This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See by Seth Godin

The answer to just about every question about work is really the question, "Who can you help?"

Marketing is the act of making change happen.  Making is insufficient.  You haven't made an impact until you've changed someone.

Better is what happens when the culture absorbs our work and improves.

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

Persistent, consistent, and frequent stories, delivered to an aligned audience, will earn attention, trust, and action.

If you want to make change, begin by making culture.  Begin by organizing a tightly knit group.  Begin by getting people in sync.

Committed, creative people can change the world (in fact, they're the only ones who do).

Change is best made with intent. 

What you say isn't nearly as important as what others say about you.

Each person has a story in his or her head, a narrative used to navigate the world.

The way we make things better is by caring enough about those we serve to imagine the story that they need to hear.

People don’t want what you make.  They want what it will do for them.  They want the way it will make them feel.

Start with empathy to see a real need. Not an invented one, not "How can I start a business?" but, "What would matter here?"

Early adopters are not adapters: They crave the new.

You can't be perfect in the eyes of an early adopter; the best you can do is be interesting.

I needed a team of eight engineers and a budget of millions of dollars to send emails to a million people in 1994.  Today, anyone can do it for nine dollars a month using Feedblitz.

Irresistible is rarely easy or rational.

It's all built around the simple question: "Do people like me do things like this?"  Normalization creates culture, and culture drives our choices, which leads to more normalization.

Popular culture isn't as popular as it used to be, Mad Men, which was hyped by the New York Times in dozens of articles in just one season, was only regularly seen by 1 percent of the U.S. population.

Fear will paralyze us if we haven't been taught that forward motion is possible.

We don’t want to feel left out, left behind, uninformed, or impotent.  We want to get ahead.  We want to be in sync.  We want to do what people like us are doing.

The status quo doesn't shift because you're right.  It shifts because the culture changes.  And the engine of culture is status.

Shame is the status killer. The reason that shame is used as a lever is simple: it works.  If we accept the shame someone sends our way, it undermines our entire narrative about relative status.

Instead of asking, "How can I get more people to listen to me, how can I get the word out, how can I find more followers, how can I convert more leads to sales, how can I find more clients, how can I pay my staff…?"  you can ask, "What change do I seek to make?" Once you know what you stand for, the rest gets a lot easier.

A brand is a shorthand for the customer's expectations.  What promise do they think you're making?

When you ask, "Who's it for?" the answer needs to be, "The kind of customers who are going to show up for us in a way that lets us keep going".  You'll serve many people.  You'll profit from a few.  The whales pay for the minnows.

Tactics are easy to understand because we can list them.  You use a tactic or you don't.  Strategy is more amorphous.  It's the umbrella over your tactics, the work the tactics seek to support.  And your goal is the thing you'll be betting will happen if your strategy works.

The best way to earn trust is through action. 

If you're having trouble making your contribution, realize your challenge is a story you are marketing to yourself.

The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance by Josh Waitzkin

While a fixation on results is certainly unhealthy, short-term goals can be useful developmental tools if they are balanced within a nurturing long-term philosophy. 

There is nothing like a worthy opponent to show us our weaknesses and push us to our limit.

Disappointment is a part of the road to greatness.

Growth comes at the point of resistance.  We learn by pushing ourselves and finding what really lies at the outer reaches of our abilities.

The nature of our state of concentration will determine the first phase of your reaction.

In all disciplines, there are times when a performer is ready for action, and times when he or she is soft, in flux, broken-down or in a period of growth.  Learners in this phase are inevitably vulnerable.  It is important to have perspective on this and allow yourself protected periods for cultivation.

The fact is that when there is intense competition, those who succeed have slightly more honed skills than the rest.  It is rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the top, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a basic skill set.  Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential.

There are clear distinctions between what it takes to be decent, what it takes to be good, what it takes to be great, and what it takes to be among the best.  If your goal is to be mediocre, then you have a considerable margin for error.  You can get depressed when fired and mope around waiting for someone to call. 

In the absence of continual external reinforcement, we must be our own monitor, and quality of presence is often the best gauge.  We cannot expect to touch excellence if "going through the motions" is the norm of our lives.

Regardless of the discipline, the better we are at recovering, the greater potential we have to endure and perform under stress.

Not only do we have to be good at waiting, we have to love it.  Because waiting is not waiting, it is life.

Once we build our tolerance for turbulence and are no longer upended by the swells of our emotional life, we can ride them and even pick up speed with their slopes. 

Punk Rock Science: Inside the Mind of God by Manjir Samanta-Laughton

Time is a series of nows, emergent from timelessness, which gives us the impression of a passage of time. Each now is self-aware and linked to the quality of consciousness.

We are embedded in hyperspace even though we are not aware that we are. Just as an ant cannot understand the concept of up and down, we cannot conceive of the geometry of higher dimensions.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson

Very few animals on earth have the ability to think cogent thoughts to begin with, but we humans have the luxury of being able to have thoughts about our thoughts.

Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience.

Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.

Indifferent people are afraid of the world and the repercussions of their own choices.  That's why they don't make any meaningful choices.

Here's another sneaky little truth about life.  You can't be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others.

When a person has no problems, the mind automatically finds a way to invent some.

We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful.  It is nature's preferred agent for inspiring change.

Emotions are merely signposts, suggestions that our neurobiology gives us, not commandments.

A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider, is, "What pain do you want in your life?  What are you willing to struggle for?" Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.

The true measurement of self-worth is not how a person feels about her positive experiences, but rather how she feels about her negative experience.

If suffering is inevitable, if our problems in life are unavoidable, then the question we should be asking is not "How do I stop suffering" but "Why am I suffering -- for what purpose?"

Self-awareness is like an onion.  There are multiple layers to it, and the more you peel them back, the more likely you're going to start crying at inappropriate times.

Denying negative emotions leads to expanding deeper and more prolonged negative emotions and to emotional dysfunction.  Constant positivity is a form of avoidance. 

These values -- pleasure, material success, always being right, staying positive -- are poor ideals for a person's life.  Some of the greatest moments of one's life are not pleasant, not successful, not known, and not positive.

Values are about prioritization.

The only way to solve our problems is to first admit that our actions and beliefs up to this point have been wrong and are not working.  This openness to being wrong must exist for any real change or growth to take place.

The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.

If it feels like it's you versus the world, chances are it's really just you versus yourself.

Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you've failed at something.  If someone is better than you at something, then it's likely because she has failed at it more than you have.  If someone is worse than you, it's likely because he hasn't been through all of the painful learning experiences you have.

Many people, when they feel some form of pain or anger or sadness, drop everything and attend to numbing out whatever they're feeling.  Their goal is to get back to "feeling good" again as quickly as possible, even if that means substances or deluding themselves or returning to their shitty values.

Learn to sustain the pain you've chosen. When you choose a new value, you are choosing to introduce a new form of pain into your life.  Relish it.  Savor it.  Welcome it with open arms.  Then act despite it.

Life is about not knowing and then doing something anyway.  All of life is like this.

Action isn't just the effect of motivation; it's also the cause of it. 

Absolute freedom, by itself, means nothing.  Freedom grants the opportunity for greater meaning, but by itself there is nothing necessarily meaningful about it. Ultimately, the only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one's life is through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or (gulp) one person.

The desire to avoid rejection at all costs, to avoid confrontation and conflict, the desire to attempt to accept everything equally and to make everything cohere and harmonize, is a deep and subtle form of entitlement.

Most elements of romantic love that we pursue -- the dramatic and dizzyingly emotional displays of affection, the topsy-turvy ups and downs -- aren't healthy, genuine displays of love.

When you have murky areas of responsibility for your emotions and actions -- areas where it's unclear who is responsible for what, whose fault is what, why you're doing what you're doing -- you never develop strong values for yourself.

In general, entitled people fall into one of two traps in their relationships.  Either they expect other people to take responsibility for their problems…. Or they take on too much responsibility for other people's problems.

It can be difficult for people to recognize the difference between doing something out of obligation and doing it voluntarily.  So here's a litmus test:  ask yourself, "If I refused, how would the relationship change?"

People with strong boundaries are not afraid of a temper tantrum, an argument, or getting hurt.  People with weak boundaries are terrified of those things and will constantly mold their own behavior to fit the highs and lows of their relational emotional roller coaster.

For a relationship to be healthy, both people must be willing and able to both say no and hear no.

If people cheat, it's because something other than the relationship is more important to them.

Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod

You have to find a way of working that makes it dead easy to take full advantage of your inspired moments.  They never hit at a convenient time, nor do they last long. 

You become older faster than you think.  Be ready for when it happens.

Enlightenment is a house with 6 billion doors.

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Non-skin-in-the-game people don't get simplicity.

People have two brains, one when there is skin in the game, one when there is none.

What you learn from the intensity and the focus you had when under the influence of risk stays with you.

If you can't put your soul into something, give it up and leave that stuff to someone else.

The most effective, shame-free policy is maximal transparency, even transparency of intentions.

Whenever the "we" becomes too large a club, things degrade, and each one starts fighting for his own interest.

The Samurai had to leave their families in Edo as hostages, thus guaranteeing to the authorities that they would not take positions against the rulers.

The problem is never the problem; it is how people handle it.

The Zero Point Agreement: How to Be Who You Already Are by Julie Tallard Johnson

PART ONE

Life isn't meaningful until you bring the meaning to it.

When each of us realizes that we are our own meaning maker and that we participate in the world from our place, we will find the meaning in making the  meaning. Life then becomes a series of inspirational moments, bursts of insight, eruptions of creativity, and even personal revelation.

We often perceive ourselves as being caught between two unfavorable options.  Fortunately, integral within such moments is always a third option -- an opportunity to define the moment with what we reach for.

When we know how to widen our perceptions to the multitude of our possibilities and not get caught up in just solving a problem, real possibilities emerge.

Every act, every choice, every experience expresses what we are in agreement with and what we are not in agreement with.

To continue to awaken to our full human and spiritual potential means to personally awaken to the interconnectedness of all life, which is only achieved through direct experience as a result of using our free will and taking responsibility for our experiences.

Awakening to our greatest potential (true nature) is a resounding knowing of our connectedness to all things.

To fully express ourselves, to reach our greatest potential, means to dismantle our pain stories, challenge our assumptions, and rewrite our personal and global myths.

Rely on the naturalness of life. Let go of the "right and wrong".

The undisciplined mind is the root of all suffering.

An undisciplined mind, an inability to stay focused, makes you vulnerable to internal and external distractions.

[Mindfulness] gives you the ability to place your energy and attention where you choose.  This is what you must pursue.  Nothing else in your spiritual or creative life compares with your ability to place your heart and mind where you desire.

Cultivating attention is really about letting go.  Instead of holding on to the past, or the negative thought pattern, or the outside drama, we can let it go.

This is how it works: we carry a pain story shaped by past experiences.  We then build and establish beliefs and assumptions around this pain story.  We become habituated to repeat the past.  We encounter something or someone.  We respond habitually to events with our pain stories and supporting beliefs.

Suffering always points to a pain story and its sustaining assumptions and beliefs.

Suffering and pain is not the same thing.  Pain may be physical, emotional, or mental.  Suffering is the added story lines, beliefs, and assumptions we add to the difficulty.

Our mind is the key player in our suffering and our freedom from suffering. 

Eastern Body, Western Mind: Psychology and the Chakra System As a Path to the Self by Anodea Judith

PART ONE

Grounding comes from the solid contact we make with the earth, especially with our feet and legs.  It is rooted in sensation, feeling, action and the solidity of the material world.  Grounding provides a connection that makes us feel safe, alive, centered in our selves, and rooted in our environment.

Childhood traumas, cultural conditioning, limited belief systems, restrictive or exhausting habits, physical and emotional injuries, or even just lack of attention all continue to chakra blockages.  Difficulties abound in life, and for each one, we develop a coping strategy.  When difficulties persist, these coping strategies become chronic patterns, anchored in the body and psyche as defense mechanisms. 

Excessive chakras over compensate for loss or damage by focusing excessively on that issue -- usually in a dysfunctional way that fails to heal the loss.

Emotional identity expands the experience of the body and gives it dimension and texture, connecting us to the flow of the world.

The purpose of the crown chakra, meditation, and indeed, of most spiritual disciplines, is to break through the bonding with the smaller identities and to achieve realization of the universal identity.  This does not deny the reality of the smaller identities; it just means that we see them as part of a unified and integrated whole.

Separated from the experience of our bodies, we are separated from our aliveness, from the experience of the natural world, and from our most basic inner truth.

Disconnected from our body, our actions become compulsive -- no longer ruled by consciousness or rooted in feelings, but fueled by an unconscious urge to bridge the gap between mind and body at whatever cost.

Dissociation produces dangerously disconnected actions. 

Without the body as a unifying figure of existence, we become fragmented. We repress our aliveness and become machinelike, easily manipulated. We lose our testing ground for truth.

Healing the split between mind and body is a necessary step in the healing of us all.  It heals our home, our foundation, and the base upon which all else is built.

Scared is what happens when the sacred gets scrambled.

To combat fear is to strengthen the first chakra. 

Fear must be understood.  Where did it come from?  How did it serve you? Understanding is not enough, however, because the fear response is still lodged in the body.  The next step is to release and integrate the instinctual responses to the fear.  Does it make you want to run and hide? Does it make you angry and activated or paralyzed and confused?  Allowing the body to express these responses helps complete the gestalt of the response to the original trauma.

Fear is a belief that something awful might happen, while faith is a belief that something good will happen. 

When we are grounded, we can be present, focused, dynamic.

Trust or mistrust is the basic element of your first chakra program.  Which is a foundation for all the other programs that follow. 

Trust enables your body to unfold from its cramped position, allows security and calm, and encourages connection, bonding, and exploration.

The first chakra program is preverbal, preconceptual, reflexive, and instinctual. 

As the parent was to the child, so the mind is to the body.

Crisis puts us repeatedly in a state of survival.

Bodily dissociation may make one accident-prone, where edges, boundaries, and dangers are not noticed.

A person with an accelerated upward current is hypervigilant to messages outside of herself, as if constantly searching for ways to connect with her caretaker or constantly watching for danger. This is the hallmark of a deficient first chakra:  the body is deadened and the consciousness is elevated, creating a profound mind-body split.