If there’s one thing I’ve learned about living a life it’s that you need to keep moving, and if there’s another thing it’s that you really should quit your job every once in a while and take on something new, maybe even something that seems crazy and scares the hell out of you.
“You’ve never sold cars before. Is that right?”
“Right.”
“Why do you want to work here?”
My first inclination was to say, hey, I’m a car freak. Always have been. I could explain cars, how they work, get people excited about the performance and the different features. But then I remembered my editor’s advice. I smiled at Dave, trying to convey the feeling that the answer was obvious. “I want to make a lot of money,” I said.
How to Close a Sale
The Presumptive Close. Picture the prospect using your product and put yourself into that picture as they are using it. “I wish I could be there with you when you drive down your street in this new car.” “I wish I could see the look on the faces of your employees when you install this new computer system.” This is an excellent close to be used on reluctant or indecisive prospects. This can be used in conjunction with the Direct Close.
Throughout recent years, a vast amount of money and time and brains has been employed in overcoming sales resistance, i.e. in inducing unoffending persons to waste their money in purchasing objects which they had no desire to possess.
Why are artists poor?
Today, as the old mass media industries of television, newspapers, book publishing, recorded music and movies are being fundamentally restructured by the digital economy, it’s become clear that the early 21st century digital revolution is having as profound an impact upon culture as the mid 19th century industrial revolution.
To often do newbie and even intermediate guys focus on advanced concepts and ideas that either do nothing for them, or else make them seem weird without the fundamentals. In fact I suggest that all guys, including advanced, touch back on the fundamentals and make sure that they are either improving or not getting worse. This is a practice I do often actually. So exactly what are the fundamentals of game? I’ve thought about this and came up with the following…
Nassim Nicolas Taleb Life Tips
1. Skepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be skeptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
2. Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
3. It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
4. Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
5. Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
6. Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.
7. Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).
8. Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.
9 .Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
10. Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.
- From The Prophet of Boom and Doom
Survivorship Bias
In finance, Survivorship bias is the tendency for failed companies to be excluded from performance studies because they no longer exist. It often causes the results of studies to skew higher because only companies which were successful enough to survive until the end of the period are included.
“Biomimicry is a design idea that specifically looks at — and emulates — naturally occuring phenomena in order to develop sustainable technologies.”
Xerox Star 8010 - High Quality Polaroids. This was the inspiration for the Macintosh.
3 good reasons to start a company
1. You know how to do something that nobody else can do (the typical MIT tech spinoff approach)
2. You have a lower cost of capital than anyone else (the “my dad was really rich” approach taken by Bill Gates and others)
3. You have a better understanding of one kind of customer than anyone else.
- From Phillip Greenspun’s Tips for Startup Companies
The Sullivan Nod
The Sullivan nod is a theoretical sales technique used to create a subconscious suggestion to a customer to purchase one particular item out of a list of like items. It is used most frequently by bartenders and waiters when reciting lists of items (such as alcohol or wine) in the hopes of getting the customer to select a particular brand.
Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit.
