Josh Kaufman Quotes

By recruiting a good team and eliminating as much Friction (discussed later) as possible, you’ll achieve the results you’re seeking.

advertising attracts attention, attention brings prospects, and prospects lead to sales.

Objections #4 and #5 (“I can wait” / “it’s too difficult”) are best addressed via Education-Based Selling. Often, your prospects haven’t fully realized they have a problem, particularly in the case of Absence Blindness (discussed later). If the business doesn’t realize it’s losing $10 million in the first place, it’s difficult to convince them that you can help. The best way to get around this is to focus your early sales efforts on making your customers smarter by teaching them what you know about their business, then helping them Visualize what their involvement would look like if they decide to proceed.

people assume that they need to attend business school to learn how to build a successful business or advance in their career. That’s simply not true.

A Checklist is an Externalized, predefined Standard Operating Procedure for completing a specific task. Creating a Checklist is enormously valuable for two reasons. First, Checklisting will help you define a System for a process that hasn’t yet been formalized — once the Checklist has been created, it’s easier to see how to improve or Automate the system. Second, using Checklists as a normal part of working can help ensure that you don’t forget to handle important steps that are easily overlooked when things get busy.

Believe it or not, there are only four ways to increase your business’s revenue: 1. Increase the number of customers you serve. 2. Increase the average size of each Transaction by selling more. 3. Increase the frequency of Transactions per customer. 4. Raise your prices.

Experience makes it easier to avoid Absence Blindness. Experience is valuable primarily because the expert has a larger mental database of related patterns and thus a higher chance of noticing an absence. By noticing violations of expected patterns, experienced people are more likely to get an “odd feeling” that things “aren’t quite right,” which is often enough warning to find an issue before it becomes serious.

According to Pfeffer and Fong’s study, it doesn’t matter if you graduate at the top of your class with a perfect 4.0 or at the bottom with a barely passing grade — getting an MBA has zero correlation with long-term career success. None.

The trick is to start practicing as quickly as possible. Not thinking about practicing or worrying about practicing, but actually practicing.

Large companies move slowly. Good ideas often died on the vine because they had to be approved by too many people.

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,

these foundational business concepts mental models, and together, they create a solid framework you can rely on to make good decisions. Mental models are concepts that represent your understanding of “how things work.” Think of driving a car: what do you expect when you press down on the right-side pedal? If the car slows down, you’ll be surprised — that pedal is supposed to be the accelerator. That’s a mental model — an idea about how something works in the real world.

All of us have had the experience of knowing or feeling that we should do something or that an action would be in our best interest … but we don’t do it. The term for that experience is Akrasia (pronounced “ah-KRAH-see-ah”).

When creating a Hook, focus on the primary benefit or value your offer provides. Emphasize what’s uniquely valuable about your offer and why the prospect should care. Brainstorm a list of words and phrases related to your primary benefit, then experiment with different ways to connect them in a short phrase.

Focus on Options, not issues, and you’ll be able to handle any situation life throws at you.