Josh Kaufman Quotes

Using what you make every day is the best way to improve the quality of what you’re offering. Nothing will help you find ways to make your offer better than being its most avid and demanding customer.

all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. — BERTRAND RUSSELL,

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. — BILL GATES,

Learn everything you can from your competition and then create something even more valuable.

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

Lifetime Value is the total value of a customer’s business over the lifetime of their relationship with your company.

A forcing function is a process or constraint that requires an action, decision or trade-off within a certain timeframe.

Business schools don't create successful people. They simply accept them, then take credit for their success.

Climbing the corporate ladder is an obstacle to doing great work. I wanted to focus on getting things done and making things better, not drafting memos, sitting in meetings, and positioning myself for promotion.

Most drivers don’t buy expensive off-road-capable vehicles because they actually drive off the road. They buy them because off-road capability makes them feel adventurous and bold, capable of meeting any driving challenge.

Absence blindness is a cognitive bias that prevents us from identifying what we can't observe.

At the core, every business is a collection of five Interdependent processes, each of which flows into the next: 1. Value Creation — discovering what people need or want, then creating it. 2. Marketing — attracting attention and building demand for what you’ve created. 3. Sales — turning prospective customers into paying customers. 4. Value Delivery — giving your customers what you’ve promised and ensuring that they’re satisfied. 5. Finance — bringing in enough money to keep going and make your effort worthwhile.

"A decision is the act of committing to a specific plan of action. The word "decide" comes from the Latin decidere, which means to "cut off". When you make a decision, you're cutting off the other possible avenues that you could explore, leaving only the path you're committing to."

7. Make dedicated time for practice. The time you spend acquiring a new skill must come from somewhere. Unfortunately, we tend to want to acquire new skills and keep doing many of the other activities we enjoy, like watching TV, playing video games, et cetera. I’ll get around to it, when I find the time, we say to ourselves. Here’s the truth: “finding” time is a myth. No one ever “finds” time for anything, in the sense of miraculously discovering some bank of extra time, like finding a twenty-dollar bill you accidentally left in your coat pocket. If you rely on finding time to do something, it will never be done. If you want to find time, you must make time.

The trick is to find an attractive market that interests you enough to keep you improving your offering every single day. Finding that market is mostly a matter of patience and active exploration.