Perennial Seller Quotes

perennial truths of financial history. Sooner or later every bubble bursts. Sooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers. Sooner or later greed turns to fear.

A critical test of any product: Does it have a purpose? Does it add value to the world? How will it improve the lives of the people who buy it?

Each new work competes for customers with everything that came before it and everything that will come after.

Nothing has sunk more creators and caused more unhappiness than this: our inherently human tendency to pursue a strategy aimed at accomplishing one goal while simultaneously expecting to achieve other goals entirely unrelated.

People claim to want to do something that matters, yet they measure themselves against things that don’t, and track their progress not in years but in microseconds. They want to make something timeless, but they focus instead on immediate payoffs and instant gratification.

From sacrifice comes meaning. From struggle comes purpose. If you’re to create something powerful and important, you must at the very least be driven by an equally powerful inner force. If

If you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.

For any project, you must know what you are doing—and what you are not doing. You must also know who you are doing it for—and who you are not doing it for—to be able to say: THIS and for THESE PEOPLE. In

You must be able to explicitly say who you are building your thing for. You must know what you are aiming for—you’ll miss otherwise. You need to know this so you can make the decisions that go into properly positioning the project for them. You

People claim to want to do something that matters, yet they measure themselves against things that don’t, and track their progress not in years but in microseconds.

creating more work is one of the most effective marketing techniques of all.

The more you do, the harder you work, the luckier you seem to get.

As a general rule, however, the more accessible you can make your product, the easier it will be to market. You can always raise the price later, after you’ve built an audience.

Knowing what your goal is—having that crystal clear—allows you to know when to follow conventional wisdom and when to say “Screw it.

Customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen and it’s harder than it looks. —Peter Thiel

Principles are better than instructions and “hacks.” We can figure out the specifics later—but only if we learn the right way to approach them.

Advertising can add fuel to a fire, but rarely is it sufficient to start one.

Working on improving your product until it screams “Share me with everyone you know”—that’s less fun than buying a back-page ad that everyone (who still reads newspapers) will see.

In the way that a good wine must be aged, or that we let meat marinate for hours in spices and sauce, an idea must be given space to develop. Rushing into things eliminates that space.

Phil Libin, the cofounder of Evernote, has a quote I like to share with clients: “People [who are] thinking about things other than making the best product never make the best product.

There are too many famous Steve Jobs anecdotes to count, but several of them revolve around one theme: his unwillingness to leave well enough alone. His products had to be perfect; they had to do what they promised, and then some. And even though deadlines loomed and people would have to work around the clock, he would regularly demand more from his teams than they thought they could provide. The result? The most successful company in the history of the world and products that inspire devotion that is truly unusual for a personal computer or cell phone.

Marketing is the art of allocating resources—sending more power to the wheels that are getting traction, sending it away from the ones that are spinning. And investing in each strategy until the results stop working. Then find the next one!

As infuriating as it may be, we must be rational and fair about our own work. This is difficult considering our conflict of interest—which is to say, the ultimate conflict of interest: We made it. The way to balance that conflict of interest is to bring in people who are objective.

Free and cheap helps.” So does making the entire process as easy and seamless as possible. The more you reduce the cost of consumption, the more people will be likely to try your product. Which means price, distribution, and other variables are not only essential business decisions, they are essential marketing decisions.

Stoicism is designed to be medicine for the soul.

No one is entitled to relationships only because their work is genius. Relationships have to be earned, and maintained.

Creating is often a solitary experience. Yet work made entirely in isolation is usually doomed to remain lonely.

Paul Graham explains, “The best way to increase a startup’s growth rate is to make the product so good people recommend it to their friends.

To create something is a daring, beautiful act. The

Focusing on smaller, progressive parts of the work also eliminates the tendency to sit on your ass and dream indefinitely. There

The idea that you won’t have to work to sell your product is more than entitled.

Ben Horowitz: “There is no silver bullet. . . . No, we’re going to have to use a lot of lead bullets.

In the way that a good wine must be aged, or that we let meat marinate for hours in spices and sauce, an idea must be given space to develop. Rushing into things eliminates that space. Another

I always prefer to start from a place of reality, not from my own projections and preferences. Humility is clearer-eyed than ego—and that’s important because humility always works harder than ego.

Ignore what other people are doing. Ignore what’s going on around you. There is no competition. There is no objective benchmark to hit. There is simply the best that you can do—that’s all that matters.

I’m alarmed at how many creators gloss over creating. They fritter away their time on Twitter and Facebook—not killing time, but believing that they are building up followers to be the recipients of their unremarkable work.

Successfully finding and “scratching” a niche requires asking and answering a question that very few creators seem to do: Who is this thing for? Instead, many creators want to be for everyone . . . and as a result end up being for no one.

So we ask ourselves: Why are things the way they are? What practices should be questioned and which should remain sound? This allows us to be both exotic and accessible, shocking but not gratuitous, fresh without sacrificing timelessness.

To be great, one must make great work, and making great work is incredibly hard. It must be our primary focus. We must set out, from the beginning, with complete and total commitment to the idea that our best chance of success starts during the creative process.

You can pay for influence the way you can pay for sex, but from what I understand neither is quite the same as when you get it the old-fashioned way. Just as earned media is always better than paid media, cultivating real influence and relationships is far better than paying for eyeballs and fake friends.

Not only should you be testing your project as you create it, you must most seriously test your creation as it begins to resemble a final product. So you know what you have—so you can improve it. So you know what you have—so that you might figure out what to do with it. So you know what you have—so you can adjust your expectations.

Yet far too many people set out to produce something that, if they were really honest with themselves, is only marginally better or different from what already exists. Instead of being bold, brash, or brave, they are derivative, complementary, imitative, banal, or trivial. The problem with this is not only that it’s boring, but that it subjects them to endless amounts of competition.

Every project needs to go through this process. Whether it’s with an editor or a producer or a partner or a group of beta users or just through your own relentless perfectionism—whatever form it takes is up to you. But getting outside voices is crucial. The fact is, most people are so terrified of what an outside voice might say that they forgo opportunities to improve what they are making. Remember: Getting feedback requires humility. It demands that you subordinate your thoughts about your project and your love for it and entertain the idea that someone else might have a valuable thing or two to add.

The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. —Patti Smith

It’s total nonsense. Of course you can judge a book by its cover—that’s why books have covers. They’re designed to catch people’s attention and draw them toward the work—and away from all the other works that stand equal on the shelf.

Seneca wrote that what’s required is “confidence in yourself and the belief that you are on the right path, and not led astray by the many tracks which cross yours of people who are hopelessly lost, though some are wandering not far from the true path.

I had acquired what, to my mind, is the most valuable success a writer can have—a faithful following, a reliable group of readers who looked forward to every new book and bought it, who trusted me, and whose trust I must not disappoint. —Stefan Zweig

When I asked Craig Newmark what it felt like to know that he had created something used by millions of people, something that’s still going strong after twenty years, his answer was the perfect note to end this book on: “It feels nice for a moment, then surreal, then back to work.

God 4.0' is a stunning tour de force of erudition, deftly summarizing forty thousand years of the human search for spiritual transcendence – via the painted caves of the Ice Age shamans, the Neolithic megaliths and Mesopotamian ziggurats, and the soaring Medieval cathedrals and mosques. The second half of the book turns inward to describe the structures and processes of the human brain that foster transcendence, and the factors that interfere with it. Robert and Sally Ornstein make an ideal team for this collaboration, Sally a painter and publisher of children’s books, and Robert a psychologist and neuroscientist. The result is a brilliant guided expedition through reams of archeological and neurological research, with the authors highlighting in easily understood language the important discoveries and developments in our perennial quest for meaning and purpose. — Lisa Alther, novelist and author of four New York Times best sellers

The great Stoic Marcus Aurelius once admonished himself to be a “boxer, not a fencer.” A fencer, he said, has to bend down to pick up his weapon. A boxer’s weapon is a part of him—“all he has to do is clench his fist.

Humility is clearer-eyed than ego—and that’s important because humility always works harder than ego.

As for the uncertainty—that can’t bother us. Because, as Arthur Miller wrote in Death of a Salesman, successfully fulfilling our creative need is “greater than hunger or sex or thirst, a need to leave a thumbprint somewhere on the world. A need for immortality, and by admitting it, the knowing that one has carefully inscribed one’s name on a cake of ice on a hot July day.

From Ryan Holiday’s Perennial Seller: You can cut back on a lot of things as a leader, but the last thing you can ever skimp on is marketing. Your product needs a champion . . . That must be you. Marketing is your job. It can’t be passed on to someone else. Even if you’re famous, even if you have a million Twitter followers, even if you have a billion dollars to spend . . . it’s still on you and it still won’t be easy. Putting your ass where your heart wants to be means putting it out there where the world can judge it—and doing it in the smartest and most appealing way possible.

Likewise, if you’ve fallen into the sway of tracking your fellow creators on social media or you check the charts every week to see what other people are doing, you’re going to sap yourself of the discipline required to do what you are trying to do.

We are fighting not just against our contemporaries for recognition, but against centuries of great art for an audience. Each new work competes for customers with everything that came before it and everything that will come after.

The best marketing you can do for your book is to start writing the next one.

The idea that the web is empowering is just a bunch of rattling, chattering talk. Everything you consume online has been “optimized” to make you dependent on it. Content is engineered to be clicked, glanced at, or found-like a trap designed to bait, distract, and capture you.

Networking is not going to networking events and handing out business cards—that’s flyering. It is instead about forming, developing, and maintaining real relationships. It’s about being valuable and being available so that one day the favor might be returned.

Instead, the timeless, recurring problems that make us human—those are ambitious problems to tackle. Some

Only is better than best.

Many creatives want to be just the creator, or only “the idea guy.” They like that because it’s sexy and because that’s what comes easy to us. But I suspect we like it also because we’re afraid. We’re afraid of taking full responsibility for everything that comes next. A lot of decisions are going to be made—many of which can sink or make a project—that it’d be nice to have someone else to put it on. If we hand it off to someone else, then we have someone to blame when the project fails.

Adults create perennial sellers—and adults take responsibility for themselves. Children expect opportunities to be handed to them; maturity is understanding you have to go out and make them.

Lots of people,” as the poet and artist Austin Kleon puts it, “want to be the noun without doing the verb.” To make something great, what’s required is need. As in, I need to do this. I have to. I can’t not.

Luck is polarizing. The successful like to pretend it does not exist. The unsuccessful or the jaded pretend that it is everything.

Cut flowers can outlast movies that people have poured millions into.