Scott Galloway Quotes

Don’t follow your passion, follow your talent.

People who received a great deal of attention for their looks at a young age are more likely to opt for cosmetic procedures when older. It’s the same in business.

Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.

teach 120 kids on Tuesday nights in my Brand Strategy course. That’s $720,000, or $60,000 per class, in tuition payments, a lot of it financed with debt. I’m good at what I do, but walking in each night, I remind myself we (NYU) are charging kids $500/minute for me and a projector. This. Is. Fucking. Ridiculous.

Expect that a certain amount of failure is out of your control, and recognize you may need to endure it or move on.

The ultimate gift, in our digital age, is a CEO who has the storytelling talent to capture the imagination of the markets while surrounding themselves with people who can show incremental progress against that vision each day.

Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity,” said Coco Chanel.

it seems impossible until it isn’t.

I believe most people are especially repelled by attributes in other people that remind them of things they loathe about themselves.

love was a willingness to take the life you’ve built for yourself and tear it up for the other person.

You want to cover more ground in less time than your peers. This is partially built on talent, but mostly on strategy and endurance

A step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction. —Kurt Vonnegut

We like to position education as the great leveler. But in fact it has become a caste system, a means of passing privilege on to the next generation.

tell my students that nothing wonderful, I’m talking really fantastic, will happen without taking a risk and subjecting yourself to rejection. Serendipity is a function of courage.

It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled.

luxury is irrational, which makes it the best business in the world. In 2016 Estée Lauder was worth more than the world’s largest communications firm, WPP.9 Richemont, owner of Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, was worth more than T-Mobile.10 LVMH commands more value than Goldman Sachs.

It is conventional wisdom that Steve Jobs put “a dent in the universe.” No, he didn’t. Steve Jobs, in my view, spat on the universe. People who get up every morning, get their kids dressed, get them to school, and have an irrational passion for their kids’ well-being, dent the universe. The world needs more homes with engaged parents, not a better fucking phone.

three platforms: Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Registering, iterating, and monetizing its audience is the heart of each platform’s business. It’s what the most valuable man-made things ever created (their algorithms) are designed to do.

This is the challenge with owning a restaurant. A large fixed cost—your lease—and little or nothing you can do about it, and because it’s a low-margin business with few sources of funding, there’s typically no capital cushion to survive lean times.

Entrepreneurs are usually enamored with the preciousness of their product vs. something that can scale.

Balance when establishing your career, in my view, is largely a myth. “Struggle porn” will tell you that you must be miserable before you can be successful. This isn’t true: you can experience a lot of reward along the way to success. But if balance is your priority in your youth, then you need to accept that, unless you are a genius, you may not reach the upper rungs of economic security.

What we experience is change, not time. Aristotle observed that time does not exist without change, because what we call time is simply our measurement of the difference between “before” and “after.

The nation once idolized astronauts and civil rights leaders who inspired hope and empathy. Now it worships tech innovators who generate billions and move financial markets. We get the heroes we deserve.

In the past decade, we have transitioned from an innovation economy to an exploitation economy. Innovation is dangerous and unpredictable. It changes market dynamics and creates opportunities for nimble new players to steal share from established players.

My experience in traditional firms is that anything new is seen as innovative, and the people assigned to it, like any parent, become irrationally passionate about the project and refuse to acknowledge just how stupid and ugly your little project has become.

What’s clear is that we need business leaders who envision, and enact, a future with more jobs—not billionaires who want the government to fund, with taxes they avoid, social programs for people to sit on their couches and watch Netflix all day. Jeff, show some real fucking vision.

Hrănim, cu bună-știință, mașinăriile corporatiste cu foarte multe informații despre viețile noastre - trasee zilnice, e-mailuri, apeluri telefonice, toate cele - și apoi ne așteptăm ca acele firme să le folosească cu intenții bune și în același timp să le protejeze, chiar să le ignore.

A study found that on Facebook, the top descriptors to complete the phrase “My husband is . . .” are “the best,” “my best friend,” “amazing,” “the greatest,” and “so cute.” On Google, under the cloak of anonymity, one of the top five ways to complete that phrase is also “amazing.” The other four: “a jerk,” “annoying,” “gay,” and “mean.”10

If you want to work for Vogue, produce films, or open a restaurant, you had better get immense psychological reward from your gig, as the comp, and returns on your efforts, will likely suck. Competition will be fierce, and even if you manage to get in, you'll be easily replaceable, as there are always younger, hipper candidates nipping at your heels. Very few high-school graduates dream of working for Exxon, but a big firm in a large sector would give you a career trajectory with regular promotions a sexy industry won't.

The number one piece of advice seniors would give to their younger selves is that they wish they’d been less hard on themselves

There has to be a product that doesn’t require you to get out the spoon and publicly eat shit over and over. Actually, no, there isn’t.

Altruistic behavior decreases in times of greater income inequality. The rich are more generous in times of lesser inequality and less generous when inequality grows more extreme.

Recent research from the Johns Hopkins University Center on Aging and Health found that caregivers had an 18 percent lower mortality rate than noncaregivers.

Booking travel the same day? You must be a business traveler, please - bend over.

Facebook—at Google the defining factors were the elegantly simple homepage and the fact that advertisers weren’t allowed to influence search results (organic search).

Brands are two things: promise and performance.

It's never been a better time to be exceptional, or a worst time to be average.

The definition of rich is when your passive income exceeds your nut (what you need to live).

One way to appreciate the brilliance of this acquisition is to look at Instagram’s “Power Index,” the number of people a platform reaches times their level of engagement. This social index reveals Instagram as the world’s most powerful platform, as it has 400 million users, a third of Facebook’s, but garners fifteen times the level of engagement. L2 Analysis of Unmetric Data.

the words of Silicon Valley marketer Tom Hayes, who did just that for Applied Materials, “When the news is negative, you want to be perceived as a good company to which a bad thing has happened.

Consumers don’t want more choice, but more confidence in the choices presented. Choice is a tax on time and attention. Customers want someone else to do the research and curate the options for them.

The digital age is Heraclitus on steroids: change is a daily constant. In almost every professional environment, we are expected to use and master tools that did not exist a decade ago, or even last year. For better or worse (and frankly, it is often for worse), organizations have access, essentially, to infinite amounts of data, and what might as well be an infinite variety of ways to sort through and act on that data. At the same time, ideas can be turned into reality at unprecedented speed. The thing Amazon, Facebook, and no less hot firms, including Zara, have in common is they are agile (the new-economy term for fast).

The wealthiest man in the twentieth century mastered the art of minimum-wage employees selling you stuff. The wealthiest man of the twenty-first century is mastering the science of zero-wage robots selling you stuff.

People who get up every morning, get their kids dressed, get them to school, and have an irrational passion for their kids’ well-being, dent the universe. The world needs more homes with engaged parents, not a better fucking phone.

Getting a good job, working long hours, keeping your skills relevant, navigating the politics of an organization, finding a live/work balance...these are all really hard. In contrast, respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility...these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy stuff right. In and of themselves they will not make you successful. However, not possessing them will hold you back and you will not achieve your potential.

Costco is well positioned to buck the ugly trends in retail for a number of reasons, including 11 billion of them sitting in its bank account. Honeywell’s $15 billion will likely carry it into a post-corona land of milk and honey. Johnson & Johnson has nearly $20 billion—it’s not going anywhere. Every one of these companies will have their pick of the assets and customers left behind when their weaker competitors shut down. In every category, there will be more concentration of power in the two or three companies with the strongest balance sheets.

Gap years should be the norm, not the exception. An increasingly ugly secret of campus life is that a mix of helicopter parenting and social media has rendered many 18-year-olds unfit for college. Ninety percent of kids who defer and take a gap year return to college and are more likely to graduate, with better grades.

Don’t follow your passion, follow your talent. Determine what you are good at (early), and commit to becoming great at it. You don't have to love it, just don't hate it. If practice takes you from good to great, the recognition and compensation you will command will make you start to love it. And, ultimately, you will be able to shape your career and your specialty to focus on the aspects you enjoy the most. And if not—make good money and then go follow your passion. No kid dreams of being a tax accountant. However, the best tax accountants on the planet fly first class and marry people better looking than themselves—both things they are likely to be passionate about.

Consider that the telephone took 75 years to reach 50 million users, whereas television was in 50 million households within 13 years, the internet in 4,  . . . and Angry Birds in 35 days. In the tech era, the pace is accelerating further: it took Microsoft Office 22 years to reach a billion users, but Gmail only 12, and Facebook 9. Trying

The result has been disproportionate suffering. Lower-income Americans and people of color are more likely to be infected and face twice the risk of serious illness than people from higher-income households.7 For the wealthy, time with family, Netflix, savings, and stock portfolio value have all increased as commutes and costs have declined.

Pay special attention to things that bring you joy that don’t involve mind-altering substances or a lot of money. Whether it’s cooking, capoeira, the guitar, or mountain biking, interests and hobbies add texture to your personality. Being “in the zone” is happiness. You lose the sense of time, forget yourself, and feel part of something larger.

the so-called first-mover advantage is usually not an advantage. Industry pioneers often end up with arrows in their backs—while the horsemen, arriving later (Facebook after Myspace, Apple after the first PC builders, Google after the early search engines, Amazon after the first online retailers), get to feed off the carcasses of their predecessors by learning from their mistakes, buying their assets, and taking their customers.

No one has been able to aggregate more intention data on what consumers like than Google. Google not only sees you coming, but sees where you’re going. When homicide investigators arrive at a crime scene and there is a suspect—almost always the spouse—they check the suspect’s search history for suspicious Google queries (like “how to poison your husband”). I suspect we’re going to find that U.S. agencies have been mining Google to understand the intentions of more than some shopper thinking about detergent, but cells looking for fertilizer to build bombs. Google controls a massive amount of behavioral data. However, the individual identities of users have to be anonymized and, to the best of our knowledge, grouped. People are not comfortable with their name and picture next to a list of all the things they have typed into the Google query box. And for good reasons. Take a moment to imagine your picture and your name above everything you have typed into that Google search box. You’ve no doubt typed in some crazy shit that you would rather other people not know. So, Google has to aggregate this data, and can only say that people of this age or people of this cohort, on average, type in these sorts of things into their Google search box. Google still has a massive amount of data it can connect, if not to specific identities, to specific groups.

How has my industry raised prices at this rate without improving the product? At a few elite institutions, including NYU, we’ve leveraged scarcity. More than a business strategy, it’s become a fetish—believing you are a luxury brand instead of a public servant. Ivy Leagues have acceptance rates of 4–10%. A university president bragging about rejecting 90% of applicants is tantamount to a homeless shelter taking pride in turning away 90% of the needy that arrive each night. And this is not about standards or brand dilution. In an essay explaining his decision to stop conducting application interviews for his alma mater, Princeton, journalist Bryan Walsh observed, “The secret of elite college admissions is that far more students deserve to attend these colleges than are admitted, and there is virtually no discernible difference between those who make it and the many more who just miss out.” In support, he offered this statement from Princeton’s own dean of admissions: “We could have admitted five or six classes to Princeton from the [applicant] pool.”4 So, with a $26 billion endowment, the question becomes, Why wouldn’t you?

In early 2016, Amazon was given a license by the Federal Maritime Commission to implement ocean freight services as an Ocean Transportation Intermediary. So, Amazon can now ship others’ goods. This new service, dubbed Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), won’t do much directly for individual consumers. But it will allow Amazon’s Chinese partners to more easily and cost-effectively get their products across the Pacific in containers. Want to bet how long it will take Amazon to dominate the oceanic transport business? 67 The market to ship stuff (mostly) across the Pacific is a $ 350 billion business, but a low-margin one. Shippers charge $ 1,300 to ship a forty-foot container holding up to 10,000 units of product (13 cents per unit, or just under $ 10 to deliver a flatscreen TV). It’s a down-and-dirty business, unless you’re Amazon. The biggest component of that cost comes from labor: unloading and loading the ships and the paperwork. Amazon can deploy hardware (robotics) and software to reduce these costs. Combined with the company’s fledgling aircraft fleet, this could prove another huge business for Amazon. 68 Between drones, 757/ 767s, tractor trailers, trans-Pacific shipping, and retired military generals (no joke) who oversaw the world’s most complex logistics operations (try supplying submarines and aircraft carriers that don’t surface or dock more than once every six months), Amazon is building the most robust logistics infrastructure in history. If you’re like me, this can only leave you in awe: I can’t even make sure I have Gatorade in the fridge when I need it.

History favors the bold. Compensation favors the meek. As a Fortune 500 company CEO, you’re better off taking the path often traveled and staying the course. Big companies may have more assets to innovate with, but they rarely take big risks or innovate at the cost of cannibalizing a current business. Neither would they chance alienating suppliers or investors. They play not to lose, and shareholders reward them for it—until those shareholders walk and buy Amazon stock. Most boards ask management: “How can we build the greatest advantage for the least amount of capital/investment?” Amazon reverses the question: “What can we do that gives us an advantage that’s hugely expensive, and that no one else can afford?” Why? Because Amazon has access to capital with lower return expectations than peers. Reducing shipping times from two days to one day? That will require billions. Amazon will have to build smart warehouses near cities, where real estate and labor are expensive. By any conventional measure, it would be a huge investment for a marginal return. But for Amazon, it’s all kinds of perfect. Why? Because Macy’s, Sears, and Walmart can’t afford to spend billions getting the delivery times of their relatively small online businesses down from two days to one. Consumers love it, and competitors stand flaccid on the sidelines. In 2015, Amazon spent $7 billion on shipping fees, a net shipping loss of $5 billion, and overall profits of $2.4 billion. Crazy, no? No. Amazon is going underwater with the world’s largest oxygen tank, forcing other retailers to follow it, match its prices, and deal with changed customer delivery expectations. The difference is other retailers have just the air in their lungs and are drowning. Amazon will surface and have the ocean of retail largely to itself.

It took the last 10 years to create 20 million jobs and 10 weeks to destroy 40 million.

We registered a decade of ecommerce growth in eight weeks.

Your childhood, teens, and college years are the stuff of Han Solo, beer, road trips, random sexual encounters, and self-discovery. Pure magic. From your mid-twenties through your mid-forties, though, shit gets real—work, stress, and the realization that, despite what your teachers and your mom told you, you likely won’t be a senator or have a fragrance named after you.

The definition of “rich” is having passive income greater than your burn.

I try to avoid investing in anything that sounds remotely cool. I didn’t buy BlackBook magazine, or invest in Ford Models or a downtown members-only club focused on music. If, on the other hand, the business, and the issue the business addresses, sounds so boring I want to put a gun in my mouth, then . . . bingo, I’ll invest.

The internet is the fastest-growing channel in the largest economy in the world, and Amazon is capturing the majority of that growth.

Entrepreneurship is a sales job with negative commissions until you raise capital, are profitable, or go out of business—whichever comes first.

The internet is the fastest-growing channel in the largest economy in the world, and Amazon is capturing the majority of that growth.34 In the all-important holiday season (November and December 2016), Amazon captured 38 percent of online sales.

Facebook and Google (now known as Alphabet) are together worth $1.3 trillion. You could merge the world’s top five advertising agencies (WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, IPG, and Dentsu) with five major media companies (Disney, Time Warner, 21st Century Fox, CBS, and Viacom) and you’d still need to add five major communications companies (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Charter, and Dish) to get only 90 percent of what Google and Facebook are worth together.

Apple’s profits were greater than the revenues of either Coca-Cola or Facebook. The first quarter of 2018, it will clock nearly twice the profits that Amazon has produced in its history.

Within twenty-four hours of the Amazon–Whole Foods acquisition announcement,64 large national grocery stocks fell 5 to 9 percent.

Apple, the most successful firm selling a low-cost product at a premium price. The total material cost for the iPhone X is $370, a fraction of the $999 price tag.80 Put another way, Apple has the profit margin of Ferrari with the production volume of Toyota.

Governments won’t let Facebook use its superpower — negligence — to disrupt their economy. Enabling genocide in Myanmar is one thing, but messing with our ability to buy Chick-fil-A and Land Rovers is another level. — Scott Galloway, NYU Stern

The Covid-19 pandemic is an effective weapon of mass distraction from big tech’s bad behavior. No news story survives 12 hours while a pandemic coupled with a national display of incompetence renders everything else what it is, less important.

Dr. Mike Ryan, who leads the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Programme, put it well, a lesson that applies to all emergencies: “If you need to be right before you move, you will never win. Perfection is the enemy of the good when it comes to emergency management. Speed trumps perfection.

I tell my students that nothing wonderful, I’m talking really fantastic, will happen without taking a risk and subjecting yourself to rejection. Serendipity is a function of courage.

fear of rejection is a bigger obstacle than lack of talent or the market.

The truth about 90-plus percent of entrepreneurs is that we start companies not because we’re so skilled, but because we don’t have the skills to be an effective employee.

the same answer to most of life’s questions: whatever is best for the kids.

IN A capitalist society, we mark life by our purchases.

You are also less likely to believe in God if you have a high IQ.

Because I’m successful, people often recast this offensiveness as honesty or even leadership.

the subject matter in section three is profound: love and relationships.

Selling is calling people who don’t want to hear from you, pretending to like them, getting treated poorly, and then calling them again.

It’s key, if you’re doing really well, to realize that much of it isn’t your fault—you’ve been swept up in a boom.

Wealthy people claim they don’t think much about money. That’s bullshit—they are obsessed with money.

Professional success is the means, not the end.

Take a ton of pictures, text your friends stupid things, check in with old friends as often as possible, express admiration to coworkers, and every day, tell as many people as you can that you love them. A couple of minutes every day—the payoff is small at first, and then it’s immense.

Advertisers need Facebook much more than Facebook needs any one, or thousand, advertisers. If Ford Motor announced they were concerned with the subterfuge of our democracy and were no longer going to advertise on Facebook, the Detroit firm would be commended for their actions in the media, and the market would promptly cut 10 percent off their share price.

For babies, active crying may be a way of restoring equilibrium after overstimulation.

as we get older we become more like ourselves,

The billionaire jerk portrayed in movies and on TV is mostly a cartoon—an animation of something that isn’t real.

Achievement is just a moment in pencil unless you can share it with people you care about. Then it becomes real, a memory in permanent ink.

Colleges have embraced people who do not look like us, but are increasingly intolerant of people who don’t think like us.

Achievement is just a moment in pencil unless you can share it with people you care about.

Parents are like consumer brands in that, as kids, we remember only two or three key things about them, missing the nuance you only appreciate as you get older and realize people are complicated.

El poder del big data y de la inteligencia artificial consiste en que están señalando el final de los muestreos y las estadísticas, ahora es posible rastrear directamente el patrón de compra de cada uno de tus clientes en cada una de tus tiendas por todo el mundo, y responder casi instantáneamente con descuentos, cambios en el inventario, el diseño de las tiendas, etcétera... y hacerlo 24 horas 7 días a la semana 365 días al año. O mejor aún, creas la tecnología necesaria para responder al segundo de forma automática. Mi aplicación favorita de inteligencia artificial es la función de reproducción automática del siguiente episodio de Netflix, que ahora han copiado otras plataformas.

To be sure, the early phases have not been pretty. Simply taking a college lecture course and putting it on Zoom is not e-learning in any but the most rudimentary sense, and students are predictably dissatisfied. That will change. Schools are putting their faculty through training programs, teaching them how to use the available tools, how to restructure their classes, how to migrate online.

El nuevo marketing es la orientación conductual. Y funciona: no hay nada que pueda predecir tus futuras compras mejor que tu actividad actual. Si estoy en el sitio web de Tiffany, he estado mirando anillos de compromiso y he programado una cita para comprar dicho anillo en una determinada tienda, probablemente signifique que estoy a punto de casarme. Si me paso mucho tiempo en el sitio de Audi configurando un A4, entonces estoy en busca de un sedán de lujo de cuatro puertas de unos treinta o cuarenta mil dólares.

what's good for amazon is bad for retail, and vice versa

Amazon's unwavering focus on making consumer purchases increasingly frictionless

given a 10 percent chance of a hundred times payout, you should take that bet every time

they live for today and acknowledge that great success only comes with significant, even existential risk

biggest mistakes in business history.. are risks that firms failed to take