Quotes on Products

My feeling about work is it's much more about the experience of doing it than the end product. Sometimes things that are really great and make lots of money are miserable to make, and vice versa.

Fame is a by-product. It's not a goal. What matters is loving your work and loving what you do

Millions of people never analyze themselves. Mentally they are mechanical products of the factory of their environment, preoccupied with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, working and sleeping, and going here and there to be entertained. They don't know what or why they are seeking, nor why they never realize complete happiness and lasting satisfaction. By evading self-analysis, people go on being robots, conditioned by their environment. True self-analysis is the greatest art of progress.

Leave America and you'll find that the consumers in many other countries enjoy watching advertising. Not because the products are better, but because the ads are produced to be entertaining. Sometimes they are funny. Sometimes they are dramatic. Sometimes they are just beautiful.

If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility.

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.

I don't subscribe to the view some people have in the industry that you should purposefully design products that do not last that long. I don't think it is good for anyone.

At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.

The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter; the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing.

We are living in a world where the individual must learn to command the raw materials of expression. He must not be dependent all the time on the ready-made, the finished product. It's the transferring, the changing of the raw into what is the expression of your own self – the whole joy and satisfaction and frustration of life is built into this.

There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves.

I was a product of Andy Warhol's Factory. All I did was sit there and observe these incredibly talented and creative people who were continually making art, and it was impossible not to be affected by that.

**New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.** That's right - the essential insight doesn't come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight -- a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision. [first-line bold by author] [2002] p.23

If you paid Americans a living wage, they would be able to pay for products made by Americans in America.

Among the many problems with taking the Bible literally is it reduces the most mysterious and complex of realities to simple - even simplistic - terms. Yes, scripture speaks of fire and damnation and eternal bliss, but the Bible is the product of human hands and hearts, and much of the imagery is allegorical, not meteorological.

Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.

The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.

Companies in the East put a lot more emphasis on human relationships, while those from the West focus on the product, the bottom line. Westerners appear to have more of a need for achievement, while in the East there's more need for affiliation.

I think we're having fun. I think our customers really like our products. And we're always trying to do better.

If people keep buying poorly designed products, manufacturers and designers will think they are doing the right thing and continue as usual.