Quotes about Growth

Deep change is difficult, and worth it

We seek out experiences and products that deliver more value, more connection, and more experience, and change us for the better.

Let's define dumb as being different from stupid. Dumb means you don't know what you're supposed to know. Stupid means you know it but make bad choices. […] Dumb used to be a by-product of lack of access, bad teachers, or poor parenting. Today, dumb is a choice, one that's made by individuals who choose not to learn. If you don't know what you need to know, that's fixable. But first you have to want to fix it.

You don't have to like change to take advantage of it.

There are two ways to grow: by stealing from the competition or by growing the market. The first path is slow and painful and difficult. The second path is where the magic of fast growth kicks in.

The essential thing to know about the Dip is that it's there. Knowing that you're facing a Dip is the first step in getting through it.

The best marketers are farmers, not hunters. Plant, tend, plow, fertilize, weed, repeat. Let someone else race around after shiny objects.

All effective education creates tension, because just before you learn something, you're aware you don't know it (yet).

Marketers make change. We change people from one emotional state to another. We take people on a journey; we help them become the person they've dreamed of becoming, a little bit at a time.

Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google, told me, "We knew that Google was going to get better every single day as we worked on it, and we knew that sooner or later, everyone was going to try it. So our feeling was that the later you tried it, the better it was for us because we'd make a better impression with better technology. So we were never in a big hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better.

Things that grow don't grow forever—but that's okay, because the experiences we collect stick with us, and we get to take those experiences wherever we go.

Perfect closes the door. It asserts that we're done, that this is the best we can do. Worse, perfect forbids us to try. To seek perfection and not reach it is a failure.