Keith Ferrazzi

Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Those rewards create almost as many problems as they solve. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter,

Flirting is the promise of sex with no guarantee. A successful brand, then, is the promise and guarantee of a mind shattering experience each and every time.

Seize this very minute; what you can do, or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The answer is we created buzz: that powerful, widespread phenomenon that can determine the future of individuals, companies, and movies alike. Buzz is the riddle every enterprising person is trying to solve. It’s a grassroots, word-of-mouth force that can turn a low-budget flick into a multimillion-dollar blockbuster. You feel its energy in Internet chat rooms, at the gym, on the street, and all of it is stoked by a media hungry for the inside scoop. Buzz is marketing on steroids.

Creativity in business is often nothing more than making connections that everyone else has almost thought of. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just attach it to a new wagon.

time for the new CEO to feel that he or she knows what the issues and problems are, but not enough time to have gotten his or her arms around the solutions.

It’s better to give before you receive. And never keep score. If your interactions are ruled by generosity, your rewards will follow suit.

What you see shapes how you change ... We tell ourselves a story of what our job is, what our company does, who the people we work with are - and that story becomes our reality. ...
What you see shapes how you change

Oh, I’m really sorry, I’m a personal friend of a friend of his. I just moved into the city, and Jane suggested that I should meet Michael, and honestly, I don’t even know why besides the fact that Jane is a good friend of Michael’s. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s all wrong. Maybe Michael doesn’t know Jane well and he wouldn’t want to meet me. I apologize if this is the case.

The only way they can do that well is by serving their specific audience. “Listen, I’m a devoted reader of this magazine,” I’ll tell editors while mentioning a few recent articles I’ve enjoyed. “I’ve got a story for you that I know your audience will be interested in, as I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.” That’s not a line, either. Before I call journalists, I’ll spend time reading their articles, figuring out what they cover, and what kinds of stories their publications like to run.

People you’re contacting to create a new relationship need to see or hear your name in at least three modes of communication — by, say, an e-mail, a phone call, and a face-to-face encounter — before there is substantive recognition. • Once you have gained some early recognition, you need to nurture a developing relationship with a phone call or e-mail at least once a month. • If you want to transform a contact into a friend, you need a minimum of two face-to-face meetings out of the office. • Maintaining a secondary relationship requires two to three pings a year. • Social media pings (status updates, retweets, comments, etc.) are terrific for ongoing relationship maintenance, especially for the fringe of your network, but they don’t replace the need for one-to-one pinging with the people in your highest-priority network, those people connected to your current goals.

We let what we know limit what we can imagine; the result, a failure of imagination.

I learned that real networking was about finding ways to make other people more successful. It was about working hard to give more than you get.

Samuel Beckett wrote, “Fail, fail again. Fail better.

Success in any field, but especially in business is about working with people, not against them.