Category: Quotes

“When you listen to a novelist on a show, one of the questions the speakers love to ask is, ‘where you get your ideas.’ And every time someone asks a creative person that, they roll their eyes. It’s not that they don’t want to tell you where they got their ideas, it’s that it doesn’t matter. The reason it doesn’t matter is that everyone has ideas. The difference between creative people and non-creative people is, non-creative people shoot their ideas in the head and walk away. Creative people take those ideas and run with them.” – Seth Godin, Become a Connector: The Impresario Institute

“The thing about being what somebody calls a creative person is that you have absolutely no idea where any of your thoughts come from, really. And especially, you don’t have any idea where they’re going to come from tomorrow.” – Hal Riney

“Be scrappy. Things are not going to ever go in your life like you think they’re going to go. Period. That is a universal truth. I don’t know what that means for each person, but when they don’t go your way, you have two choices. Go home and be depressed. Or pick yourself up and figure it out for that day, for that hour. That is something that takes self awareness, exploration, motivation, energy. If you can’t do that, you can’t change things. You have to move to change….wherever you go, you take yourself. You have to be the boss of yourself.”  -Rachel Weiss, L’Oreal VP of Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the #girlboss radio podcast

“A book is a bargain. Still. A screaming bargain. You pay $15-20 bucks, and you have something that might change your life. You have something that reminds you 20 years later siting on the shelf where you were when you read it. I love buying books.” – Seth Godin on The Tim Ferriss Show, February 10, 2016

“The joke that cemented my relationship with Letterman. I actually approached him because I saw him at the Comedy Store. He’s talking about editorials and local newspapers..I can’t remember the setup. He said, ‘We are diametrically opposed to using orphans as yardage markers on public golf courses.’ I just liked the phraseology of that. Hearing comedians doing a certain routine. It’s like hearing a song with a lyric that I like.” – Jay Leno on David Letterman, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee

“I think a lot about myself. Too much, I imagine. I wonder about who I really am and what that really means. We all play roles. We are caricatures of ourselves. We have different roles at work, in our relationship, around certain people, around strangers, when we walk down the street. Again, I know I am self-conscious/aware. But it is odd after talking to so many people, most of whom have public personas, how many are much more interesting and obviously more deep than we assume. I have no idea what to do with who I ‘really’ am or what that even means. I know pretty well what makes me uncomfortable and whether or not that is fear or just coming from not liking something. But in terms of what really makes me tick there are things that I just don’t share. I know that is surprising but I think we all have that stuff.”  – Marc Maron

“Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.” – Babe Ruth

“Language, age, geography, personal hardship, they all inform how we solve problems in crazy, subtle ways….It turns out if you’re British or African American from the South (not as a rule but generally speaking), you’re likely to keep your ketchup in the cupboard. If you’re not British or not African American from the south, you tend to keep your ketchup in the fridge. And you could think – who cares? It actually does matter because suppose you run out of ketchup. If you’re out of ketchup, and you store your ketchup in the fridge, what are you going to use? Mayonnaise or mustard because those are the things you think of that are close to ketchup. If, alternatively, you’re a ketchup in the cupboard person, and you run out of ketchup. What is next to the ketchup in the cupboard? Malt vinegar. The more diverse backgrounds you have, the more associations you get, the more paths towards solving a hard problem.” – Scott Page, Professor of Complex Systems, The University of Michigan in the Reply All Podcast, Raising the Bar.