When you meet a head of state, and you say, 'What is your most precious natural resource?' they will not say children at first, and then when you say, 'children,' they will pretty quickly agree with you.
Nicholas NegroponteRead
I'm not good at selling laptops. I'm good at selling ideas.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of ideas over products in sales.
In this quote, Nicholas Negroponte suggests that the true value in sales lies not in the physical object being sold, such as a laptop, but rather in the ideas, concepts, and innovations that those products represent. It highlights the significance of vision and creativity in marketing and the persuasive power of ideas in influencing people.
Themes
SellingIdeasTechnologyInnovationLaptops
In practice
Example use cases
In a presentation about the future of technology, one could use this quote to stress the importance of innovative thinking.
More from Nicholas Negroponte
All quotes βWhere do new ideas come from? The answer is simple: differences. While there are many theories of creativity, the only tenet they all share is that creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions. The best way to maximize differences is to mix ages, cultures, and disciplines.
Nicholas NegroponteRead
Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air.
Nicholas NegroponteRead
It's hard to propose a $100 laptop for a world community of kids and then not say in the same breath that you're going to depend on the community to make software for it.
Nicholas NegroponteRead
Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living. Whatever big problem you can imagine, from world peace to the environment to hunger to poverty, the solution always includes education, ... We need to depend more on peer-to-peer and self-driven learning. The laptop is one important means of doing that.
Nicholas NegroponteRead
I've spent my whole life worrying about the human-computer interface, so I don't want to suggest that what we have today is even close to acceptable.
Nicholas NegroponteRead
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