Josh Kaufman > Quotes

“Business schools don't create successful people. They simply accept them, then take credit for their success.”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume

“Every successful business (1) creates or provides something of value that (2) other people want or need (3) at a price they're willing to pay, in a way that (4) satisfies the purchaser's needs and expectations and (5) provides the business sufficient revenue to make it worthwhile for the owners to continue operation.”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume

“You can't make positive discoveries that make your life better if you never try anything new.”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

“Whoever best describes the problem is the one most likely to solve it. —”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume

“If you rely on finding time to do something, it will never be done. If you want to find time, you must make time.”
― Josh Kaufman, The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything ... Fast

“Every time your customers purchase from you, they’re deciding that they value what you have to offer more than they value anything else their money could buy at that moment.”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

“The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears.”
― Josh Kaufman, The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast!

“Ideas are cheap—what counts is the ability to translate an idea into reality, which is much more difficult than recognizing a good idea.”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

“Retired general Colin Powell famously advocates collecting half of the information available, then making a decision, even though your information is clearly incomplete.”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

“The trouble comes when we confuse learning with skill acquisition. If you want to acquire a new skill, you must practice it in context. Learning enhances practice, but it doesn’t replace it. If performance matters, learning alone is never enough.”
― Josh Kaufman, The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything ... Fast

“Improve by 1% a day, and in just 70 days, you’re twice as good.”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

“There is only one boss: the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else. —SAM WALTON, FOUNDER OF WALMART A”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

“Focus on Options, not issues, and you’ll be able to handle any situation life throws at you.”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

“A great example of Guiding Structure is the “Sterile Cockpit Rule” that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) instituted in 1981. Most airline accidents happen below ten thousand feet, where distractions can be deadly. Above ten thousand feet, pilots can talk about anything they want, but below ten thousand feet, the only discussion permitted is about information directly related to the flight in progress. By eliminating distractions, the Sterile Cockpit Rule reduces errors and accidents.”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

“If you want an audience, start a fight. —IRISH PROVERB”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

“Fitbit is a company that knows the value of Shadow Testing. Founded by Eric Friedman and James Park in September 2008, Fitbit makes a small clip-on exercise and sleep data-gathering device. The Fitbit device tracks your activity levels throughout the day and night, then automatically uploads your data to the Web, where it analyzes your health, fitness, and sleep patterns. It’s a neat concept, but creating new hardware is time-consuming, expensive, and fraught with risk, so here’s what Friedman and Park did. The same day they announced the Fitbit idea to the world, they started allowing customers to preorder a Fitbit on their Web site, based on little more than a description of what the device would do and a few renderings of what the product would look like. The billing system collected names, addresses, and verified credit card numbers, but no charges were actually processed until the product was ready to ship, which gave the company an out in case their plans fell through. Orders started rolling in, and one month later, investors had the confidence to pony up $2 million dollars to make the Fitbit a reality. A year later, the first real Fitbit was shipped to customers. That’s the power of Shadow Testing.”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

“Once you eliminate your number one problem, number two gets a promotion. —GERALD WEINBERG,”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

“Ending a chapter of your life on your own terms is a feat worthy of respect and admiration.”
― Josh Kaufman, How to Fight a Hydra: Face Your Fears, Pursue Your Ambitions, and Become the Hero You Are Destined to Be

“Learn everything you can from your competition, and then create something even more valuable.”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

“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.”
― Josh Kaufman, The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything ... Fast

“Here’s a curious fact about human beings: we have a really hard time realizing that something isn’t there.”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

“Goods in any storehouse are useless until somebody takes them out and puts them to the use they were meant for. That applies to what man stores away in his brain, too. —THOMAS J. WATSON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF IBM”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume

“Options are often an overlooked form of value—flexibility is one of the Three Universal Currencies (discussed later). Find a way to give people more flexibility, and you may discover a viable business model.”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

“Experimentation is the essence of living a satisfying, productive, fulfilling life. The more you Experiment, the more you learn, and the more you’ll achieve.”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume

“College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

“1. Recruit the smallest group of people who can accomplish what must be done quickly and with high quality. Comparative Advantage means that some people will be better than others at accomplishing certain tasks, so it pays to invest time and resources in recruiting the best team for the job. Don’t make that team too large, however—Communication Overhead makes each additional team member beyond a core of three to eight people a drag on performance. Small, elite teams are best. 2. Clearly communicate the desired End Result, who is responsible for what, and the current status. Everyone on the team must know the Commander’s Intent of the project, the Reason Why it’s important, and must clearly know the specific parts of the project they’re individually responsible for completing—otherwise, you’re risking Bystander Apathy. 3. Treat people with respect. Consistently using the Golden Trifecta—appreciation, courtesy, and respect—is the best way to make the individuals on your team feel Important and is also the best way to ensure that they respect you as a leader and manager. The more your team works together under mutually supportive conditions, the more Clanning will naturally occur, and the more cohesive the team will become. 4. Create an Environment where everyone can be as productive as possible, then let people do their work. The best working Environment takes full advantage of Guiding Structure—provide the best equipment and tools possible and ensure that the Environment reinforces the work the team is doing. To avoid having energy sapped by the Cognitive Switching Penalty, shield your team from as many distractions as possible, which includes nonessential bureaucracy and meetings. 5. Refrain from having unrealistic expectations regarding certainty and prediction. Create an aggressive plan to complete the project, but be aware in advance that Uncertainty and the Planning Fallacy mean your initial plan will almost certainly be incomplete or inaccurate in a few important respects. Update your plan as you go along, using what you learn along the way, and continually reapply Parkinson’s Law to find the shortest feasible path to completion that works, given the necessary Trade-offs required by the work. 6. Measure to see if what you’re doing is working—if not, try another approach. One of the primary fallacies of effective Management is that it makes learning unnecessary. This mind-set assumes your initial plan should be 100 percent perfect and followed to the letter. The exact opposite is true: effective Management means planning for learning, which requires constant adjustments along the way. Constantly Measure your performance across a small set of Key Performance Indicators (discussed later)—if what you’re doing doesn’t appear to be working, Experiment with another approach.”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

“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.”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

“there’s often a huge difference between an interesting idea and a solid business.”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume

“A good salesman, as the old (and politically incorrect) saying goes, can sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo. It's a cliché, but there's some truth to it: Inuit who live above the Arctic Circle use insulated refrigerators to keep their food from freezing in subzero temperatures”
― Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”
― Josh Kaufman, Worldly Wisdom: Collected Quotations and Aphorisms