Virality is not an accident. It is engineered. And that's why growth hackers beat traditional marketers.
If you ask most smart or successful people where they learned their craft, they will not talk to you about their time in school. It's always a mentor, a particularly transformative job, or a period of experimentation or trial and error.
If the media is a farce, why should you be the only one stuck with rules and restrictions?
Writing the perfect paper is a lot like a military operation. It takes discipline, foresight, research, strategy, and, if done right, ends in total victory.
I have a pet goat.
As tough an idea as it often is to stomach, the best way to thrive in a world that requires grunt work is to stop seeing it as grunt work.
Reddit is like any democratic form of government - unless carefully guarded by its leaders and members, its trusts and privileges can be and often are abused.
Leveraging community intelligence and making connections is a key component to being a growth hacker.
Growth hackers are typically computer engineers that build great marketing ideas into the product during the development process.
Growth hackers don't tolerate waste.
If it comes as a constant surprise each and every time something unexpected occurs, you're not only going to be miserable whenever you attempt something big, you're going to have a much harder time accepting it and moving on to attempts two, three, and four.
Every job carries occupational hazards.
What I've found in my research is that realism and self-honesty are the antidote to ego, hubris, and delusion.
Understanding how the media actually works is critical. Because editors depend on ignorance and media illiteracy to ply their trade. The fact that many readers expect fact checking, editorial oversight, and ethics actually makes it easier for the media to be lazy.
The news is notoriously inaccurate, and our memory of it is even worse.
It angers me to see armed defenders at the bottom of Lost Cause statues, adding a renewed threat of violence to icons that are themselves part of an ideology of violence and intimidation.
There has to be something about your business that gets you excited. Otherwise, you probably wouldn't have spent your precious - irreplaceable - time on it.
We only have so much energy for our work, for our relationships, for ourselves. A smart person understands this and guards it carefully. Meanwhile, idiots focus on marginal productivity hacks and gains while they leak out energy each passing day.
Every media appearance is a learning experience about the media outlet and their journalists and their feelings about you, so treat it as such.
Life is hard, but we make it much harder.
