Quotes About Relevance

When I choose what I do, I ask, 'Does it make a difference?'

I'm sorry for when you asked me about Soviet foreign policy I said , Who gives a $@!&?

The Devil's out of fashion.

What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.

The grasp of objects that bind us to some betokening.

It's how the news becomes so powerful it doesn't need TV or newspapers. It exists in people's perceptions. It's something they invent, strong enough to seem real. It's the news without the media.

As pessoas nao vão morrer. Não é esse o credo da nova cultura? As pessoas vão ser absorvidas em fluxos de informações. Não entendo nada disso. Os computadores vão morrer. Já estão morrendo na sua forma atual. Estão praticamente mortos como unidades distintas. Uma caixa, uma tela, um teclado. Eles estão se dissolvendo na textura da vida cotidiana. (...) Até a palavra computador parece retrógrada e burra.

There's something about having limited horizons that makes everything right around you appear to be monumental and important, even if in reality it is relatively insignificant.

If the skill is easily automated, it wasn't essential.

We have long known that when people are anxious they tend to narrow their thought processes, concentrating upon aspects directly relevant to a problem. This is a useful strategy in escaping from danger, but not in thinking of imaginative new approaches to a problem.

Imagine your customer is a hitchhiker. You pull over to give him a ride, and the one burning question on his mind is simply Where are you going? But as he approaches, you roll down the window and start talking about your mission statement, or how your grandfather built this car with his bare hands, or how your road-trip playlist is all 1980s alternative. This person doesn't care.

This means that when we ramble on and on about how we have the biggest manufacturing plant on the West Coast, our customers don't care. Why? Because that information isn't helping them eat, drink, find a mate, fall in love, build a tribe, experience a deeper sense of meaning, or stockpile weapons in case barbarians start coming over the hill behind our cul-de-sac. So what do customers do when we blast a bunch of noise

Just because a tagline sounds great or a picture on a website grabs the eye, that doesn't mean it helps us enter into our customers' story. In every line of copy we write, we're either serving the customer's story or descending into confusion; we're either making music or making noise.

And they should be able to answer these questions within five seconds of looking at our website or marketing material:

People do not want to be enlightened about you (get to know you more) unless they are curious about you (you have something that can help them survive), and until they are enlightened about how you can help them survive, they will never commit.

let's explore what we need to do to help a customer be more interested in a brand.

You rarely think of a brand unless you associate that brand with the solution to a problem.

It bears repeating. The more we talk about the problems our customers experience, the more interest they will have in our brand.

The point is this: if you don't tell somebody how you can help them survive, they will set you aside—or worse, discard you.

Make Sure the Problem and Solution Are Connected

if there's nothing at stake in whether or not I buy your product, I'm not going to buy your product. After all, why should I?

Does Your Header Pass the Grunt Test?

If we want to connect with customers, we have to stop blasting them with noise.

How long will we last if we keep talking about aspects of our products our customers don't care about?