been a Druid temple, a landing site for flying saucers, or an astronomical calendar, according to the interests of the times. The same could be said about our stories about Vikings, and they have been alternately, noble savages, raiders, marauders and rapists, peaceful traders, entrepreneurs, explorers, early democrats, or IKEA sales personnel, according to what we want them to be.

For a generation of girls raised on the Disney corporation's multibillion-dollar line of so-called princess products, the five sisters of Keeping Up with the Kardashians were real-life princesses who lived in a Calabasas, California, castle, unabashedly focused on the pursuit of beauty treatments, expensive fun, and luxury brands - the latter a national fixation spawned in the "luxury revolution" of the last thirtysomething years, in which most of the wealth of the country had traveled into the hands of a few, with the rest of the population looking on longingly as the beneficiaries of a new Gilded Age flaunted their high-end stuff. And entertainment media, from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to Keeping Up with the Kardashians, provided them with ample opportunities to do just that.

Enterprise deals or “how to lose your freedom in 5 minutes” Being able to use our product for sales prospecting, I decided to go after some big names at the enterprise level. After one week I had booked meetings with companies like Uber, Facebook, etc. This is where the fun begins…or not… I spent 3 months doing between 4 to 9 meetings for each enterprise company I had booked meetings with. Every meeting leads to the next one as you go up the chain of command. And then comes the pilot phase. Awesome you might think! Well, not really… Working with enterprise-level clients requires a lot of custom work and paperwork. And when I say “a lot” I mean a sh*t ton of work. You need an entire department to handle the legal aspect, and hire another 10 people to entirely change your tech department to meet their requirements. During 4 months I went from being super excited to work with the most famous companies in the world to “this deal will transform our company entirely and we’ll have to start doing custom everything”. Losing my freedom and flexibility quickly became a no-go. The issue here is, with all these meetings I thought that they would adapt to our standards. That they understood from the start that we were a startup and that we couldn’t comply with all their needs. But it doesn’t work like this. It’s actually the other way around even though the people you meet working at these companies tell you otherwise. The bottleneck often comes from the legal department. It doesn’t matter if everyone is excited to use your product, if you don’t comply with their legal requirements or try to negotiate it will never work out. To give you an example, we had enterprise companies asking us to specifically have all our employee’s computers locked down in the office after they end their day. Knowing that we’re a remote company, it’s impossible to comply with that... If you want to target enterprise accounts, do it. But make sure to know that you need a lot of time and effort to make things work. It won’t be quick. I was attracted to the BIG names thinking that it would be an amazing way to grow faster, but instead, I should have been 100% focused on our target market (startups, SMBs).

Our Organization Carrara Car Mart is one of the famous and successful used car yards on the Gold Coast.

The painting is considered to have been very valuable to Vermeer, as he chose never to part with it or sell it, even when he was in debt. In 1676, his widow Catharina bequeathed the piece to her mother, Maria Thins, in an attempt to avoid the sale of the painting to satisfy creditors. The executor of Vermeer’s estate, the famous Delft microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek, determined that the transferral of the work to the late painter’s mother-in-law was illegal.

I loathe San Francisco. Sure, it looks like Jurassic Park in places, and the fog layer is enchanting with its plumes and trellises interweaving with the leaves and lichen on the redwoods. But everything else is like if New York’s Gramercy neighborhood got a whole town. On any given night there are way too many “going-out shirts” and the women dress like there was a fire sale at some emporium that only sells clam-diggers and kicky little jackets with ornamental zippers. I have never so frequently witnessed pinstripe and patchwork meeting in the middle as I have on the tragic A-line skirts of Valencia Street. Every man who isn’t contemptibly rich enough to be famous for it reminds me of Matthew Lillard’s pigtail-braided Rollerblader in Hackers. I have never tallied so many “Pick-Up Artist” hats or labret piercings outside of 1996. Fashion is no more than an indication of larger trends. Certain parts of San Francisco are what happens when white people have no natural predator.

It is then strange that on Bukowski’s tombstone, the epitaph reads: “Don’t try.” See, despite the book sales and the fame, Bukowski was a loser. He knew it. And his success stemmed not from some determination to be a winner, but from the fact that he knew he was a loser, accepted it, and then wrote honestly about it. He never tried to be anything other than what he was. The genius in Bukowski’s work was not in overcoming unbelievable odds or developing himself into a shining literary light. It was the opposite. It was his simple ability to be completely, unflinchingly honest with himself—especially the worst parts of himself—and to share his failings without hesitation or doubt. This is the real story of Bukowski’s success: his comfort with himself as a failure. Bukowski didn’t give a fuck about success. Even after his fame, he still showed up to poetry readings hammered and verbally abused people in his audience. He still exposed himself in public and tried to sleep with every woman he could find. Fame and success didn’t make him a better person. Nor was it by becoming a better person that he became famous and successful. Self-improvement and success often occur together. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the same thing.

Leopold and Loeb were the first bad rich kids of the American narrative. They were also bad rich kids who wanted to be famous.

Now when these storms arise, we simply have one decision and that is how we respond to those storms. And not just how, but when we respond to these storms. In Colorado, they are world famous for the Rocky Mountains that cover the western side and the plains that cover the eastern side. Because of this, Colorado is one of the only places in the world that houses both buffalo and cows. And there is a fantastic lesson for each of us to learn about how each of these animals responds to storms. When the storm rolls in from Colorado, it usually comes from the west and heads toward the east. Now the cows are fantastic creatures, and they usually sense the storm and as it slowly begins to approach them, they turn and begin to run from the storm. But because they can’t outrun the storm, they begin to run with the storm—maximizing the time spent in the storm. As people, we tend to do the same thing in life. We spend so much time trying to avoid the inevitable changes, and we put ourselves in more difficult situations that last much longer than they should. Now the buffalo do something quite different. As the storm rolls in from the west and begins to head toward the east, the buffalo sense the storm rolling over the mountains and instead of running from the storm, they begin to charge toward the storm. Because they run directly at the storm, they end up running straight through it—minimizing the overall time spent in that storm. This is a great lesson for all of us because I promise you that one thing in life is certain and it is that storms will come. Now we can’t control how often they come, how bad they are, or when they come, but one thing is certain: that each and every one of us can control how we respond to these storms. So instead of being the cow and trying to outrun the storm, increasing your pain and frustration, from this moment forward, I challenge you to charge the storm. I challenge you to be the buffalo.

when presented with options or a product with three sets, it feels complete and whole in our minds.5 Anything outside of that becomes overwhelming. Rule number one of explaining a product or offer is knowing that a confused buyer never buys. So if you overexplain and give way too many details, your prospect most likely is going to say, “I need to think about it.” The famous objection sales reps hear about 95 percent of the time.

So back to the famous selling in threes. Figure out the top three things in your program everyone must know. I’ll give you a hint because most coaching offers have these things. If someone buys a program or offer, it typically entails (1) coaching, (2) online course support or (3) online community. Those are three powerful things to focus on when explaining an offer. If you get bogged down by the details of what each of those entails when explaining to a client, it may be too much to handle.