Abhilash Rao

Buying is no longer about getting things we need. It’s about reinforcing a set of beliefs we hold and share. Marketing is not about finding new ways to sell more of something. It’s about affinity more than it’s about price—feelings more than facts.

When physical vigor fails with age, for example, it means that one will be ready to turn one’s energies from the mastery of the external world to a deeper exploration of inner reality.

Look at Google. Its heartbeat is erratic, unpredictable. It works for them—mostly, sometimes—but it could work so much better. Google arguably only has one big external heartbeat each year at Google I/O—and most teams don’t bother aligning with it. They typically launch whatever they want whenever they want throughout the year, sometimes with real

As Morgan McCall, in his book High Flyers, points out, “Unfortunately, people often like the things that work against their growth. . . . People like to use their strengths . . . to achieve quick, dramatic results, even if . . . they aren’t developing the new skills they will need later on. People like to believe they are as good as everyone says .

A good positioning has one foot in the present and one in the future. It needs to be somewhat aspirational so the brand has room to grow and improve. Positioning on the basis of the current state of the market is not forward looking enough, but at the same time, the positioning cannot be so removed from reality that it is essentially unobtainable.

some other famous failures: Michael Jordan: cut from his high-school basketball team. Steven Spielberg: rejected from film school thrice. Walt Disney: fired by the editor of a newspaper for lacking ideas and imagination. Albert Einstein: He learned to speak at a late age and performed poorly in school. John Grisham: first novel was rejected by 16

Everything you publish should serve a purpose. As you work on a piece, ask yourself: How does it support your goals? How does it align with your mission? Does it teach people something new?