Quality, quality, quality: never waver from it, even when you don’t see how you can afford to keep it up. When you compromise, you become a commodity… - Josh Kaufman

Loss Aversion is the idea that people hate to lose things more than they like to gain them. There are very few relationships that psychology is able to quantify, but this is one of them: people respond twice as strongly to potential loss as they do to the opportunity of an equivalent gain. If you look at your investment portfolio and notice that it’s increased by 100 percent, you’ll feel pretty good. If you notice that your portfolio went down 100 percent, you’ll feel horrible.

Every improvement you make to your Value Stream makes it harder for potential competitors to keep up, creating a Barrier to Competition. By increasing your ability to create and deliver value in an efficient and effective way, you make it more difficult for competitors to compete with you by doing what you’re doing. Every benefit you deliver and every customer you serve make it harder for competitors to replicate you. Don’t focus on competing — focus on delivering even more value. Your competition will take care of itself.

Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.