If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.

YOU DON’T KNOW IF YOUR IDEA IS ANY GOOD the moment it’s created. Neither does anyone else. The most you can hope for is a strong gut feeling that it is. And trusting your feelings...

Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being...

..The stuff you learn beforehand will never be one-tenth as useful as the stuff you learn the hard way, on the job.

You do not own the molecules. They are stardust. They belong to God. What you do own is your soul. Nobody can take that away from you.

The old ways are dead. And you need people around you who concur. That means hanging out more with the creative people, the freaks, the real visionaries, than you’re already doing. Thinking more about what...

…the best Evil Plan offers something much more for people–a chance to buy into an idea that matters, and share it with people who matter to them.

If you’re creative, if you can think independently, if you can articulate passion, if you can override the fear of being wrong, then your company needs you more than it ever did. And now your...

Writer’s block is just a symptom of feeling like you have nothing to say, combined with the rather weird idea that you should feel the need to say something. Why? If you have something to...

They’re only crayons. You didn’t fear them in Kindergarten, why fear them now?

You have to find your own shtick. A Picasso always looks like Picasso painted it. Hemingway always sounds like Hemingway. A Beethoven symphony always sounds like a Beethoven symphony. Part of being a master is...

GOOD IDEAS ALTER THE BALANCE IN RELATIONSHIPS. THAT IS WHY GOOD IDEAS ARE ALWAYS INITIALLY RESISTED.

If your business plan depends on suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail. Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain.

But Andrew was right about one thing. Human beings need to tell stories. Historically, it’s the quickest way we have for transmitting useful information to other members of our species. Stories are not simply nice...

Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it.

The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care.

The only people who can change the world are people who want to. And not everybody does.

Your idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours alone. The more the idea is yours alone, the more freedom you have to do something really amazing. The more amazing, the...