If we can fall in love with serving people, creating value, solving problems, building valuable connections and doing work that matters, it makes it far more likely we're going to do important work

By all means, fire the customers who aren't worth the time and the trouble. But understand that the moment you insist the customer is wrong, you've just started the firing process.

Repeating easy tasks again and again gets you not very far. Attacking only steep cliffs where no progress is made isn’t particularly effective either. No, the best path is an endless series of difficult (but achievable) hills.

More process, less innovation. More operations, less innovation. More management, less innovation. More entrepreneurs, more innovation.

You have to find a group that really desperately cares about what it is you have to say. Talk to them. They have something I call otaku. It's a great Japanese word. It describes the desire of someone who's obsessed to, say, drive across Tokyo to try a new Ramen noodle place 'cause that's what they do, they get obsessed with it.

All the creativity books in the world aren’t going to help you if you’re unwilling to have lousy, lame, and even dangerously bad ideas.

Giving people what they want isn't always what they want.