When you're building a business, you want to focus and deliver excellence at what you do. This simply cannot be done when you are launching multiple ventures, dozens of new products, and selling everywhere and anywhere at the same time.
Interpretation
Focusing on excellence in business leads to better outcomes than spreading efforts too thin across many projects.
The quote emphasizes the importance of concentration and quality in business endeavors. Daniel Lubetzky suggests that attempting to juggle multiple ventures or products simultaneously can dilute efforts and hinder the ability to deliver exceptional results. By focusing on fewer initiatives and striving for excellence, one can achieve greater success and impact.
In practice
During a business seminar, one might use this quote to underscore the importance of quality over quantity.
We need to understand the other side to impact the other side. We become much more effective as humans and leaders when we engage in hearty conversations with those who are different from us, not necessarily to change our opinions, but to build the empathy muscle.
Civilized discourse demands critical thinking, self-reflexiveness, sober-headed analysis.
The ideal is to build a culture of healthy discussion, where everyone's ideas are valued. At KIND, we want everyone to be comfortable challenging my or anyone else's ideas without ever feeling or making someone else feel that the questioning is a personal attack.
You have to be very careful. If you over-commercialize a social mission, it completely loses its soul.
My dad had this incredible kindness that oozed through every part of his body. He had the ability to look at life positively in spite of what he went through. He was a Holocaust survivor. When he was 15-1/2 years old, he was liberated from the Dachau Concentration Camp by American soldiers who risked a lot to save people they had never met.
To maintain our entrepreneurial spirit, we have to create a culture in which everyone remembers that every order, big or small - and every interaction, every moment - will define what our company is today and what it will become tomorrow.
My generation, we came along, we had to really know our craft.
The secret to successful hiring is this: look for the people who want to change the world.
If 90% of success in life is showing up, the other 10% depends on what you're showing up for.
I don't take any shorts. I don't say, 'Okay, it's good enough.' I try to get exactly what I'm hearing in my head to the tape, and I won't let it move until then.
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
I always point people to the article '1,000 True Fans' by Kevin Kelly. If you choose your thousand ideal customers or readers properly and find the single author blog that targets that audience, you never have to do any more marketing. You're done. That is a lesson that very few product developers and marketers have learned, and it's unfortunate.
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