The Wisdom Wall
10 quotable lessons, heuristics and mental models. Every one is playable at the moment it was said. No fortune cookies allowed.
“You sit in school in a straight row, number two pencil, filling out the little circles, no stray marks. What's that about? It's about training you to work in the factory.”
“The more agita I cause my publisher, the better the book's going to do. Right? Both the way the book is written, the way the book is packaged, and the way the book is marketed, the more they hate it, the better the book's going to do.”
“Rough edges are what we pay for.”
“My argument is that physical labor is not so good anymore. You can't make a living, really, with physical labor. So we get paid for emotional labor. Get paid for digging deep and doing work that maybe we don't feel like.”
“And on the internet, a world of digital goods, where accumulating more stuff isn't worth very much because it's all bits. Guess what the most valuable thing to accumulate is? Respect. Attention. People who think they owe you something. This idea of people opening themselves to your idea. That's where power lies.”
“Well, uh, Steve and I disagree with this about the resistance, but I don't think it can be conquered. I think that trying to conquer it is the problem. That trying to make the fear and the lizard brain go away is what distracts us and takes all of our time and energy.”
“The goal of the next thing, it has to be scarier than the last thing, or else we've wasted our platform.”
“Now, if you were the first into the category, that would be a dumb thing to do. But if you're the 20th into the category, and you look like the other guys, it's already over.”
“The difference is once you get going, you have enough reserve that you can fail more quietly Because you can test market. You can put things into a different space.”
“What we've discovered is the lowest paid people in the company are your marketing team now. You have all these airlines, and all these ads, and all these runways, and all these buildings, and it all comes down to one, 18 dollar an hour junior person who decides to make a connection or not with the person on the other…”