There's no such thing as writer's block. Writer's block is real, but it does not exist. What it really is is misnamed 'I have a fear of bad writing. I have a fear of what the world will say when it encounters my bad writing.' And the way through is to do your bad writing. You don't have to ship it to the world, but you have to do the bad writing. And bad writing, over time, if you do enough of it, can't persist. Good writing will slip through.

It's very important to acknowledge the moment that we are in and say 'In this moment, conditions are non-ideal.' But it's also worth remembering that it's when conditions are non-ideal that almost every single creative breakthrough happens because creative breakthroughs only occur when what was working isn't working anymore.

What it means to do any sort of creative work, whether you're Jackson Pollock or Spike Lee or anyone in between, is persistently and consistently discovering how it's not done before you stumble onto something that other people didn't expect that works.

Decisions and outcomes are different things; a good decision may very well lead to a lousy outcome, but that doesn’t mean it wasn't a good decision

We get to pick our attitude. And in fact, it's the only thing each of us truly gets to pick. And it doesn't mean what happened to you is what you deserve; it just means that that happened. Now, you get the one and only choice, which is how to process that.

Nobody has everyone as their customer, nobody. Maybe the water company, but that's about it. Our goal cannot be to be for everyone ... We have to be for someone—the smallest viable audience, not the biggest possible audience.

Writer's block... isn't real, and it's real at the same time. It's just misnamed fear—fear of bad writing, fear of ridicule, fear of being seen as a fraud and an imposter.

Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance, at least it is for me ... After it's over, we don't call it anxiety anymore. We're in grief or we're rebuilding. But when it might go wrong, worrying (anxiety) is what we feel when we're imagining it did, and that's not helping anything.

Conversations need to happen more; meetings need to happen never ... A conversation means there are questions and there are answers. People are talking to each other. Everyone is changed at the end. A meeting is a delivery of information for the convenience of the person who called it.

I'm super proud of my failures. I've had more failures than most people, and that's the key. I wouldn't trade in any of them because if you don't have the failures, it means that you're not leaning toward the edges that allow you to do creative work.

The world is going to be whatever the world is. Approaching it with a positive energetic attitude probably will make your experience of the world better.

The only way to learn is by doing things. We can read about how to swim, and we can read about how to make a vegetarian Maki roll, but you will not learn how to do it until you do it.

If you had a boss who woke you up in the middle of the night, scolded you for not working hard enough, criticized all your work, and told you you were never going to amount to anything, you would not work for that person for very long. And yet, most of us, that is our own boss. That's who we work for—that voice in our head. And if that voice is shaming you, you need to figure out how to undo that internal narrative because it is extinguishing your work.

What would you do if you knew you would fail? What would be worth doing even though it's not going to work? And if you've got things on that list that you haven't been doing, ironically, those are the things that are most likely to work because other people aren't doing them either.

The mistake that so many people building something make is they get hung up on the feedback of people who it’s not for as opposed to being obsessed with the people who it is for. Can they live without it? Would they miss it if it were gone. Let’s make that. That’s what we should make.

We're all going to die—maybe not in a year, but no one listening to this is going to be alive in 100 years. Even some Silicon Valley billionaires who are getting blood transfusions aren't going to be alive. And so, the only question is are you going to die in a year or 100 years?

Amazon has had turnover as high as 30% in a 90-day period. 30% of all the people they hired across the whole company quit in less than 90 days ... It cost Amazon a third of their profit, a third of their total profit, because of turnover. And the reason is simple: Because when you get there to work in a warehouse—and more than half of all the warehouse injuries in the United States happened in Amazon warehouses last year—they don't treat you like a person.

If you're the fastest cheapest person, you're just a mechanical turk. You're just cranking it out, and no one cares about you, because the minute someone's faster and cheaper than you, they'll switch. And what we're looking for is to find work where our work is unmistakably us.

Is there a human somewhere connected to you in person or online, can you connect with them in a way that makes things better for them at least a little, and then can you do it again? ... That is what fills people with meaning.

Tomorrow morning, when you wake up, you probably won't feel like engaging in the practice, and if you do, you probably won't feel that way the next day. What we do is... decide that we're a runner, and runners go running every day. We decide we're a blogger, and bloggers blog every day. And that decision lightens the cognitive load so much because there's no time, no reason, to negotiate with ourselves because we already had the meeting—we already decided.

The way we act determines how we feel way more often than the way we feel determines how we act.

What we know in a business context is that ignoring sunk cost is one of the single smartest things you can ever do.

A professional makes a promise and then keeps the promise, whether or not they feel like it ... Amateurs show up when they want to and make what they want to make. I love being an amateur at some things ... But if you’re going to be a pro, it means you need to understand the state of the art; it means you need to raise the bar; you need to understand who it’s for and what it’s for and what change do you seek to make.

We are not who we are because of our atoms or molecules or DNA; we're who we are because of the stories we tell ourselves—about the pain we're in, the hopes we have, the dreams we live with.

Education is compliant. Education is compulsory. Education is coercion. Learning is serial incompetence on our way to getting better.

We don't have a profit shortage; we have a meaning shortage.

Someone sends me a note saying, 'I'm 25-years-old. How do I become a marketer? Where do I get a job? Where do I train?' My answer is you do it by becoming a marketer.

I think authenticity is a crock, and I think authenticity is overrated and talked about far too much. The problem with authenticity is it's selfish. Authenticity enables us to say whatever we want, and if people don't like it, 'Well, I was just being authentic.' It is a ticket to self-absorbed inconsistency.

Creativity is a generous act. Get out of your own way. Don't ask for a guarantee. Simply merely ship the work without drama and without dialogue.

Do it on purpose, and you'll find out who you are. Asking for a guarantee before you start isn't helpful. Instead, we need to look at a concept [or] idea and be willing to try it out with intent because if we do, if we try it on for size, we will figure out if it fits us—as opposed to the opposite, which is spending a lot of time figuring out who we are, and then going and finding the things that fit us.

Sunk costs are the very common human desire to stick with something that was hard to get in the first place.

Have you ever been creative once in your life? Have you ever solved an interesting problem, told a funny joke, said something to somebody else that needed to be said? I've never met anyone who said 'no.' Everyone has been creative at least once.

The people who say 'I don't have any questions.' Well, no, it's impossible you don't have any questions. What you're actually saying is 'I don't care enough to ask a question that might embarrass me' —that's what you're actually saying.

Failure is what creativity is based on.