Twenty minutes later, my ski patrol woman did come back, rubbing her bare hands together. "How you doing?" she asked. At first the enthusiasm in her voice worried me, because she sounded as if we might now move on to calisthenics.

They ask that we pray for their families, and for kinder leaders, and for the homeless, and people with AIDS, and people in other countries in crises of starvation or war.

Look around and see whom you can serve. This will fill you.

Passion is caring enough about your art that you will do almost anything to give it away, to make it a gift, to change people.

People don't want what you make They want what it will do for them.

Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem.

Make things better. It's entirely possible that the thing you are marketing satisfies no real demand.

Empathy is at the heart of marketing People don't believe what you believe. They don't know what you know. They don't want what you want. It's true, but we'd rather not accept this. Sonder is defined as that moment when you realize that everyone around you has an internal life as rich and as conflicted as yours. Everyone has noise in their heads.

Marketing is the generous act of helping others become who they seek to become. It involves creating honest stories—stories that resonate and spread. Marketers offer solutions, opportunities for humans to solve their problems and move forward.

Theodore Levitt famously said, "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill bit. They want a quarter-inch hole." The lesson is that the drill bit is merely a feature, a means to an end, but what people truly want is the hole it makes.

Customer development is the act of gaining traction with customers, of finding a fit between what you make and what they want. This traction is worth far more than fancy technology or expensive marketing.

great marketing is the generous and audacious work of saying, "I see a better alternative; come with me.