16 posts tagged “zquotes”
(Crossposted from zBlog:~C4Chaos)
Business 2.0 asked 50 of the brightest minds in business how they do what they do. Check it out. Lots of golden nuggets in there.
Here's a list of my favorite quotes. Also added them to my Zaadz quotes tagged with how to succeed. Something to think about while working on that conscious capitalism thing :)
Sergey Brin
Co-founder, Google
Succeed With Simplicity
“We
are focused on features, not products. We eliminated future products
that would have made the complexity problem worse. We don't want to
have 20 different products that work in 20 different ways. I was
getting lost at our site keeping track of everything. I would rather
have a smaller set of products that have a shared set of features.”
Chris DeWolfe
Co-founder, Myspace
Keep Social Networks Social
“The key is to be true to your community's norms and values. You can't just force yourself on people and try to sell them something they don't want - that's good advice for marketers generally, but particularly on community-driven sites like MySpace. You have to find ways to add value to your members' lives while being consistent with your brand's identity.”
Rachael Ray
Chef, Author, and Entrepreneur
Turn Your Passion Into an Empire
“I've also learned that you can't be all things to all people. Whatever it is that you're successful at, that has to be the No. 1 goal.
Chad Hurley
Co-founder, YouTube
Give Your Startup a Fighting Chance
“As you start building the product, don't assume that you know all the answers. Listen to the community and adapt. We had a lot of our own ideas about how the service would evolve. Coming from PayPal and eBay, we saw YouTube as a powerful way to add video to auctions, but we didn't see anyone using our product that way, so we didn't add features to support it.”
Howard Schultz
Chairman, Starbucks
Dare to Be a Social Entrepreneur
“The
rules of engagement around building a brand have changed significantly
over the past 10 to 15 years. Where companies at one time could spread
their message through traditional marketing, consumers now seek an
enduring emotional connection with the companies they patronize. The
foundation of that connection is the most important characteristic of
building a world-class brand: trust. Trust with your people and trust
with your customers.”
Michael Scott
Regional Manager, Dunder-Mifflin Paper Co.
Avoid a Staff Mutiny (With Chocolate, if Necessary)
“Nowadays I find chocolate and/or chocolate-based snacks to be great motivators. Everyone loves chocolate. If someone has a lot of work to do, put a piece of fudge in a glass container (so they can see it) and let them know that if they accomplish their tasks, they can eat the fudge. You'll definitely get a reaction!”
Andre Agassi
Co-founder, Agassi Graf Development
Stage a Great Second Act
“You have to understand who you are and figure out a way to communicate it. It might be in a different industry, but it's about what pumps the blood through your veins, what makes you excited, what pushes your buttons. And then discovering the best way to communicate that, no matter how big or small; it's what you stand for, what you believe in, and what reflects who you are.”
Kevin Rose
Founder, Digg
Let the Users Run the Show
“Letting users control your site can be terrifying at first. From day one we were asking ourselves, “What is going to be on the front page today?” You have no idea what the system will produce. But stepping back and giving consumers control is what brought more and more people to the site. They have a sense of ownership and discovery at the same time. If you give users the tools to spread and share their interests with others, they will use them to promote what is important to them.”
Stephen Covey
Vice Chairman, FranklinCovey; Author, The 7 habits of Highly Effective People
Strive for Moral Authority
“Most
people define greatness through wealth and popularity and position in
the corner office. But what I call everyday greatness comes from
character and contribution.”
Muhammad Yunus
Founder, Grameen Bank; Winner, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize
Seek Big Rewards in Small Ideas
“Business is about problem-solving, but it does not always have to be about maximizing profit. When I went into business, my interest was to figure out how to solve problems I see in front of me. That's why I looked at the poverty issue. I got involved in lots of things to address it, and one of them was money lending with loans and credits and savings accounts, and in the process I created Grameen Bank. So you can also have social objectives. Ask yourself these questions: Who are you? What kind of world do you want?”
Donald Trump
Chairman, Trump Organization
Obsess About Solutions, Not Problems
“The image of success is important, but even more important is the ability to focus on solutions instead of on problems. That way, you'll never be thinking like a loser, and you probably won't look like one either.”
Reed Hastings
Co-founder and CEO, Netflix
Turn Your Biggest Weakness Into Your Greatest Asset
“Truly brilliant marketing happens when you take something most people think of as a weakness and reposition it so people think of it as a strength.”
Craig Newmark
Founder and Chairman, Craigslist
Trust Your Customers and They'll Love You in Return
“We are a very open, very democratic site, which means we get all sorts of people. We do get some bad guys who are a few fries short of a Happy Meal. So we have to enlist the aid of our community to help us. The lesson implicit in this is that people will help you out and behave in a really good way. If you trust them, they will respond to that trust.”
Fred Wilson
Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures
Build a Blog That Builds Your Business
“I also like to use a sensational headline. Many people read blogs in aggregators, which generally show only the headline. So you have to give people a reason to click through. Blogs need to be real and personal. Reading it should be like hanging out with you. I play music for my readers. I show them videos I like. I tell them what I did over the weekend. And I tell them what is happening in the technology, Internet, and VC markets.”
(Crossposted from www.c4chaos.com)
“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are – if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.”
I just love watching all the Joseph Campbell videos on YouTube. Here are some more video segments from the The Power of Myth. They're all about God, life, death, sex, marriage, love, nonduality, impermanence, and following our bliss: Bliss 01, Bliss 02, Bliss 03.
Here's the video for Bliss 03.
May you all find your blissful rabbit holes!
~C (for Campbell still rocks!)
(Crossposted from www.c4chaos.com) "Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the
great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that
represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of
transcendence: sat-chit-ananda. The word "Sat" means being. "Chit"
means consciousness. "Ananda" means bliss or rapture. I thought, "I
don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I
don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not;
but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and
that will bring me both my consciousness and my being." I think it
worked."
Source: The Power of Myth, Page: 120
Speaking of the four Ls, by some weird serendipity I happen to bump into this classic Joseph Campbell interview. It's a video segment of The Power of Myth. In this video Joseph Campbell talked about Love, the Holy Grail, and God. It's a cool hyper-overview of Campbell's massive knowledge of mythology. Campbell's beer-goggles is a perfect example of DEPTH and SPAN. This video a must-see
I {heart} you all!
~C (for Campbell rocks!)
Kranzberg’s First Law
helps to clarify this situation: Technology is neither good nor bad—nor
is it neutral. At the risk of spoiling its Zenlike nature, let me
propose an interpretation: a technology isn’t inherently good or bad,
but it will
have an impact, which is why it’s not neutral. Almost every applied
technology has a good side and a bad side. When you think of
transportation technologies, do you think of how they enable a
delightful vacation or get the family back together during the
holidays—or do you think of traffic jams and pollution? Are books a
source of wisdom and spirituality or a way to distribute pornography
and hate? Do you applaud medical technology for curing plagues or
deplore transportation technology for spreading them? Does encrypted
e-mail keep honest people safe from criminals or criminals safe from
the police? Are plastics durable conveniences or everlasting
pollutants? Counterfeiting comes with money, obscene phone calls come
with the telephone, spam comes with e-mail, and pornography comes with
the Internet. Every law creates an outlaw.
“Suppose hypothetically that one out of every 200 people or so is a jerk. In today's world these jerks will discover that if they enter government or business they can become super rich and powerful jerks. Do we conclude, therefore, that markets (or government) have caused greed? No, the fact is that once we no longer live in tiny tribes of 200, anonymity allows some people, who would have been assholes in a small tribe but who would have been sanctioned there, to go off and become jerks on a much, much larger scale.
“Technology,
including Zaadz, will allow us to evade the jerks far more than we
could before. The technology-based social responsibility movement,
broadly construed, will allow us to return to some extent to the moral
monitoring of small villages.”
(Crossposted from www.c4chaos.com)
“Social entrepreneurs have existed throughout history. St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan Order, would qualify as a social entrepreneur – having built multiple organizations that advanced pattern changes in his “field.” Similarly, Florence Nightingale created the first professional school for nurses and established standards for hygiene and hospital care that have shaped norms worldwide. What is different today is that social entrepreneurship is developing into a mainstream vocation, not only in the United States, Canada, and Europe, but increasingly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In fact, the rise of social entrepreneurship represents the leading edge of a remarkable development that has occurred across the world over the past three decades: the emergence of millions of new citizen organizations.”
Source: How to Change the World : Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas
I'm an only child who grew up in a humble country along the Pacific ocean. I remember spending my lazy afternoons with friends and neighbors just chilling out under a bayabas tree. Me and my friends were fond of watching Jackie Chan movies and anything that had to do with ninjas. We were crazy about sci-fi movies too. Thank God for VHS tapes!
I consider myself a social person but I'm the type who is more on the introvert side of the scale. That's why I can watch movies alone and get lost in books for days, only getting up if I need to eat, drink, stretch, or pee. Some people will label that as “geeky.” Then call me a blissful geek for all I care.
There was a point in my life when I had the urge of developing my personality. So I devoured inspirational books, spiritual books, philosophical books, scientific books, self-help books, and those uber-mindblowing books about enlightenment and integral stuff. Yet I was still screwed up. I still didn't know where to start and what to do with my life. Books are fingers pointing to the moon. It's so obvious now, but I was still clueless back then.
I'm at the stage in my life right now where I get easily bored with spiritual talks, philosophical dialogues, stupid lemon-eating debates, and feel-good literature. Those are still cool once in a while but most of the time I find them empty at best, or just another version of a blissful drug at worst. They give me a sense of elitism and make me think I'm special, that I'm much more intelligent and compassionate than others. Well, nothing wrong with that, and besides, those blissful drugs water the seeds of vision. But where's the action? Ah, exactly! That's the main ingredient that has been missing in my life all along.
Philosophical, intellectual, and spiritual stuff can really pump us up, but they're very partial. Most of them lack the real world examples to put our vision into action. At worst, they could even make us more naive about how interrelated things are in the social dimension – politics, economics, business, science, religion, and stages of moral development.
You see, I'm one of those naive people. So I've decided to do something about it. Instead of the never-ending personality development and purely intellectual, theoretical, and spiritual stuff, I will switch my focus on more “practical” matters in the area of social enterprise. This is my way of taking off too much attention on myself, and instead, investing a better part of my psychic energy on how to really make a better impact on others.
The first phase of my solution would be to change the flavor of my intellectual consumption, starting with books. I've created a Starship Social Enterprise book list via zBooks so that I can keep tabs of these books while sharing and discussing them with others.
The next phase would be to integrate everything I've learned and put them into collective and collaborative action in the real world. Zaadz would be my tool. Zaadz would be my livelihood that will make it possible for me to do these crazy things. We'll see.
David Bornstein
Source: How to Change the World : Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas
(Crossposted from ~C4Chaos@Zaadz.com)
On a rainy, overcast, and cold Thursday morning, while the UK is on critical alert due to terrorist threats, I felt the need to remind myself why I'm working at Zaadz. I believe that what we're doing here is worthwhile in the grand scheme of things…
(via zQuotes tagged with "zaadz")
First of all, I just want to make a distinction about who zaadz is serving. When we first came up with the idea for zaadz, we talked about creating a community for 'spiritual' people. Unfortunately, the word 'spiritual' normally conjures up a vision of groups of monks sitting in silent meditation or perhaps… a bunch of idealistic vegans.
Our
big realization is that 'spiritual' doesn't have to be put into a box
(or a silo). We believe that spirituality is about following your
soul's purpose, whether that's about doing yoga, spinning poi or
creating the next big thing on the web.
Source: Aeon's Blog: Towards an Integral Zaadz
But I don't see Zaadz as a place with a single motive for its members - I think that we want to enable people of like minds (whether those minds be yogic, Buddhist, self-improvement-oriented) to congregate, communicate and cooperate, to create an atmosphere of wellness, support and abundance for ourselves and our members, and for ourselves - the wizards - to do so in a sustainable way that supports our own livelihoods.
We want to be part of people's lives. People who want to live a life of health and sustainability. We want our members to learn from each other. We want our members to have various opinions. We want debate. We want encouragement. We want community.
We are not here to provide a platform for meaninglessness. We want people to come here for inspiration.
I strongly believe that nothing is more spiritual than living at our highest potential while serving others. I believe that the more closely aligned we are to “spirit” the more fully we will give ourselves in service to the world. As such, my “spiritual path” is the path that leads me to a more complete manifestation of my unique Bodhisattvic duties.
Anyone who has ever accomplished anything of importance - especially to the benefit of others - has had to endure being misunderstood by those who just couldn't get it.
There are some people who are actually driven by something much greater than self-absorption. These people have an Urge on the inside of them that haunts and compels them to make their Urge a reality.
Source: An Open Letter to Visionaries, via zPod:Vision Cafe – http://pods.zaadz.com/power
The work of a person laboring in some humble occupation is no less relevant to the well-being of society than that of, for example, a doctor, a teacher, a monk, or a nun. All human endeavor is potentially great and noble. So long as we carry out our work with good motivation, thinking, “My work is for others,” it will be of benefit to the wider community. But when concern for others' feelings and welfare is missing, our activities tend to become spoiled. Through lack of basic human feeling, religion, politics, economics, and so on can be rendered dirty. Instead of serving humanity, they become agents of destruction.
Source: Ethics for the New Millennium: His Holiness the Dalai Lama , Page: 174
