Smart Marketing Quotes

If you are on social media, and you are not learning, not laughing, not being inspired or not networking, then you are using it wrong.

5 Ways To Build Your Brand on Social Media: 1 Post content that add value 2 Spread positivity 3 Create steady stream of info 4 Make an impact 5 Be yourself

Tweet others the way you want to be tweeted.

Some people have a lot of time, but no money-- It's because they don't work hard enough. Some people have a lot of money, but no time-- It's because they don't work smart enough. The most successful people have both.

Freedom of Speech doesn't justify online bullying. Words have power, be careful how you use them.

If you are in a position where you can reach people, then use your platform to stand up for a cause. HINT: social media is a platform.

The left holds that because markets are stupid models should be smart; the right believes that because models are stupid markets should be smart. Alas, it never hit both sides that both markets and models are very stupid.

Fifteen years ago, this would have been insider trading, but that quaint concept had disappeared a decade or two ago when so many brokers were doing it that it was impossible to jail them all. Now it was called smart trading.

If there are still honest-smart men and women within those old and noble traditions, they should think carefully, observe and diagnose the illness. They should face the contradiction. Discuss the conflation. And then do as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and many others have done. Choose the miracle of creative competition over an idolatry of cash. They should stand up..

They had stumbled either upon a serious flaw in modern financial markets or into a great gambling run. Characteristically, they were not sure which it was. As Charlie pointed out, “It’s really hard to know when you’re lucky and when you’re smart.

stop trying to be amazing and start being useful. I don’t mean this in a Trojan-horse, “infomercial that pretends to be useful but is actually a sales pitch” way. I mean a genuine, “how can we actually help you?” way.

Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are.

The Roman censor Appius Claudius the Blind said, “Every man is the architect of his own fortune.

There is nothing better than having to struggle and make your own way.

A foolish environmentalist wants to save nature from the greed of the market by exposing it to the tragedy of the commons. A smart environmentalist wants to save nature from the tragedy of the commons by exposing it to the greed of the market.

Think before you click. If people do not know you personally and if they cannot see you as you type, what you post online can be taken out of context if you are not careful in the way your message is delivered.

The time you won your town the race We chaired you through the market-place; Man and boy stood cheering by, And home we brought you shoulder-high. Today, the road all runners come, Shoulder-high we bring you home, And set you at your threshold down, Townsman of a stiller town. Smart lad, to slip betimes away From fields where glory does not stay, And early though the laurel grows It withers quicker than the rose. Eyes the shady night has shut Cannot see the record cut, And silence sounds no worse than cheers After earth has stopped the ears. Now you will not swell the rout Of lads that wore their honours out, Runners whom renown outran And the name died before the man. So set, before its echoes fade, The fleet foot on the sill of shade, And hold to the low lintel up The still-defended challenge-cup. And round that early-laurelled head Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead, And find unwithered on its curls The garland briefer than a girl’s.

Every Spring, nature teaches a class on business entrepreneurship. ....We see how capital is re-allocated, currencies are re-directed, growth is re-emphasized, and numerous life forms promote their value with re-vitalized marketing programs that implement flowers or seeds or aromas or habitability or pollination in an effort demonstrate a unique value proposition in a busy economy. Smart entrepreneurs enroll in this class every Spring and take good notes. Whether you're an entrepreneur of a small business or an entrepreneur of a line of business within a large company... learn from nature.

3 qualities of a good management; Honest Hungry & Smart.

Starting with the customer, market, and price is the only approach for product success.” —

Selling is a sacred trust between buyer and seller.

My phone isn't "smart" because of its features. I make it smart by maximizing the phone's feature-set toward better personal efficiency.

What if instead of trying to be amazing you just focused on being useful? What if you decided to inform, rather than promote?

You gotta be smart with AdSpend. Ultimately it's about conversion to sales. And your AdSpend needs to have a healthy ROI based on that conversion to sales.

Bones is, in short, my hero. She is like a one-woman marketing campaign for smart girls.

On the other hand, data smart marketers look beyond data and do not go around chasing KPI. They focus on solving their customers’ problems, one at a time.

Darknet markets remain the most popular Bitcoin use case after speculation and ransomware. In 2014, darknet markets were estimated to have processed more bitcoins than all legitimate payment processors put together.

SOME PEOPLE ARE JUST born unlucky—so unlucky in fact that they do just the opposite of what they should at exactly the wrong time. Suckers? Maybe. But in the business of investing, those people have a name: retail investors.

She tells him staying with her would mean giving up his identity, his city, his whole life. He says, "You’re supposed to be smart, but you don’t get it. You are my life. You are my identity. I will not give you up. As for everything else? He shrugs. Who needs it?

Buying market share by hiring your competitors’ salespeople does nothing good for your reputation in the industry. Maybe you don’t care when you’re young and brash, but eventually you learn that reputation is a crucial business asset, worth much more over the long run than a few extra sales.

We carried the sleeping dog out to the garden and laid him on a mat on the lawn so that we could watch him as he came round from the anesthetic. Out there in the old high-walled garden the sun shone down on the flowers and the apple trees. Helen put on her fancy hat again and I put my smart jacket back on and we sat there, enjoying the good things from the picnic basket, we felt that we were still having a day out. But Helen kept glancing anxiously at the little dog and I knew she was thinking the same thing I was. Would he be all right after all that we had done for him and, even then, what was going to happen to him? Would his owners ever come to claim him, because if they didn’t, he had nobody in the world to look after him.

For a business to strengthen its position on the market, its managers should become skillful at helping their subordinates to set and achieve specific and measurable goals with realistic deadlines and clear expectations. Managers should also mentor employees through challenges, helping them grow and develop new skills.

Over recent years, [there's been] a strong tendency to require assessment of children and teachers so that [teachers] have to teach to tests and the test determines what happens to the child, and what happens to the teacher...that's guaranteed to destroy any meaningful educational process: it means the teacher cannot be creative, imaginative, pay attention to individual students' needs, that a student can't pursue things [...] and the teacher's future depends on it as well as the students'...the people who are sitting in the offices, the bureaucrats designing this - they're not evil people, but they're working within a system of ideology and doctrines, which turns what they're doing into something extremely harmful [...] the assessment itself is completely artificial; it's not ranking teachers in accordance with their ability to help develop children who reach their potential, explore their creative interests and so on [...] you're getting some kind of a 'rank,' but it's a 'rank' that's mostly meaningless, and the very ranking itself is harmful. It's turning us into individuals who devote our lives to achieving a rank, not into doing things that are valuable and important. It's highly destructive...in, say, elementary education, you're training kids this way [...] I can see it with my own children: when my own kids were in elementary school (at what's called a good school, a good-quality suburban school), by the time they were in third grade, they were dividing up their friends into 'dumb' and 'smart.' You had 'dumb' if you were lower-tracked, and 'smart' if you were upper-tracked [...] it's just extremely harmful and has nothing to do with education. Education is developing your own potential and creativity. Maybe you're not going to do well in school, and you'll do great in art; that's fine. It's another way to live a fulfilling and wonderful life, and one that's significant for other people as well as yourself. The whole idea is wrong in itself; it's creating something that's called 'economic man': the 'economic man' is somebody who rationally calculates how to improve his/her own status, and status means (basically) wealth. So you rationally calculate what kind of choices you should make to increase your wealth - don't pay attention to anything else - or maybe maximize the amount of goods you have. What kind of a human being is that? All of these mechanisms like testing, assessing, evaluating, measuring...they force people to develop those characteristics. The ones who don't do it are considered, maybe, 'behavioral problems' or some other deviance [...] these ideas and concepts have consequences. And it's not just that they're ideas, there are huge industries devoted to trying to instill them...the public relations industry, advertising, marketing, and so on. It's a huge industry, and it's a propaganda industry. It's a propaganda industry designed to create a certain type of human being: the one who can maximize consumption and can disregard his actions on others.

Another lesson is that smart professionals might give an instruction to a program based on a sensible-seeming and normally sound assumption (e.g. that trading volume is a good measure of market liquidity), and that this can produce catastrophic results when the program continues to act on the instruction with iron-clad logical consistency even in the unanticipated situation where the assumption turns out to be invalid. The algorithm just does what it does; and unless it is a very special kind of algorithm, it does not care that we clasp our heads and gasp in dumbstruck horror at the absurd inappropriateness of its actions. This is a theme that we will encounter again.

The worst continued to worsen. What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning. Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to maximize the suffering, and also to insure that as few people as possible escape the common misfortune. The fortunate speculator who had funds to answer the first margin call presently got another and equally urgent one, and if he met that there would still be another. In the end all the money he had was extracted from him and lost. The man with the smart money, who was safely out of the market when the first crash came, naturally went back in to pick up bargains. The bargains then suffered a ruinous fall. Even the man who waited for volume of trading to return to normal and saw Wall Street become as placid as a produce market, and who then bought common stocks would see their value drop to a third or a fourth of the purchase price in the next 24 months. The Coolidge bull market was a remarkable phenomenon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable.

Learn to allow your team leaders to shine while you reign. All that matters in the end is the result, nobody cares about attention without financial benefits.

Patience and practice are what will get me there. This

What you lack in smarts or talent, you can make up for with passion and hard work. Effort is the great equalizer.

Friends are people that are willing to tell me when I’m making stupid decisions as well as encourage me onward when I’m making smart ones.

Smart Risk will shatter the emotional myths to investing and help Canadians see the opportunities in today's volatile market.

If you start with a smart strategy, and clear vision, you will be able to achieve superior results to reach the right audiences, through the right channels at the right time.

What the efficient market hypothesis doesn't account for is that people are not always rational. Just ask any divorce lawyer.

The darknet markets are fuelled by users who want to buy drugs without having to go to the bad part of town and talk to people from a minority, and dealers obtaining commercial quantities to sell locally

Whether Musk was a founder of Tesla in the purest sense of the word is irrelevant at this point. There would be no Tesla to talk about today were it not for Musk’s money, marketing savvy, chicanery, engineering smarts, and indomitable spirit. Tesla was, in effect, willed into existence by Musk and reflects his personality as much as Intel, Microsoft, and Apple reflect the personalities of their founders.

Market matters most; neither a stellar team nor fantastic product will redeem a bad market. Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are. —MARC ANDREESSEN, VENTURE CAPITALIST AND FOUNDER OF NETSCAPE AND NING.COM

Market matters most. And neither a stellar team nor a fantastic product will redeem a bad market. . . . Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are. —MARC ANDREESSEN, VENTURE CAPITALIST AND COFOUNDER OF NETSCAPE

I’m having yet another dinner, but this time with more of the working-level capital markets origination bankers. These guys are considerably more risk averse; they don’t have the stomach for sales and trading and lack the smarts for M&A.

The big guys who ran things didn't want you thinking or feeling. It slowed down production. They wanted you scared and working so you wouldn't bump up against the truth--life could be fun. Yup, they wanted you scared. They wanted you grim. They wanted you madly cranking out Barbie dolls or Post Toasties or Xerox, or they wanted you overworked and underpaid at teaching so you could at least feel smart, and they wanted you to keep having kids so you'd have to keep working at whatever job you were stuck in and not have time to think or feel or, if you did, you certainly wouldn't have time to do anything about it, or even get close to the big fun, the fun that belonged only to them. And then they wanted your kids to hop on the same treadmill.

newspapers do not have to have a screaming headline saying that nothing new is taking place (though the Bible was smart enough to declare ein chadash tachat hashemesh—“ nothing new under the sun,” providing the information that things just do recur).

You make plans and decisions assuming randomness and chaos are for chumps. The illusion of control is a peculiar thing because it often leads to high self-esteem and a belief your destiny is yours for the making more than it really is. This over-optimistic view can translate into actual action, rolling with the punches and moving ahead no matter what. Often, this attitude helps lead to success. Eventually, though, most people get punched in the stomach by life. Sometimes, the gut-punch doesn’t come until after a long chain of wins, until you’ve accumulated enough power to do some serious damage. This is when wars go awry, stock markets crash, and political scandals spill out into the media. Power breeds certainty, and certainty has no clout against the unpredictable, whether you are playing poker or running a country. Psychologists point out these findings do not suggest you should throw up your hands and give up. Those who are not grounded in reality, oddly enough, often achieve a lot in life simply because they believe they can and try harder than others. If you focus too long on your lack of power, you can slip into a state of learned helplessness that will whirl you into a negative feedback loop of depression. Some control is necessary or else you give up altogether. Langer proved this when studying nursing homes where some patients were allowed to arrange their furniture and water plants—they lived longer than those who had had those tasks performed by others. Knowing about the illusion of control shouldn’t discourage you from attempting to carve a space for yourself out of whatever field you want to tackle. After all, doing nothing guarantees no results. But as you do so, remember most of the future is unforeseeable. Learn to coexist with chaos. Factor it into your plans. Accept that failure is always a possibility, even if you are one of the good guys; those who believe failure is not an option never plan for it. Some things are predictable and manageable, but the farther away in time an event occurs, the less power you have over it. The farther away from your body and the more people involved, the less agency you wield. Like a billion rolls of a trillion dice, the factors at play are too complex, too random to truly manage. You can no more predict the course of your life than you could the shape of a cloud. So seek to control the small things, the things that matter, and let them pile up into a heap of happiness. In the bigger picture, control is an illusion anyway.

Jeanette once told me that video games and mainstream entertainment were like marketing tools for the confused and disconnected youth of America. She believed society and its moral center, its sense of propriety and right and wrong, black and white, had become so corrupted on a basic level that one day all decent people would become overwhelmed and disconnect from society in Howard Hughes fashion. You had to worry when someone as smart and inherently decent as Jeanette Miller began talking like that.

I think ya'll should work for me this summer in Gutshot. I'm starting a project, and you'd be perfect for it." Over the years, people had occasionally sought to employ Colin in a manner beffitting his talents. But (a) summers were for smart-kid camp so that he could further his learning and (b) a real job would distract him from his real work, which was becoming an ever-larger repository of knowledge, and (c) Colin didn't really have any marketable skills. One rarely comes across, for instance, the following want ad:

This book is, in a way, a scrapbook of my writing life. From shopping the cathedral flea market in Barcelona with David Sedaris to having drinks at Cognac with Nora Ephron just months before she died. To the years of sporadic correspondence I had with Thom Jones and Ira Levin. I’ve stalked my share of mentors, asking for advice. Therefore, if you came back another day and asked me to teach you, I’d tell you that becoming an author involves more than talent and skill. I’ve known fantastic writers who never finished a project. And writers who launched incredible ideas, then never fully executed them. And I’ve seen writers who sold a single book and became so disillusioned by the process that they never wrote another. I’d paraphrase the writer Joy Williams, who says that writers must be smart enough to hatch a brilliant idea—but dull enough to research it, keyboard it, edit and re-edit it, market the manuscript, revise it, revise it, re-revise it, review the copy edit, proofread the typeset galleys, slog through the interviews and write the essays to promote it, and finally to show up in a dozen cities and autograph copies for thousands or tens of thousands of people… And then I’d tell you, “Now get off my porch.” But if you came back to me a third time, I’d say, “Kid…” I’d say, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Is my product compelling to our target customer? Have we made this product as easy to use as humanly possible? Will this product succeed against the competition? Not today’s competition, but the competition that will be in the market when we ship? Do I know customers who will really buy this product? Not the product I wish we were going to build, but what we’re really going to build? Is my product truly differentiated? Can I explain the differentiation to a company executive in two minutes? To a smart customer in one minute? To an industry analyst in 30 seconds?

Avasarala: "... and I understand that you've got a few after-market add-ons?" "Keel-mounted rail gun!" Alex said with a grin. "That scream of overcompensating for tiny, tiny penises, but might prove useful, the mission commander has requested you and your ship, and honestly none of you are worth a wet slap at this point except Ms. Nagata, anyway.

In short, the quiet political philosophy behind classical liberalism holds that capitalist business owners should rule. The self-regulating market is a facade covering political domination by business owners. Thus the name “propertarianism,” because its main practical tenet is that the owners of property should exercise political command over society.

I don’t have any wonderful insights that other people don’t have. I just have slightly more consistently than others avoided idiocy. Other people are trying to be smart. All I’m trying to be is non-idiotic. I find that all you have to do to get ahead in life is to be non-idiotic and live a long time. It’s harder to be non-idiotic than most people think.

Why did so many smart people believe these laissez-fairey tales? It’s a good question. Some of the blame surely goes to the excessive faith in free markets that was the elixir of the day. Some goes to economists who believed and extolled the efficient markets hypothesis—and taught it to their students, many of whom wound up as financial engineers on Wall Street.

If a young man tells his date she’s intelligent, looks lovely, and is a great conversationalist, he’s saying the right things to the right person and that’s marketing. If the young man tells his date how handsome, smart, and successful he is, that’s advertising. If someone else tells the young woman how handsome, smart, and successful her date is, that’s public relations

Do not worry about failure, I would tell them. Do not worry about making mistakes in life. It is good to lose money, to go broke at least once, and preferably twice. But if you are going to do it, do it early in your career. It is better to go bust when you are talking about $20,000 than when you are talking about $20 million. Do it early, and it is not the end of the world.

My “10 Smart Market Diagnosis and Profiling Questions” What keeps them awake at night, indigestion boiling up their esophagus, eyes open, staring at the ceiling? What are they afraid of? What are they angry about? Who are they angry at? What are their top three daily frustrations? What trends are occurring and will occur in their businesses or lives? What do they secretly, ardently desire most? Is there a built-in bias to the way they make decisions? (Example: engineers = exceptionally analytical) Do they have their own language? Who else is selling something similar to their product, and how? Who else has tried selling them something similar, and how has that effort failed? So, Step 1 in our system is to analyze thoroughly, understand, and connect with the customer.

Creativity, like love, is entirely emotional, meaning it doesn’t have a physical presence. That’s what makes it so extraordinary, and yet so difficult for so many to believe in or understand. It makes a lot of very smart people uncomfortable; they have an intense desire for creativity in their lives or businesses, but they can’t just purchase it like a material thing or control it like a process in a factory.

Harry Potter Vs Lord Voldemort Invisible Selling is like magic . It can be used as if you are Harry Potter or as Lord Voldemort . I request you to use it like Harry & not like Voldemort . Also the understanding of it will protect you from people who use these powerful strategies to hijack your rational brain & sell useless products to you or influence you in a harmful way Hence deploy ethically & protect smartly

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So identified has the State become in the public mind with the provision of these services that an attack on State financing appears to many people as an attack on the service itself. Thus if one maintains that the State should not supply court services, and that private enterprise on the market could supply such service more efficiently as well as more morally, people tend to think of this as denying the importance of courts themselves. The libertarian who wants to replace government by private enterprises in the above areas is thus treated in the same way as he would be if the government had, for various reasons, been supplying shoes as a tax-financed monopoly from time immemorial. If the government and only the government had had a monopoly of the shoe manufacturing and retailing business, how would most of the public treat the libertarian who now came along to advocate that the government get out of the shoe business and throw it open to private enterprise? He would undoubtedly be treated as follows: people would cry, “How could you? You are opposed to the public, and to poor people, wearing shoes! And who would supply shoes to the public if the government got out of the business? Tell us that! Be constructive! It’s easy to be negative and smart-alecky about government; but tell us who would supply shoes? Which people? How many shoe stores would be available in each city and town? How would the shoe firms be capitalized? How many brands would there be? What material would they use? What lasts? What would be the pricing arrangements for shoes? Wouldn’t regulation of the shoe industry be needed to see to it that the product is sound? And who would supply the poor with shoes? Suppose a poor person didn’t have the money to buy a pair?” These questions, ridiculous as they seem to be and are with regard to the shoe business, are just as absurd when applied to the libertarian who advocates a free market in fire, police, postal service, or any other government operation. The point is that the advocate of a free market in anything cannot provide a “constructive” blueprint of such a market in advance. The essence and the glory of the free market is that individual firms and businesses, competing on the market, provide an ever-changing orchestration of efficient and progressive goods and services: continually improving products and markets, advancing technology, cutting costs, and meeting changing consumer demands as swiftly and as efficiently as possible.

While I enjoy the work because of my love of mathematics, I luckily realized that this career path was simply designed to exploit inefficiencies in markets in order to extract profits from others. This financial realm known as trading is a zero-sum game where for every dollar you make, someone else loses a dollar, and I know I’m not destined to become such an obvious parasite on society. I only aspire to lead a meaningful, impactful life where I can apply my skills as an extremely analytical individual toward the benefit of humanity. I’m

If you sold a business opportunity: * Well, you know how a five-day weekend is better than a two-day weekend? * Well, you know how great it would be to work out of our homes? * Well, you know how commuting takes up so much time? * Well, you know how we will never get rich working a job? * Well, you know how we would love to sell our alarm clock to our neighbor? * Well, you know how we would all like to earn more money? * Well, you know how smart people all have a second income? * Well, you know how we would love to set our own hours? * Well, you know how we want to pick up our children from school? * Well, you know how great it would be to never to go to work again?

Here are my simple rules for identifying market tops and bottoms: 1. Market tops are relatively easy to recognize. Buyers generally become overconfident and almost always believe “this time is different.” It’s usually not. 2. There’s always a surplus of relatively cheap debt capital to finance acquisitions and investments in a hot market. In some cases, lenders won’t even charge cash interest, and they often relax or suspend typical loan restrictions as well. Leverage levels escalate compared to historical averages, with borrowing sometimes reaching as high as ten times or more compared to equity. Buyers will start accepting overoptimistic accounting adjustments and financial forecasts to justify taking on high levels of debt. Unfortunately most of these forecasts tend not to materialize once the economy starts decelerating or declining. 3. Another indicator that a market is peaking is the number of people you know who start getting rich. The number of investors claiming outperformance grows with the market. Loose credit conditions and a rising tide can make it easy for individuals without any particular strategy or process to make money “accidentally.” But making money in strong markets can be short-lived. Smart investors perform well through a combination of self-discipline and sound risk assessment, even when market conditions reverse.

Moore’s law means computers will get smaller, more powerful, and cheaper at a reliable rate. This does not happen because Moore’s law is a natural law of the physical world, like gravity, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It happens because the consumer and business markets motivate computer chip makers to compete and contribute to smaller, faster, cheaper computers, smart phones, cameras, printers, solar arrays, and soon, 3-D printers. And chip makers are building on the technologies and techniques of the past. In 1971, 2,300 transistors could be printed on a chip. Forty years, or twenty doublings later, 2,600,000,000. And with those transistors, more than two million of which could fit on the period at the end of this sentence, came increased speed.

Advice to your 20-year-old self? “I would say, ‘Write everything down because it’s all very fleeting.’ I would say, ‘Keep a journal,’ which I have but I would have been more meticulous. Then I would say, ‘Don’t bow to the gatekeepers at the head of, in my case, show business, but at the gate of any business or any endeavor.’ Don’t bow to the gatekeepers because I think, in essence, there are no gatekeepers. You are the gatekeeper. . . . “Don’t waste your time on marketing, just try to get better. . . . “And also, it’s not about being good; it’s about being great. Because what I find, the older I get, is that a lot of people are good, and a lot of people are smart, and a lot of people are clever. But not a lot of people give you their soul when they perform.

Ergoloid mesylates (Hydergine) Developed by Albert Hofmann and marketed without FDA approval as a neuroprotective “smart drug,” ergoloid mesylates is reportedly comparable at standard doses to microdoses of LSD. It’s only available on prescription in most Western countries, but you may be able to buy it online elsewhere. 2C-B-FLY Active even at sub-milligram doses, the effects of 2C-B-FLY have been likened to mescaline and MDA (MDMA’s more potent, more psychedelic predecessor). Microdoses of less than 100 μg (0.1 mg) may enhance motivation, empathy, creativity, and philosophical or abstract thinking. 2C-B-FLY is unscheduled in the U.S. but may be considered an illegal analog of 2C-B. In Canada, it’s a Schedule III substance. In any case, it’s widely available online.

GET BEYOND THE ONE-MAN SHOW Great organizations are never one-man operations. There are 22 million licensed small businesses in America that have no employees. Forbes suggests 75 percent of all businesses operate with one person. And the average income of those companies is a sad $44,000. That’s not a business—that’s torture. That is a prison where you are both the warden and the prisoner. What makes a person start a business and then be the only person who works there? Are they committed to staying small? Or maybe an entrepreneur decides that because the talent pool is so poor, they can’t hire anyone who can do it as well as them, and they give up. My guess is the latter: Most people have just given up and said, “It’s easier if I just do it myself.” I know, because that’s what I did—and it was suicidal. Because my business was totally dependent on me and only me, I was barely able to survive, much less grow, for the first ten years. Instead I contracted another company to promote my seminars. When I hired just one person to assist me out of my home office, I thought I was so smart: Keep it small. Keep expenses low. Run a tight ship. Bigger isn’t always better. These were the things I told myself to justify not growing my business. I did this for years and even bragged about how well I was doing on my own. Then I started a second company with a partner, a consulting business that ran parallel to my seminar business. This consulting business quickly grew bigger than my first business because my partner hired people to work for us. But even then I resisted bringing other people into the company because I had this idea that I didn’t want the headaches and costs that come with managing people. My margins were monster when I had no employees, but I could never grow my revenue line without killing myself, and I have since learned that is where all my attention and effort should have gone. But with the efforts of one person and one contracted marketing company, I could expand only so much. I know that a lot of speakers and business gurus run their companies as one-man shows. Which means that while they are giving advice to others about how to grow a business, they may have never grown one themselves! Their one-man show is simply a guy or gal going out, collecting a fee, selling time and a few books. And when they are out speaking, the business terminates all activity. I started studying other people and companies that had made it big and discovered they all had lots of employees. The reality is you cannot have a great business if it’s just you. You need to add other people. If you don’t believe me, try to name one truly great business that is successful, ongoing, viable, and growing that doesn’t have many people making it happen. Good luck. Businesses are made of people, not just machines, automations, and technology. You need people around you to implement programs, to add passion to the technology, to serve customers, and ultimately to get you where you want to go. Consider the behemoth online company Amazon: It has more than 220,000 employees. Apple has more than 100,000; Microsoft has around the same number. Ernst & Young has more than 200,000 people. Apple calls the employees working in its stores “Geniuses.” Don’t you want to hire employees deserving of that title too? Think of how powerful they could make your business.

There is no part of this country where one cannot find a source of fresh, organic meat and produce. I’m not talking about Whole Foods, I’m referring to farmers’ markets and local butchers and fishermen and -women. If you can’t find a source for fresh produce and eggs and/or chicken, bacon, and/or dairy products, by Christ, become the source! What more noble pursuit than supplying your community with breakfast foods?! If you want to read more about this notion, by actual smart and informed writers, pick up some Michael Pollan and some Wendell Berry. I have no intention of ever ceasing to enjoy red meat. However, I firmly believe that we can choose how and where our meat is raised, and I’m all for a grass-fed, happy steer finding its way to my grill long before a factory-farmed, filthy, corn-fed lab creation. It’s up to us to choose farm-to-table fare as much as possible until it becomes our society’s norm once again.

Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities, and at this point, after examining the lives of Bill Joy and Bill Gates, pro hockey players and geniuses, and Joe Flom, the Janklows, and the Borgenichts, it shouldn't tbe hard to figure out where the perfect lawyer comes from. This person will have been born in a demographic trough, so as to have had the best of New York's public schools and the easiest time in the job market. He will be Jewish, of course, and so, locked out of the old-line downtown law firms on account of his "antecedents". This person's parents will have done meaningful work in the garment business, passing on to their children autonomy and complexity and the connection between effort and reward. A good school -- although it doesn't have to be a great school -- will have been attended. He need not have been the smartest in the class, only smart enough.

What is a “pyramid?” I grew up in real estate my entire life. My father built one of the largest real estate brokerage companies on the East Coast in the 1970s, before selling it to Merrill Lynch. When my brother and I graduated from college, we both joined him in building a new real estate company. I went into sales and into opening a few offices, while my older brother went into management of the company. In sales, I was able to create a six-figure income. I worked 60+ hours a week in such pursuit. My brother worked hard too, but not in the same fashion. He focused on opening offices and recruiting others to become agents to sell houses for him. My brother never listed and sold a single house in his career, yet he out-earned me 10-to-1. He made millions because he earned a cut of every commission from all the houses his 1,000+ agents sold. He worked smarter, while I worked harder. I guess he was at the top of the “pyramid.” Is this legal? Should he be allowed to earn more than any of the agents who worked so hard selling homes? I imagine everyone will agree that being a real estate broker is totally legal. Those who are smart, willing to take the financial risk of overhead, and up for the challenge of recruiting good agents, are the ones who get to live a life benefitting from leveraged Income. So how is Network Marketing any different? I submit to you that I found it to be a step better. One day, a friend shared with me how he was earning the same income I was, but that he was doing so from home without the overhead, employees, insurance, stress, and being subject to market conditions. He was doing so in a network marketing business. At first I refuted him by denouncements that he was in a pyramid scheme. He asked me to explain why. I shared that he was earning money off the backs of others he recruited into his downline, not from his own efforts. He replied, “Do you mean like your family earns money off the backs of the real estate agents in your company?” I froze, and anyone who knows me knows how quick-witted I normally am. Then he said, “Who is working smarter, you or your dad and brother?” Now I was mad. Not at him, but at myself. That was my light bulb moment. I had been closed-minded and it was costing me. That was the birth of my enlightenment, and I began to enter and study this network marketing profession. Let me explain why I found it to be a step better. My research led me to learn why this business model made so much sense for a company that wanted a cost-effective way to bring a product to market. Instead of spending millions in traditional media ad buys, which has a declining effectiveness, companies are opting to employ the network marketing model. In doing so, the company only incurs marketing cost if and when a sale is made. They get an army of word-of-mouth salespeople using the most effective way of influencing buying decisions, who only get paid for performance. No salaries, only commissions. But what is also employed is a high sense of motivation, wherein these salespeople can be building a business of their own and not just be salespeople. If they choose to recruit others and teach them how to sell the product or service, they can earn override income just like the broker in a real estate company does. So now they see life through a different lens, as a business owner waking up each day excited about the future they are building for themselves. They are not salespeople; they are business owners.

Yet there are problems with speeding up whole-grain bread, and they begin with the flour. Many if not most of the new whole-grain white breads on the market are made with a new variety of hard white wheat developed by ConAgra. This is why the bread doesn’t look like whole wheat: the specks of bran are white, or whitish. They are also microscopic: The wheat is milled by ConAgra using a patented process called Ultrafine that attains a degree of fineness never before achieved in a whole-grain flour. This resulting flour, called Ultragrain, makes for a softer, whiter whole-grain bread, but at a price. It is metabolized almost as fast as white flour, obviating one of the most important health advantages of whole grains: that our bodies absorb and metabolize them slowly, and so avoid the insulin spikes that typically accompany refined carbohydrates. A common measure of the speed by which a food raises glucose levels in the blood (and therefore insulin, an important risk factor for many chronic diseases) is the glycemic index. The glycemic index of a whole-grain Wonder Bread (around 71) is essentially the same as that of Classic Wonderbread (73). (By comparison, the glycemic index of whole-grain bread made with stone-ground flour is only 52.) So perhaps we really have gotten too smart for our own good. Using

She Is Remarkable Salute to the woman who knows who she is And why she is who she is A powerful being Once thrown into the deep end of the ocean But swam her way back to shore She never stops moving forward Nothing can ever pull her backwards Such a brave warrior Shout out to the superwoman Determined to change the status quo Because she feels the need to do so Just like an eagle She soars higher and higher As the wind blows stronger She does not let anything deter her From reaching another level in life Thumbs up to an amazing woman A great force to be reckoned with That committed Mother on the street Who trades from sunrise to sunset Trying to make ends meet Oh, she has a heart so big Being mindful that come snow or sunshine She has mouths to feed I revere this gifted woman Who uses her creativity To make an impact in society Despite the uniqueness of her talent She remains a trendsetter It could be the potter in whose hands clay becomes magic The miner who touches gold, before it even gets sold to the markets Or the strategist who sits in high-level meetings, making sure organisations do not collapse A special mention to the special woman Who chooses not to give up She understands that others look up to her The smart lady out there, with a clear vision She makes things happen for her family, community, and the world at large She deserves a badge of honour Because she is remarkable!

Before long they saw in the distance the towers and flags of Dictionopolis sparkling in the sunshine, and in a few moments they reached the great wall and stood at the gateway to the city. “A-H-H-H-R-R-E-M-M,” roared the gateman, clearing his throat and snapping smartly to attention. “This is Dictionopolis, a happy kingdom, advantageously located in the Foothills of Confusion and caressed by gentle breezes from the Sea of Knowledge. Today, by royal proclamation, is market day. Have you come to buy or sell?” “I beg your pardon?” said Milo. “Buy or sell, buy or sell,” repeated the gateman impatiently. “Which is it? You must have come here for some reason.” “Well, I——” Milo began. “Come now, if you don’t have a reason, you must at least have an explanation or certainly an excuse,” interrupted the gateman. Milo shook his head. “Very serious, very serious,” the gateman said, shaking his head also. “You can’t get in without a reason.” He thought for a moment and then continued. “Wait a minute; maybe I have an old one you can use.” He took a battered suitcase from the gatehouse and began to rummage busily through it, mumbling to himself, “No … no … no … this won’t do … no … h-m-m-m … ah, this is fine,” he cried triumphantly, holding up a small medallion on a chain. He dusted it off, and engraved on one side were the words “WHY NOT?” “That’s a good reason for almost anything— a bit used perhaps, but still quite serviceable.” And with that he placed it around Milo’s neck, pushed back the heavy iron gate, bowed low, and motioned them into the city.

In fact, the same basic ingredients can easily be found in numerous start-up clusters in the United States and around the world: Austin, Boston, New York, Seattle, Shanghai, Bangalore, Istanbul, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, and Dubai. To discover the secret to Silicon Valley’s success, you need to look beyond the standard origin story. When people think of Silicon Valley, the first things that spring to mind—after the HBO television show, of course—are the names of famous start-ups and their equally glamorized founders: Apple, Google, Facebook; Jobs/ Wozniak, Page/ Brin, Zuckerberg. The success narrative of these hallowed names has become so universally familiar that people from countries around the world can tell it just as well as Sand Hill Road venture capitalists. It goes something like this: A brilliant entrepreneur discovers an incredible opportunity. After dropping out of college, he or she gathers a small team who are happy to work for equity, sets up shop in a humble garage, plays foosball, raises money from sage venture capitalists, and proceeds to change the world—after which, of course, the founders and early employees live happily ever after, using the wealth they’ve amassed to fund both a new generation of entrepreneurs and a set of eponymous buildings for Stanford University’s Computer Science Department. It’s an exciting and inspiring story. We get the appeal. There’s only one problem. It’s incomplete and deceptive in several important ways. First, while “Silicon Valley” and “start-ups” are used almost synonymously these days, only a tiny fraction of the world’s start-ups actually originate in Silicon Valley, and this fraction has been getting smaller as start-up knowledge spreads around the globe. Thanks to the Internet, entrepreneurs everywhere have access to the same information. Moreover, as other markets have matured, smart founders from around the globe are electing to build companies in start-up hubs in their home countries rather than immigrating to Silicon Valley.

When a country’s economy is in trouble—when it has a balance of trade deficit, for instance, and when its debts are mounting—and when the currency, therefore, is declining in value because everybody can see that the economy is bad, politicians, throughout history, have found a way of making things worse with the imposition of exchange controls. They run to the press and they say, “Listen, all you God-fearing Americans, Germans, Russians, whatever you are, we have a temporary problem in the financial market and it is caused by these evil speculators who are driving down the value of our currency—there is nothing wrong with our currency, we are a strong country with a sound economy, and if it were not for these speculators everything would be OK.” Diverting attention away from the real cause of the problem, which is their own mismanagement of the economy, politicians look to three crowds of people to blame for the regrettable situation. After the speculators come bankers and foreigners. Nobody likes bankers anyway, not even in good times; in bad times, everybody likes them less, because everybody sees them as rich and growing richer off the bad turn of events. Foreigners as a target are equally safe, because foreigners cannot vote. They do not have a say-so in national affairs, and remember, their food smells bad. Politicians will even blame journalists: if reporters did not write about our tanking economy, our economy would not be tanking. So we are going to enact this temporary measure, they say. To stem the scourge of a declining currency, we are going to make it impossible, or at least difficult, for people to take their money out of the country—it will not affect most of you because you do not travel or otherwise spend cash overseas. (See Chapter 9 and the Bernanke delusion.) Then they introduce serious exchange controls. They are always “temporary,” yet they always go on for years and years. Like anything else spawned by the government, once they are in place, a bureaucracy grows up around them. A constituency now arises whose sole purpose is to defend exchange controls and thereby assure their longevity. And they are always disastrous for a country. The free flow of capital stops. Money is trapped inside your country. And the country stops being as competitive as it once was.

The educational goal of self-esteem seems to habituate young people to work that lacks objective standards and revolves instead around group dynamics. When self-esteem is artificially generated, it becomes more easily manipulable, a product of social technique rather than a secure possession of one’s own based on accomplishments. Psychologists find a positive correlation between repeated praise and “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.” 36 The more children are praised, the more they have a stake in maintaining the resulting image they have of themselves; children who are praised for being smart choose the easier alternative when given a new task. 37 They become risk-averse and dependent on others. The credential loving of college students is a natural response to such an education, and prepares them well for the absence of objective standards in the job markets they will enter; the validity of your self-assessment is known to you by the fact it has been dispensed by gatekeeping institutions. Prestigious fellowships, internships, and degrees become the standard of self-esteem. This is hardly an education for independence, intellectual adventurousness, or strong character. “If you don’t vent the drain pipe like this, sewage gases will seep up through the water in the toilet, and the house will stink of shit.” In the trades, a master offers his apprentice good reasons for acting in one way rather than another, the better to realize ends the goodness of which is readily apparent. The master has no need for a psychology of persuasion that will make the apprentice compliant to whatever purposes the master might dream up; those purposes are given and determinate. He does the same work as the apprentice, only better. He is able to explain what he does to the apprentice, because there are rational principles that govern it. Or he may explain little, and the learning proceeds by example and imitation. For the apprentice there is a progressive revelation of the reasonableness of the master’s actions. He may not know why things have to be done a certain way at first, and have to take it on faith, but the rationale becomes apparent as he gains experience. Teamwork doesn’t have this progressive character. It depends on group dynamics, which are inherently unstable and subject to manipulation. On a crew,

Your brand is the unique persona and identity of you, your company, product or service that sets it apart from others in the same market space. It is the image you or your business present to the world. A brand is composed of many different pieces which, together, capture the attention of your buyers. Some of the pieces are physical, but much of branding is intangible; ideas and thoughts put into words, pictures and videos. When small business owners ask themselves “What is branding?” the answer is, “the essence of the business, products or services.” Your personal brand conveys the way you are perceived; and how you want people to see and feel about you, your business and your products or services. You may want to sound very dignified and reinforce your ‘expert status’ and credibility depending on your products or services. Or you may want to sound approachable, edgy and smart. Whatever voice you choose, carry it into all your messaging, marketing materials, and web presence (your platform).

Messages that tell us we aren’t pretty enough, young enough, thin enough, or desirable enough are garbage. Anyone who implies we are unable to care for our own families is lying. If you believe the persona that marketing culture has crafted --helpless, too stressed, overwhelmed, incompetent (without their products)-- I am here to say otherwise. You are not a moron or a damsel in distress. You are smart and able, and getting older is not a tragedy. Don’t believe them. Even if some observations are descriptive, they need not be prescriptive. You are not a total hot disaster! Well, no more than any of us. You can do hard things. (Some “hard things” are actually “easy things” rebranded as impossible.) You are more than some company’s profitability, and you don’t need their tricks to live a beautiful, meaningful life. We can reclaim our merit without dancing like monkeys.

MRU Consulting helps digital marketing enthusiasts increase conversion rates and improve website design with smart analytics analysis, user-friendly design.

If you want to successfully write to market, you need the right tropes, and you need to employ them like a master. Write great characters that match your genre, and your readers will follow you for life.

spend more time comforting and hugging infant girls and more time watching infant boys play by themselves.22 Other cultural messages are more blatant. Gymboree once sold onesies proclaiming “Smart like Daddy” for boys and “Pretty like Mommy” for girls.23 The same year, J. C. Penney marketed a T-shirt to teenage girls that bragged, “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me.”24 These things did not happen in 1951. They happened in 2011. Even worse, the messages sent to girls can move beyond encouraging superficial traits and veer into explicitly discouraging leadership. When a girl tries to lead, she is often labeled bossy. Boys are seldom called bossy because a boy taking the role of a boss does not surprise or offend. As someone who was called this for much of my childhood, I know that it is not a compliment. The stories of my childhood bossiness are told (and retold) with great amusement. Apparently, when I was in elementary school, I taught my younger siblings, David and Michelle, to follow me around, listen to my monologues, and scream the word “Right!” when I concluded. I was the eldest of the neighborhood children and allegedly spent my time organizing shows that I could direct and clubs that I could run. People laugh at these accounts, but to this day I always feel slightly ashamed of my behavior

Today, multiple major waves seem to be arriving simultaneously—technologies like the cloud, AI, AR/ VR, not to mention more esoteric projects like supersonic planes and hyperloops. What’s more, rather than being concentrated narrowly in a personal computer industry that was essentially a niche market, today’s new technologies impact nearly every part of the economy, creating many new opportunities. This trend holds tremendous promise. Precision medicine will use computing power to revolutionize health care. Smart grids use software to dramatically improve power efficiency and enable the spread of renewable energy sources like solar roofs. And computational biology might allow us to improve life itself. Blitzscaling can help these advances spread and magnify their sorely needed impact.

For example, in 2015, Payal Kadakia, the founder of ClassPass (a monthly subscription service for fitness classes) decided that she needed to double the size of her staff in just three months so that ClassPass would be able expand into more cities. To achieve this kind of speed, Kadakia and her team abandoned traditional hiring processes and followed two simple rules. First, they hired people from their personal networks, with an emphasis on “branded” talent. For example, if an employee had a friend, and that friend worked for the management consulting firm Bain & Company, that friend got hired because ClassPass could assume that the person was smart and would get along with people. Second, some of the time saved by not interviewing for skills allowed the team to interview for alignment with the company’s mission. Crazy? Perhaps. But ClassPass was in a crowded, emerging market, and being able to hire faster than the competition helped it maintain and increase its leadership position. Blitzscaling also requires a strong focus on risk management. While blitzscaling requires risk taking, it doesn’t require unnecessary risk taking. Indeed, the higher level of risk associated with blitzscaling makes risk management even more valuable and important. As Yahoo! cofounder Jerry Yang told us in an interview for Reid’s Masters of Scale podcast, “All bold strategies have a risk. If you don’t see it, you’re flying risk-blind.

The amount of results is listed just below the search box after you type in your keyword. This tactic is common in outdated courses teaching SEO, but completely unreliable.

Why don’t you go talk to the mask makers? See if you can find out the identity of the man in the falcon mask. And ask around a bit at the markets--see if you can find out anything about Angelo de Gradi, too.” Falco’s relaxed demeanor seemed to cloud over for just a second, but then he smiled lazily and gave her a mock salute. “As you command, Signorina Avogadore. I’ll come by the villa later tonight and let you know what I found out.” “How about we meet someplace on San Domenico,” Cass said. It wasn’t smart to have Falco strolling the grounds of Agnese’s estate. Just because Siena was going to keep her secret didn’t mean the rest of the staff would be as discreet. Falco didn’t question her. “Come by Il Mar e la Spada. I’ll even buy you a mug of their finest swill.” “Deal,” she said as he leaned in to give her a kiss on the cheek. Her eyes focused on the scar beneath his right eye. “What happened?” she asked, running one finger over the slightly raised edges. “A friend dared me to dive into the canals when I first came to town. I had no idea how shallow they were.” He rubbed at the scar. “Obviously.” Cass smiled. It sounded like something she might have done as a child. She pressed her lips to Falco’s just for a second, and then slipped quietly out the door.

Evgeny Morozov, the most bracing critic of modern optimism, emphasizes the anaesthetizing effects of perpetual amusement. People use new means of communication not to engage in political activism, but to find entertainment. The Net is no exception, and has increased the opportunities for the masses to find pleasing diversions to a level that no one had previously imagined possible. In Russia, China, Vietnam and the other formerly puritan communist countries, the decision by the new market-orientated regimes to allow Western-style media to provide high-quality escapism, sport, dating and gossip sites was a smart move that made their control of the masses more effective. In Belarus, Morozov discovered Internet service providers that were offering free downloads of pirated movies and music. The dictatorship ‘could easily put an end to such practices, [but] prefers to look the other way and may even be encouraging them’. Unlike so many who write about the Net, Morozov was brought up in a dictatorship – Belarus, as it happens – and the knowledge that freedom is hard to win explains his impatience with wishful thinking.

in a difficult market environment, profits will be smaller than normal and losses will be larger; downside gaps will be more common, and you will likely experience greater slippage. The smart way to handle this is to do the following: Tighten up stop-losses. If you normally cut losses at 7 to 8 percent, cut them at 5 to 6 percent. Settle for smaller profits. If you normally take profits of 15 to 20 percent on average, take profits at 10 to 12 percent. If you’re trading with the use of leverage, get off margin immediately. Reduce your exposure with regard to your position sizes as well as your overall capital commitment. Once you see your batting average and reward/risk profile improve, you can start to extend your parameters gradually back to normal levels.

Not All Outcomes Are Created Equal Here’s the easiest and quickest way I know to illustrate this point: Two people attempt to cross a road; one looks very carefully both ways, runs across, and gets hit by a car. The other person covers his eyes and blindly runs right into heavy traffic, but makes it to the other side safely. Does that mean the person who made it safely across the road did a smart thing? What would happen if this scenario was repeated 100 times? Who do you think would have a higher success rate of making it to the other side? The result does not justify the

If you call your prospect and they say yes, they’ve reviewed the material, you’re going to ask them a few intelligent questions. First, you’re NOT going to ask, “What did you think?” This just invites the critical part of the prospect’s mind to come up with objections to try to sound smart. The best follow-up question I’ve ever used is, “What did you like best?

According to the media and other stock market "experts," the equities bull is forever hiding just around that next corner on Wall Street. But millions of investors who listened to the experts back in 1998-2001 about "the New Economy" get hammered in the stock market and are still trying to get back to even. The smart investor looks for opportunities to acquire value on the cheap, with one eye out for a dynamic change in the offing that might make that investment even more valuable.

A good brand, relationships, technology and smart marketing can open doors but after that the business has to be sustained by delivery. Many

The smart business person sees an opportunity to generate referrals by collaborating with their competitors.

Around $300,000 of the total $600,000 that was raised by Augur's funding team comes from a man named Joe Costello. Costello is a successful tech entrepreneur, known to be one of Steve Jobs' top picks for the new CEO position of Apple itself. Following the smart money isn’t always a dumb idea. Gambling or casino are terms never used by Joey Krug, a young Pomona college dropout, but also Augur's lead developer. He and the small team of just five employees use the term “prediction market.” Due

Don’t worry, it’ll work out.” Really? How do you know? It’s unbelievable. When your business partners tell you not to worry because “It’ll work out”—it’s not going to work out. You can’t just sit back and wait for life to happen because when you do, unexpected stuff usually happens. You have to be smart. You have to be prepared. You have to go in with your guns loaded and a well-devised plan of attack. I can’t stress this enough. When starting your own business, “winging it” is not an option. Repeat after me: knowledge is power. Why do you think it’s one of the most overused aphorisms out there? Because it’s true! If you are about to make a sales pitch to a customer and you ask your salesperson, “What’s the plan?” and he or she says, “Oh, we’ll wing it,” you’re in trouble. Anytime one of my guys said that, my stomach turned. It drove me nuts. I’d say, “We’ve got to know everything about this prospect. We’ve got to know everything about this company. Do your homework!” The more you know about a customer, a product, a market, or even an employee, the greater advantage you have. And I’m not just talking about business and sales; I’m talking about everything you do in this world. You can’t just wing it through life. You’ll never end up where you want to be if you don’t know where you’re going.

The fatal conceit of intellectuals, he said, is to think that smart people can design an economy or a society better than the apparently chaotic interactions of millions of people. Such intellectuals fail to realize how much they don’t know or how a market makes use of all the localized knowledge each of us possesses.