50.) It’s easier to sell something when you list the faults.
It’s would seems to be a contradiction, but your sales will increase when you tell people what’s wrong with what you’ve got. Including if what you’re selling is you and your services. If you don’t, your customers’ attention will be divided between your sales pitch and their own on-going effort to sniff out the hidden catch in your sales pitch.
59.) Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”
- Chuck Close
58.) Artists reveal more of themselves than of their subject in their work.
Every time I think of something witty to say during a conversation but fail to get it out before the topic of conversation changes, I become just a little more fond of threaded comments and just a hair less likely to strike up a conversation in real life…
I’m pretty sure that I’m destined to be a hermit, thanks to the internet.
57.) Resign yourself to the fact that, if you work in the technology sector, you will always be a beginner.
I don’t write on your Facebook wall so you can comment on what I’ve said. I write on your wall so you’ll reciprocate and make me seem more popular, damn it.
56.) Technologies improves so fast that, that before you can master any new hardware, software, or system, it will be supplanted by the next generation of technology.
Rather than becoming an expert on any one technology, focus your efforts on training yourself to unlearn and re-learn new technologies.
55.) Technical people are motivated by interesting work.
They will put up with abominable working conditions if they get to work on something that interests them. I’ve managed people who had to be sent home at night. But technical people without interesting work are very difficult to manage. Their active minds tend to get them into trouble. A happy team is a group that is busy and too intrigued with their project to get mired down with internal politics. This tends to be exactly the reverse of business people, who are typically more interested in the overall job than the task at hand. Environment, recognition and security are more important to them.
The day I saw the inventor of the “Snuggie” on a talk show explaining that he had become an overnight millionaire by slapping a pair of sleeves onto a blanket, I very seriously contemplated suicide. Sometimes the “American dream” just seems like a cruel joke.
54.) Technical people respect technical people.
If you can’t talk the talk, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to gain the respect you need to manage. How can you effectively represent your people in meetings if you don’t understand what they do? That doesn’t mean that you have to know everything they do. That would defy the point of hiring them in the first place.What it means is that you take the time to learn the jargon and allow the people you put your trust in to educate you.