Abhilash Rao

Benjamin Barber, an eminent political theorist, once said, “I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures. . . . I divide the world into the learners and nonlearners.”

Research shows that the best way to deal with negativity is to observe it, without reaction and without judgment. Then consciously label each negative feeling and replace it with positive, compassionate, and solution-based thoughts.

“What’s working, and how can we do more of it?” Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: “What’s broken, and how do we fix it?” - via Chip and Dan Heath, Switch: How to Change Things when Change is Hard

“I believe . . . that everyone, of whatever age and circumstance, is capable of self-transformation.”

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.

“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent,” Keynes famously declared. Being early and right is the same as being wrong, as investors have repeatedly discovered.

We can examine competition from both an industry and a market point of view.7 An industry is a group of firms offering a product or class of products that are close substitutes for one another. ... Using the market approach, we define competitors as companies that satisfy the same customer need. For example, a customer who buys a word-processing

A great insight by Lisa Feldman Barrett: When someone expresses anxiety, the first thing you should do is ask: do you want empathy or do you want a solution?