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humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles. We call these miracles technology.
“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.
New technology has never been an automatic feature of history. Our ancestors lived in static, zero-sum societies where success meant seizing things from others. They created new sources of wealth only rarely,
A new company’s most important strength is new thinking:
Conventional beliefs only ever come to appear arbitrary and wrong in retrospect; whenever one collapses, we call the old belief a bubble.
The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.
THE BUSINESS VERSION of our contrarian question is: what valuable company is nobody building?
by “monopoly,” we mean the kind of company that’s so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute.
if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.
Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.
If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.
Simply stated, the value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future.
business is like chess. Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.”
Every company starts in unique circumstances, and every company starts only once. Statistics doesn’t work when the sample size is one.
No one pretended that misfortune didn’t exist, but prior generations believed in making their own luck by working hard.
Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists.
Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse.
The strange history of the Baby Boom produced a generation of indefinite optimists so used to effortless progress that they feel entitled to it.
Whether you were born in 1945 or 1950 or 1955, things got better every year for the first 18 years of your life, and it had nothing to do with you.
But perhaps you can’t understand Malcolm Gladwell without understanding his historical context as a Boomer
U.S. companies are letting cash pile up on their balance sheets without investing in new projects because they don’t have any concrete plans for the future.
Jobs saw that you can change the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying others’ successes.
Contrarian thinking doesn’t make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up.
what valuable company is nobody building? Every correct answer is necessarily a secret:
If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.
Religious fundamentalism, for example, allows no middle ground for hard questions: there are easy truths that children are expected to rattle off, and then there are the mysteries of God, which can’t be explained.
In between—the zone of hard truths—lies heresy.
Why search for a new secret if you can comfortably collect rents on everything that has already been done?
In 2002, HP merged with Compaq, presumably because it didn’t know what else to do.
every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside.
The extreme opposite of a cult is a consulting firm like Accenture: not only does it lack a distinctive mission of its own, but individual consultants are regularly dropping in and out of companies to which they have no long-term connection whatsoever.
EVEN THOUGH SALES is everywhere, most people underrate its importance.
Your company needs to sell more than its product. You must also sell your company to employees and investors.
Luddites are so worried about being replaced that they would rather we stop building new technology altogether.
Better technology in law, medicine, and education won’t replace professionals; it will allow them to do even more.
Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way.
