Josh Kaufman Quotes

Business schools don't create successful people. They simply accept them, then take credit for their success.

You can't make positive discoveries that make your life better if you never try anything new.

Every successful business (1) creates or provides something of value that (2) other people want or need (3) at a price they're willing to pay, in a way that (4) satisfies the purchaser's needs and expectations and (5) provides the business sufficient revenue to make it worthwhile for the owners to continue operation.

Whoever best describes the problem is the one most likely to solve it. —

If you rely on finding time to do something, it will never be done. If you want to find time, you must make time.

Every time your customers purchase from you, they’re deciding that they value what you have to offer more than they value anything else their money could buy at that moment.

The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears.

Retired general Colin Powell famously advocates collecting half of the information available, then making a decision, even though your information is clearly incomplete.

Improve by 1% a day, and in just 70 days, you’re twice as good.

Ideas are cheap—what counts is the ability to translate an idea into reality, which is much more difficult than recognizing a good idea.

Focus on Options, not issues, and you’ll be able to handle any situation life throws at you.

The trouble comes when we confuse learning with skill acquisition. If you want to acquire a new skill, you must practice it in context. Learning enhances practice, but it doesn’t replace it. If performance matters, learning alone is never enough.

Once you eliminate your number one problem, number two gets a promotion. —GERALD WEINBERG,

There is only one boss: the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else. —SAM WALTON, FOUNDER OF WALMART A

Ending a chapter of your life on your own terms is a feat worthy of respect and admiration.

If you want an audience, start a fight. —IRISH PROVERB

Here’s a curious fact about human beings: we have a really hard time realizing that something isn’t there.

Experimentation is the essence of living a satisfying, productive, fulfilling life. The more you Experiment, the more you learn, and the more you’ll achieve.

College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.

Learn everything you can from your competition, and then create something even more valuable.

Options are often an overlooked form of value—flexibility is one of the Three Universal Currencies (discussed later). Find a way to give people more flexibility, and you may discover a viable business model.

Goods in any storehouse are useless until somebody takes them out and puts them to the use they were meant for. That applies to what man stores away in his brain, too. —THOMAS J. WATSON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF IBM

Discoveries are often made by not following instructions, by going off the main road, by trying the untried. —FRANK TYGER, POLITICAL CARTOONIST AND COLUMNIST I

Focus on creating Forms of Value that require the least end-user effort to get the best possible End Result—they will have the highest perceived value.

there’s often a huge difference between an interesting idea and a solid business.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

Many things aren't fun until you're good at them . Every skill has what I call a frustration barrier, a period of time in which you're horribly unskilled and you're painfully aware of that fact.

A good salesman, as the old (and politically incorrect) saying goes, can sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo. It's a cliché, but there's some truth to it: Inuit who live above the Arctic Circle use insulated refrigerators to keep their food from freezing in subzero temperatures

Fear of the unknown will always be with you, no matter what you do. That’s comforting in a way: if there’s nothing you can do to change it, there’s no reason to let it stop you.

The moment you make a mistake in pricing, you’re eating into your reputation or your profits. —KATHARINE PAINE, FOUNDER

Ramit Sethi recommends applying what he calls the “85% Solution.” So many people get wrapped up in making the perfect decision that they wind up overwhelming themselves and doing nothing.

By making offers Modular, the business can create and improve each offer in isolation, then mix and match offers as necessary to better serve their customers. It’s like playing with LEGOS: once you have a set of pieces to work with, you can put them together in all sorts of interesting ways.

people assume that they need to attend business school to learn how to build a successful business or advance in their career. That’s simply not true.

You’re facing a monster. Of course you “don’t feel like it.” Strap on your armor anyway

Business is not (and has never been) rocket science—it

By choosing to innovate instead of compete, Apple successfully captured a leadership share of a very competitive market.

Quality, quality, quality: never waver from it, even when you don’t see how you can afford to keep it up. When you compromise, you become a commodity and then you die.

Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.

People buy because they believe they’re getting more value in the Transaction than they’re spending.

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

1. Value Creation. Discovering what people need or want, then creating it. 2. Marketing. Attracting attention and building demand for what you’ve created. 3. Sales. Turning prospective customers into paying customers. 4. Value Delivery. Giving your customers what you’ve promised and ensuring that they’re satisfied. 5. Finance. Bringing in enough money to keep going and make your effort worthwhile.

A great example of Guiding Structure is the “Sterile Cockpit Rule” that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) instituted in 1981. Most airline accidents happen below ten thousand feet, where distractions can be deadly. Above ten thousand feet, pilots can talk about anything they want, but below ten thousand feet, the only discussion permitted is about information directly related to the flight in progress. By eliminating distractions, the Sterile Cockpit Rule reduces errors and accidents.

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth. —MARCUS AURELIUS, ROMAN EMPEROR AND PHILOSOPHER

Consciously sending a mental “message received, safe to proceed” signal to your brain is a simple and surprisingly effective way to make yourself stop fixating on the issue

Approach making changes to a complex system with extreme caution: what you get may be the opposite of what you expect.

Paradox of Automation: the more efficient the Automated system, the more crucial the contribution of the human operators of that system.

It is better to have an approximate answer to the right question than an exact answer to the wrong question. —JOHN TUKEY,

How do I know what I think until I hear what I say? —E. M. FORSTER, NOVELIST AND SOCIAL ACTIVIST E

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

It’s this simple: if I never try anything, I never learn anything.

People don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy. —JEFFREY GITOMER, AUTHOR

Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff.

One of the reasons Subscriptions are so profitable is that they naturally maximize Lifetime Value.

Always remember that you’re a business, not a bank (unless your business involves Loans)—collect any outstanding payments as quickly as possible.

Desire BUT I REALLY WANT IT!!! —TWO-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN EVERYWHERE

The very best businesses create a virtuous cycle: they create huge amounts of value while keeping their expenses consistently low,

If you encourage your prospects to Visualize what their life will look like after purchasing, you increase the probability that they’ll purchase from you.

Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t. —SETH GODIN

Skip business school. Educate yourself.

As the saying goes: you can have anything you want, as long as you’re willing to pay the price.

Don’t waste time trying to predict an unknowable future—construct the most likely scenarios and plan what you’ll do if they occur, and you’ll be prepared for whatever actually happens.

You can’t operate a company by fear, because the way to eliminate fear is to avoid criticism, and the best way to avoid criticism is to do nothing. —STEVE ROSS, FORMER CEO OF TIME WARNER

7. Make dedicated time for practice. The time you spend acquiring a new skill must come from somewhere. Unfortunately, we tend to want to acquire new skills and keep doing many of the other activities we enjoy, like watching TV, playing video games, et cetera. I’ll get around to it, when I find the time, we say to ourselves. Here’s the truth: “finding” time is a myth. No one ever “finds” time for anything, in the sense of miraculously discovering some bank of extra time, like finding a twenty-dollar bill you accidentally left in your coat pocket. If you rely on finding time to do something, it will never be done. If you want to find time, you must make time.

Your job as a marketer isn’t to convince people to want what you’re offering: it’s to help your prospects convince themselves that what you’re offering will help them get what they really want.

As much as I enjoyed yoga courses, it was hard to make time for them. Generally speaking, my work arrangements were flexible, so it was mostly a psychological problem: it was hard to convince myself it was acceptable to go twist my body into knots for two hours when there was work to be done.

The trick is to find an attractive market that interests you enough to keep you improving your offering every single day. Finding that market is mostly a matter of patience and active exploration.

Oftentimes, what we experience as mental fatigue or emotional distress is simply a signal from our body that we’re not getting enough of something we physically need: nutrients, exercise, or rest.

Economic Values that people typically consider when evaluating a potential purchase. They are: 1. Efficacy—How well does it work? 2. Speed—How quickly does it work? 3. Reliability—Can I depend on it to do what I want? 4. Ease of Use—How much effort does it require? 5. Flexibility—How many things does it do? 6. Status—How does this affect the way others perceive me? 7. Aesthetic Appeal—How attractive or otherwise aesthetically pleasing is it? 8. Emotion—How does it make me feel? 9. Cost—How much do I have to give up to get this?

Motivation is an emotion—NOT a logical, rational activity. Just because your forebrain thinks you should be motivated to do something does not mean you’ll automatically become motivated to do that thing. (If only it were that easy, right?) Very often, Mental Simulations, Patterns, Conflicts, and Interpretations hidden in the midbrain can get in the way of making progress toward what we want to accomplish. As long as there are “move away from” signals being sent, you’ll have a hard time feeling motivated to move toward what you want.

Understanding what businesses actually do to create and deliver value is essential knowledge, but many business programs have de-emphasized value creation and operations in favor of finance and quantitative analysis.

The benefit of making your offers small and Modular is that it allows you to take advantage of a strategy called Bundling. Bundling allows you to repurpose value that you have already created to create even more value.

As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

Most drivers don’t buy expensive off-road-capable vehicles because they actually drive off the road. They buy them because off-road capability makes them feel adventurous and bold, capable of meeting any driving challenge.

1. Watch—What’s happening? What’s working and what’s not? 2. Ideate—What could you improve? What are your options? 3. Guess—Based on what you’ve learned so far, which of your ideas do you think will make the biggest impact? 4. Which?—Decide which change to make. 5. Act—Actually make the change. 6. Measure—What happened? Was the change positive or negative? Should you keep the change, or go back to how things were before this iteration? Iteration is a cycle—

The best businesses in the world are the ones that create the most value for other people. Some businesses thrive by providing a little value to many, and others focus on providing a lot of value to only a few people. Regardless, the more real value you create for other people, the better your business will be and the more prosperous you’ll become.

The Golden Trifecta is my personal three-word summary of How to Win Friends and Influence People. If you want to make others feel Important and safe around you, always remember to treat people with appreciation, courtesy, and respect.

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. —BILL GATES,

Perceived Value determines how much your customers will be willing to pay for what you’re offering. The higher the perceived value of your offering, the more you’ll be able to charge for it, which significantly improves your chances of succeeding.

Provide significant value to each subscriber on a regular basis. 2. Build a subscriber base and continually attract new subscribers to compensate for attrition. 3. Bill customers on a recurring basis. 4. Retain each subscriber as long as possible.

Here’s Gall’s Law : all complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked. Complex systems are full of variables and Interdependencies (discussed later) that must be arranged just right in order to function. Complex systems designed from scratch will never work in the real world, since they haven’t been subject to environmental selection forces while being designed.

A Checklist is an Externalized, predefined Standard Operating Procedure for completing a specific task. Creating a Checklist is enormously valuable for two reasons. First, Checklisting will help you define a System for a process that hasn’t yet been formalized—once the Checklist has been created, it’s easier to see how to improve or Automate the system. Second, using Checklists as a normal part of working can help ensure that you don’t forget to handle important steps that are easily overlooked when things get busy.

At the core, all successful businesses sell some combination of money, status, power, love, knowledge, protection, pleasure, and excitement. The more clearly you articulate how your product satisfies one or more of these drives, the more attractive your offer will become.

Popper said many wise things, but I think the following remark is among the wisest: “The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears.

Every business is fundamentally limited by the size and quality of the market it attempts to serve. The Iron Law of the Market is cold, hard, and unforgiving: if you don’t have a large group of people who want what you have to offer, your chances of building a viable business are very slim.

A venture that doesn’t create value for others is a hobby. A venture that doesn’t attract attention is a flop. A venture that doesn’t sell the value it creates is a nonprofit. A venture that doesn’t deliver what it promises is a scam. A venture that doesn’t bring in enough money to keep operating will inevitably close.

Value can’t be created without understanding what people want (market research). Attracting customers first requires getting their attention, then making them interested (marketing). In order to close a sale, people must first trust your ability to deliver on what’s promised (value delivery and operations). Customer satisfaction depends on reliably exceeding the customer’s expectations (customer service). Profit sufficiency requires bringing in more money than is spent (finance).

Every successful business (1) creates or provides something of value that (2) other people want or need (3) at a price they’re willing to pay, in a way that (4) satisfies the purchaser’s needs and expectations and (5) provides the business sufficient revenue to make it worthwhile for the owners to continue operation. Take away any of

STATE model to communicate without provoking anger or defensiveness: 1. Share your facts—Facts are less controversial, more persuasive, and less insulting than conclusions, so lead with them first. 2. Tell your story—Explain the situation from your point of view, taking care to avoid insulting or judging, which makes the other person feel less safe. 3. Ask for others’ paths—Ask for the other person’s side of the situation, what they intended, and what they want. 4. Talk tentatively—Avoid conclusions, judgments, and ultimatums. 5. Encourage testing—Make suggestions, ask for input, and discuss until you reach a productive and mutually satisfactory course of action.

Roughly defined, a business is a repeatable process that: 1. Creates and delivers something of value… 2. That other people want or need… 3. At a price they’re willing to pay… 4. In a way that satisfies the customer’s needs and expectations… 5. So that the business brings in enough profit to make it worthwhile for the owners to continue operation.

Fitbit is a company that knows the value of Shadow Testing. Founded by Eric Friedman and James Park in September 2008, Fitbit makes a small clip-on exercise and sleep data-gathering device. The Fitbit device tracks your activity levels throughout the day and night, then automatically uploads your data to the Web, where it analyzes your health, fitness, and sleep patterns. It’s a neat concept, but creating new hardware is time-consuming, expensive, and fraught with risk, so here’s what Friedman and Park did. The same day they announced the Fitbit idea to the world, they started allowing customers to preorder a Fitbit on their Web site, based on little more than a description of what the device would do and a few renderings of what the product would look like. The billing system collected names, addresses, and verified credit card numbers, but no charges were actually processed until the product was ready to ship, which gave the company an out in case their plans fell through. Orders started rolling in, and one month later, investors had the confidence to pony up $2 million dollars to make the Fitbit a reality. A year later, the first real Fitbit was shipped to customers. That’s the power of Shadow Testing.

Providing value in Product form is valuable because Products can be Duplicated . This book was only written once, but individual copies can be printed and delivered millions of times to readers all around the world. As a result, products tend to Scale better than other forms of value, since they can be Duplicated and/or Multiplied (all discussed later).

Before you engage, you won’t know the outcome of the struggle. You may win the day easily, with barely a scratch. You may prevail, after much effort and after earning a few battle scars. You may fall, never to rise again. There may be treasure in the back of the cave, enough to live on in splendor for the rest of your days. There may be nothing. You may win glory and renown, or be considered a fool, worse off than you were before. This is the essence of life. The outcome of your actions and decisions is unknown and unknowable. What separates the adventurer from the bulk of humanity is the willingness to fight in spite of the risks: to meet the enemy on the field of valor, trusting in skill, instinct, and determination to see them through to a good end. There are no certainties and no guarantees. The hero fights anyway.

Over time, managers and executives began using statistics and analysis to forecast the future, relying on databases and spreadsheets in much the same way ancient seers relied on tea leaves and goat entrails. The

1. Efficacy—How well does it work? 2. Speed—How quickly does it work? 3. Reliability—Can I depend on it to do what I want? 4. Ease of Use—How much effort does it require? 5. Flexibility—How many things does it do? 6. Status—How does this affect the way others perceive me? 7. Aesthetic Appeal—How attractive or otherwise aesthetically pleasing is it? 8. Emotion—How does it make me feel? 9. Cost—How much do I have to give up to get this?

these foundational business concepts mental models, and together, they create a solid framework you can rely on to make good decisions. Mental models are concepts that represent your understanding of “how things work.” Think of driving a car: what do you expect when you press down on the right-side pedal? If the car slows down, you’ll be surprised—that pedal is supposed to be the accelerator. That’s a mental model—an idea about how something works in the real world.

When creating your list of MITs, it’s useful to ask a Self-Elicitation question: “What are the two or three most important things that I need to do today? What are the things that—if I got them done today—would make a huge difference?” Write only those tasks on your MIT list, then try to get them done first thing in the morning.

In the classic sales book SPIN Selling, Neil Rackham describes the four phases of successful selling: (1) understanding the situation, (2) defining the problem, (3) clarifying the short-term and long-term implications of that problem, and (4) quantifying the need-payoff, or the financial and emotional benefits the customer would experience after the resolution of their problem.

1. Recruit the smallest group of people who can accomplish what must be done quickly and with high quality. Comparative Advantage means that some people will be better than others at accomplishing certain tasks, so it pays to invest time and resources in recruiting the best team for the job. Don’t make that team too large, however—Communication Overhead makes each additional team member beyond a core of three to eight people a drag on performance. Small, elite teams are best. 2. Clearly communicate the desired End Result, who is responsible for what, and the current status. Everyone on the team must know the Commander’s Intent of the project, the Reason Why it’s important, and must clearly know the specific parts of the project they’re individually responsible for completing—otherwise, you’re risking Bystander Apathy. 3. Treat people with respect. Consistently using the Golden Trifecta—appreciation, courtesy, and respect—is the best way to make the individuals on your team feel Important and is also the best way to ensure that they respect you as a leader and manager. The more your team works together under mutually supportive conditions, the more Clanning will naturally occur, and the more cohesive the team will become. 4. Create an Environment where everyone can be as productive as possible, then let people do their work. The best working Environment takes full advantage of Guiding Structure—provide the best equipment and tools possible and ensure that the Environment reinforces the work the team is doing. To avoid having energy sapped by the Cognitive Switching Penalty, shield your team from as many distractions as possible, which includes nonessential bureaucracy and meetings. 5. Refrain from having unrealistic expectations regarding certainty and prediction. Create an aggressive plan to complete the project, but be aware in advance that Uncertainty and the Planning Fallacy mean your initial plan will almost certainly be incomplete or inaccurate in a few important respects. Update your plan as you go along, using what you learn along the way, and continually reapply Parkinson’s Law to find the shortest feasible path to completion that works, given the necessary Trade-offs required by the work. 6. Measure to see if what you’re doing is working—if not, try another approach. One of the primary fallacies of effective Management is that it makes learning unnecessary. This mind-set assumes your initial plan should be 100 percent perfect and followed to the letter. The exact opposite is true: effective Management means planning for learning, which requires constant adjustments along the way. Constantly Measure your performance across a small set of Key Performance Indicators (discussed later)—if what you’re doing doesn’t appear to be working, Experiment with another approach.

In order to find and eliminate a Constraint, Goldratt proposes the “Five Focusing Steps,” a method you can use to improve the Throughput of any System: 1. Identification: examining the system to find the limiting factor. If your automotive assembly line is constantly waiting on engines in order to proceed, engines are your Constraint. 2. Exploitation: ensuring that the resources related to the Constraint aren’t wasted. If the employees responsible for making engines are also building windshields, or stop building engines during lunchtime, exploiting the Constraint would be having the engine employees spend 100 percent of their available time and energy producing engines, and having them work in shifts so breaks can be taken without slowing down production. 3. Subordination: redesigning the entire system to support the Constraint. Let’s assume you’ve done everything you can to get the most out of the engine production system, but you’re still behind. Subordination would be rearranging the factory so everything needed to build the engine is close at hand, instead of requiring certain materials to come from the other end of the factory. Other subsystems may have to move or lose resources, but that’s not a huge deal, since they’re not the Constraint. 4. Elevation: permanently increasing the capacity of the Constraint. In the case of the factory, elevation would be buying another engine-making machine and hiring more workers to operate it. Elevation is very effective, but it’s expensive—you don’t want to spend millions on more equipment if you don’t have to. That’s why Exploitation and Subordination come first: you can often alleviate a Constraint quickly, without resorting to spending more money. 5. Reevaluation: after making a change, reevaluating the system to see where the Constraint is located. Inertia is your enemy: don’t assume engines will always be the Constraint: once you make a few Changes, the limiting factor might become windshields. In that case, it doesn’t make sense to continue focusing on increasing engine production—the system won’t improve until windshields become the focus of improvement. The “Five Focusing Steps” are very similar to Iteration Velocity—the more quickly you move through this process and the more cycles you complete, the more your system’s Throughput will improve.