Scott Galloway > Quotes

“Don’t follow your passion, follow your talent.”
― Scott Galloway, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

“teach 120 kids on Tuesday nights in my Brand Strategy course. That’s $720,000, or $60,000 per class, in tuition payments, a lot of it financed with debt. I’m good at what I do, but walking in each night, I remind myself we (NYU) are charging kids $500/minute for me and a projector. This. Is. Fucking. Ridiculous.”
― Scott Galloway, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

“People who received a great deal of attention for their looks at a young age are more likely to opt for cosmetic procedures when older. It’s the same in business.”
― Scott Galloway, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

“Expect that a certain amount of failure is out of your control, and recognize you may need to endure it or move on.”
― Scott Galloway, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

“Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”
― Scott Galloway, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google

“The ultimate gift, in our digital age, is a CEO who has the storytelling talent to capture the imagination of the markets while surrounding themselves with people who can show incremental progress against that vision each day.”
― Scott Galloway, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

“Don’t follow your passion, follow your talent. Determine what you are good at (early), and commit to becoming great at it. You don't have to love it, just don't hate it. If practice takes you from good to great, the recognition and compensation you will command will make you start to love it. And, ultimately, you will be able to shape your career and your specialty to focus on the aspects you enjoy the most. And if not—make good money and then go follow your passion. No kid dreams of being a tax accountant. However, the best tax accountants on the planet fly first class and marry people better looking than themselves—both things they are likely to be passionate about.”
― Scott Galloway, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

“I believe most people are especially repelled by attributes in other people that remind them of things they loathe about themselves.”
― Scott Galloway, The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning

“It is conventional wisdom that Steve Jobs put “a dent in the universe.” No, he didn’t. Steve Jobs, in my view, spat on the universe. People who get up every morning, get their kids dressed, get them to school, and have an irrational passion for their kids’ well-being, dent the universe. The world needs more homes with engaged parents, not a better fucking phone.”
― Scott Galloway, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google

“luxury is irrational, which makes it the best business in the world. In 2016 Estée Lauder was worth more than the world’s largest communications firm, WPP.9 Richemont, owner of Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, was worth more than T-Mobile.10 LVMH commands more value than Goldman Sachs.”
― Scott Galloway, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

“Balance when establishing your career, in my view, is largely a myth. “Struggle porn” will tell you that you must be miserable before you can be successful. This isn’t true: you can experience a lot of reward along the way to success. But if balance is your priority in your youth, then you need to accept that, unless you are a genius, you may not reach the upper rungs of economic security.”
― Scott Galloway, The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning

“it seems impossible until it isn’t.”
― Scott Galloway, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

“Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity,” said Coco Chanel.”
― Scott Galloway, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

“love was a willingness to take the life you’ve built for yourself and tear it up for the other person.”
― Scott Galloway, The Algebra of Happiness: The pursuit of success, love and what it all means

“You want to cover more ground in less time than your peers. This is partially built on talent, but mostly on strategy and endurance”
― Scott Galloway, The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning

“wealth is the absence of economic anxiety. Freed of the pressure to earn, we can choose how we live. Our relationships with others aren’t shadowed by the stress of money. It sounds basic, easy even.”
― Scott Galloway, The Algebra of Wealth: A Simple Formula for Financial Security

“tell my students that nothing wonderful, I’m talking really fantastic, will happen without taking a risk and subjecting yourself to rejection. Serendipity is a function of courage.”
― Scott Galloway, The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning

“We like to position education as the great leveler. But in fact it has become a caste system, a means of passing privilege on to the next generation.”
― Scott Galloway, Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled.”
― Scott Galloway, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

“If you want to work for Vogue, produce films, or open a restaurant, you had better get immense psychological reward from your gig, as the comp, and returns on your efforts, will likely suck. Competition will be fierce, and even if you manage to get in, you'll be easily replaceable, as there are always younger, hipper candidates nipping at your heels. Very few high-school graduates dream of working for Exxon, but a big firm in a large sector would give you a career trajectory with regular promotions a sexy industry won't.”
― Scott Galloway, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

“A step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction. —Kurt Vonnegut”
― Scott Galloway, Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity

“Opportunity is a function of density. Get to a place that’s crowded with success. Big cities are Wimbledon—even if you aren’t Rafael Nadal, your game will improve by being on the court with him. And you’ll either get in better shape or learn you shouldn’t be at Wimbledon.”
― Scott Galloway, The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning

“three platforms: Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Registering, iterating, and monetizing its audience is the heart of each platform’s business. It’s what the most valuable man-made things ever created (their algorithms) are designed to do.”
― Scott Galloway, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

“Getting a good job, working long hours, keeping your skills relevant, navigating the politics of an organization, finding a live/work balance...these are all really hard. In contrast, respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility...these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy stuff right. In and of themselves they will not make you successful. However, not possessing them will hold you back and you will not achieve your potential.”
― Scott Galloway

“Take a ton of pictures, text your friends stupid things, check in with old friends as often as possible, express admiration to coworkers, and every day, tell as many people as you can that you love them. A couple of minutes every day—the payoff is small at first, and then it’s immense.”
― Scott Galloway, The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning

“There’s no such thing as balance, only trade-offs. You can have it all, just not at the same time.”
― Scott Galloway, Notes on Being a Man

“The digital age is Heraclitus on steroids: change is a daily constant. In almost every professional environment, we are expected to use and master tools that did not exist a decade ago, or even last year. For better or worse (and frankly, it is often for worse), organizations have access, essentially, to infinite amounts of data, and what might as well be an infinite variety of ways to sort through and act on that data. At the same time, ideas can be turned into reality at unprecedented speed. The thing Amazon, Facebook, and no less hot firms, including Zara, have in common is they are agile (the new-economy term for fast).”
― Scott Galloway, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

“Entrepreneurs are usually enamored with the preciousness of their product vs. something that can scale.”
― Scott Galloway, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

“Entrepreneurship is a sales job with negative commissions until you raise capital, are profitable, or go out of business—whichever comes first.”
― Scott Galloway, The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning

“The ultimate goal for any male is to create what the author of Of Boys and Men, Richard Reeves (my Yoda on this subject), calls surplus value. This phrase shows up a lot in these pages. It means you give more than you get. For men, this means providing more love to others than was given to you—becoming a better son, brother, friend, or employer to people. Your job, if you become a father, is to create surplus value as measured by being a better dad than your dad was to you.”
― Scott Galloway, Notes on Being a Man