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.

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

it seems impossible until it isn’t.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

wealth is the absence of economic anxiety. Freed of the pressure to earn, we can choose how we live. Our relationships with others aren’t shadowed by the stress of money. It sounds basic, easy even.

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.

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.

Opportunity is a function of density. Get to a place that’s crowded with success. Big cities are Wimbledon—even if you aren’t Rafael Nadal, your game will improve by being on the court with him. And you’ll either get in better shape or learn you shouldn’t be at Wimbledon.

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

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.

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

Brands are two things: promise and performance.

Drive a Hyundai, and take your wife to St. Barts.

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).

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

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

wealth is the absence of economic anxiety.

because it’s much easier to be successful when people are rooting for you. Strong character is a wealth accelerant.

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.

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

Invest aggressively into your strength(s) and spend modest effort to get your weaknesses to average so they don't hold you back.

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.

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

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.

We now worship at the altar of innovation and youth, versus character or kindness.

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

People who speak at universities, especially at commencement, who tell you to follow your passion—or my favorite, to “never give up”—are already rich.

Where you die, and who is around you at the end, is a strong signal of your success or failure in life.

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.

Sixty-four percent of people who join extremist groups on Facebook do so because the algorithm steers them there. Less than three years after QAnon appeared online, half of Americans had heard of its conspiracy theories. In reality, what social media favors is that which divides us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The path to rich(es) is a path of living below your means and investing in income-producing assets. Rich is more a function of discipline than how much you make.

Mil millones por una empresa con diecinueve empleados?»), Zuck se mantuvo firme y apretó el gatillo para hacerse con un activo que ahora vale cincuenta veces más que lo que pagó por él.

Amazon appeals to our hunter-gatherer instinct to collect more stuff with minimum effort. We have serious mojo for stuff, as survival went to the caveman who had the most twigs, had the right rocks to crack stuff open with, and got the most colorful mud to draw images on walls so his descendants knew when to plant crops, or what dangerous animals to avoid.

HP.com vs. the Apple Regent Street store in London is like bringing a (butter) knife to a gunfight.

With knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someone’s personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself.32

Facebook has already appropriated (that is, stolen) other Snapchat ideas, including Quick Updates, Stories, selfie filters, and one-hour messages. The trend will only continue—unless the government gets in the way.

Perhaps that’s why, of the Four, Google seems the most retiring, the most likely to remove itself from the limelight. “Gods don’t take curtain calls,” John Updike famously wrote of Ted Williams’s refusal to come out of the dugout to acknowledge the crowd after his last at bat. Lately, Google seems to prefer to keep its cap low over its eyes,

All of the other stuff—autonomous vehicles, drones—is just chaff, designed to keep customers and, even more so, employees pumped up.

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

The exit from Afghanistan demonstrated with startling clarity that a well-placed pawn can topple a king.

The exit from Afghanistan demonstrated with startling clarity that a well-placed pawn can topple a king. If the U.S. defense budget were as tall as the Empire State Building, the entirety of Afghanistan’s GDP would be only as high as the lampposts out front. The Taliban’s income would be about the size of a fire hydrant.

one of the dirty little secrets of the green revolution is that it requires some very grubby mineral extraction. Rare earth metals, cobalt, lithium, and other minerals are essential to batteries, magnets, and other advanced industrial applications. If the future of tech is green, it’s also red.

Life is change. The capacity to grow and evolve is what separates living things from mere objects. Stasis is death, to an organism and to a society. A healthy society is vibrant and dynamic, generating ideas and innovation in every field.

We learn tolerance through exposure, not isolation, and the connective tissue of the commonwealth doesn’t grow well over Wi-Fi.

manipulations of those who control the pipes, and their track record for enlightened despotism isn’t good. We’re anxious, overstressed, and hunched over our laptops. Friendship is dwindling—people report fewer close friends than they did thirty years ago, and 15% of men and 10% of women have no close friends at all.

If I spent my entire public life pointing out the risks we face, I would never run out of material.

Second, to be blunt, things are really fucking bad.

Nuclear energy suffers from a tragic branding problem. The technology is a carbon-free and reliable source of twenty-four-hour-per-day power. A single generator produces enough electricity to run all the homes in Philadelphia. And nuclear power has been in wide use around the world for generations.

We are a nation adrift. We lack neither wind nor sail, we have no shortage of captains or gear, yet our mighty ship flounders in a sea of partisanship, corruption, and selfishness. Our discourse is coarse, young people are failing to form relationships, and our brightest seek individual glory at the expense of the commonwealth. Our institutions are decaying, and the connective tissue of society frays nearly beyond repair. On the horizon, darkness and thunder.

We lost sight of some of the principal reasons for government: to protect the rights of the minority against the majority; to invest in things the market doesn’t like paying for, like education, infrastructure, and deep research; and to provide a safety net for those who slip through the cracks of the capitalist marketplace. Many came to see government as a threat to liberty, not its protector.

Accelerating Technological Advancement Two “laws” help explain the extraordinary changes wrought by the global adoption of the internet. The first is Moore’s Law, named for Gordon Moore, an Intel cofounder. In the 1960s, he observed that the number of transistors that could be squeezed into a single chip was increasing at a predictable rate—doubling about every eighteen months. Thanks to billions of dollars in R&D and engineering investment, that rate of improvement has held ever since. The second law is named after Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, one of the protocols foundational to the internet. Metcalfe posited that the value of a network is equal to the number of connections between users, not just the number of users. Bigger is better, and better, and better. These laws help us quantify something we can see in our online experience: both the power of our devices and the value of the network they’re attached to are millions of times greater than they were at the dawn of the internet era. Plotting this growth reveals an interesting twist, however. For the past thirty years, the value of the internet as described by Metcalfe’s Law has increased more than processing power has improved. But as internet penetration slows, so does the rate of increase in the value of the internet. Meanwhile, Moore’s Law chugs along, suggesting that we may be approaching an inflection point, when changes to our online experience are driven more by technological advancement than by the ever-growing number of online connections.

Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post (conveniently, the biggest media company in D.C.), and he’s building Amazon’s second headquarters (HQ2) across the river from—shocker!—the capital city.

I believe that fading economic opportunity and mobility is a disease, and the symptoms are shame, frustration, and rage. Young people—men in particular—have already found outlets for those feelings: chat rooms on Reddit, meme stocks, and violent protests are all signs of burgeoning boredom and frustration.

The pandemic revealed the chinks in America’s armor with painful clarity. Despite our vast resources, we were unable to wrestle with a virus one-tenth the size of the smallest dust particle.

The pandemic revealed the chinks in America’s armor with painful clarity. Despite our vast resources, we were unable to wrestle with a virus one-tenth the size of the smallest dust particle. Meanwhile, our global peers saw far lower death rates and much less dissemination of polarizing misinformation.

Netflix spends $17 billion on content annually, enough to make 1,133 episodes of Game of Thrones. That’s a lot of dragons.

These businesses were accumulating power long before Covid, but the pandemic acted as an accelerant. When physical encounters suddenly became dangerous, Big Tech stepped in with socially distant ways to order essential items, work, socialize, and be entertained. And as it evolves from being a pandemic to an endemic disease, Covid promises to finish the takeover job the search and social firms started.

With falling revenue came a dwindling pool of journalists. In 2008, the number of newsroom employees across all channels in the U.S.— from print to television—was roughly 114,000. By 2020 that number had fallen 26%, to 85,000. If the number of American journalists served as a proxy measurement for our nation’s collective truth, the truth was in sharp decline.

Luxul nu este ceva exterior, e înscris în genele noastre. El combină nevoia instinctivă de a transcende condiția umană și de a ne simți apropiați de perfecțiunea divină, având dorința de a deveni mai atractivi pentru potențialii parteneri. Timp de mii de ani am îngenuncheat în biserici, moschei și temple, am privit în jur și ne-am gândit „e imposibil ca mâinile umane să creeze catedrala din Reims/Hagia Sophia/Panteonul/Templele din Karnak. E imposibil ca oamenii simpli să fi creat această alchimie de sunet, artă și arhitectură fără inspirație divină. Ascultă cât de înălțătoare este muzica. Acea statuie, acele fresce, acei pereți de marmură. Nu mai sunt în lumea obișnuită. Aici e locul unde sălășluiește Dumnezeu.” De-a lungul istoriei masele nu au avut acces la lux, așa că făceau pelerinaje la catedrale pentru a vedea potire încrustate cu nestemate, candelabre sclipitoare, cea mai frumoasă artă din lume. Au început să asocieze copleșitoarea senzație estetică a operelor...cu prezența lui Dumnezeu. Aceasta e piatra de temelie a luxului. Datorită revoluției industriale și a creșterii generale a prosperității, în secolul XX acel lux a ajuns la îndemâna a milioane, poate chiar miliarde de oameni.

Being “in the zone” is happiness. You lose the sense of time, forget yourself, and feel part of something larger.

The world does not belong to the big, but to the fast.