Focus on the moment, not the monsters that may or may not be up ahead.
Ryan HolidayRead
Virality, at its core, is asking someone to spend their social capital recommending or linking or posting about you for free.
Interpretation
Virality relies on people's willingness to promote something using their social influence without compensation.
Ryan Holiday's quote emphasizes the nature of virality in the digital age, where content or ideas achieve widespread popularity through informal endorsements by individuals. This process hinges on social capital—the goodwill and influence that people possess within their networks—which they leverage to spread the word about a product, idea, or person without any monetary gain.
In practice
In a marketing seminar discussing the importance of social media, this quote can be used to highlight how organic sharing drives brand visibility.
Focus on the moment, not the monsters that may or may not be up ahead.
Being criticized in the media is a good problem to have - most of the time. It means you're doing something that is at least interesting or cool or crazy enough to be noticed. It might not always feel good, but it's usually better than the alternative of obscurity.
The idea that only the swaggering, all-knowing, and ruthlessly ambitious succeed is a lie. One that has discouraged so many people with so much potential - and worse, encouraged many more to crash and burn.
Ordinary people shy away form negative situations, just as they do with failure. They do their best to avoid trouble. What great people do is the opposite. They are their best in these situations. They turn personal tragedy or misfortune - really anything, everything - to their advantage.
There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.
Virality is not an accident. It is engineered. And that's why growth hackers beat traditional marketers.
If people start to buy the idea that machines are great companions for the elderly or for children, as they increasingly seem to do, we are really playing with fire.
Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure - the law firms, the real estate, all that - that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups.
Today, the smartphone in your pocket has a high-quality digital camera. Everyone - not just artists - is a photographer, and the explosion of photos taken annually proves it.
Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself.
We believe a truly new kind of game entertainment will not be realized unless there is a new way to connect a player to his game.
Considering what human beings do and have done to human beings (and to other living things as well) ... I can never imagine what the devil people think computers can add to the horrors.
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