Meaningful Quotes

“The job of every single business on the planet is to do just one thing—to make people happy. When you find ways to do that, you win.”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“The two most important things we can do are to allow ourselves to be seen AND to really see others. The greatest gift you can give a person is to see who she is and to reflect that back to her. When we help people to be who they want to be, to take back some of the permission they deny themselves, we are doing our best, most meaningful work.”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“giving a damn is seriously underrated and caring is a competitive advantage.”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“Go out and find some real people. Listen to their stories. Don’t ask for the main point. Let the story run its course. Like flowing water, it will find its own way, at its own pace. And if you’ve got patience, you’ll learn more than you might imagine. —T”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“Innovation is a by-product of empathy.”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“When we help people to be who they want to be, to take back some of the permission they deny themselves, we are doing our best, most meaningful work.”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“[I]t’s seeing the invisible problem, not just the obvious problem, that’s important, not just for product design, but for everything we do. You see, there are invisible problems all around us, ones we can solve. But first we need to see them, to feel them. —T”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“people don’t just buy the thing, they buy the feeling, so knowing what feelings your products and services are designed to elicit is just as important as knowing what features to leave out or put in. GIVING”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“New rules of brand awareness: Understand the customers' story. Make something they want. Give them a story to tell. Create brand affinity. While”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“everyone is busy making everything, how can anyone perfect anything? We start to confuse convenience with joy. Abundance with choice. Digital infinity. Designing something requires focus. The first thing we ask is: What do we want people to feel? Delight. Surprise. Love. Connection. Then we begin to craft around our intention. It takes time. There are a thousand no’s for every yes. We simplify, we perfect, we start over, until everything we touch enhances each life it touches. —A”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“Seeing your customers isn’t simply about sending out lists of questions in a survey or getting confirmation that your idea is a good one. It’s about investing time, energy and resources to understand their lives, their challenges, hopes, dreams and fears, to figure out how whatever you’re creating has a chance of addressing some of those. Dylan”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“And if you have an area you’re working, talk to customers. Every day. Talk to users of your product, active, inactive, new, and old. Talk to people who don’t want to use your product. Talk to people who are using a competitor’s product. Talk to customers of products in adjacent markets. Now, reread this paragraph and replace talk with listen. Understand how customers see the world. They don’t know the solutions, but they know the problems well. If you haven’t talked to a customer today, you’re doing it wrong. The simple fact is that the majority of great software startups today … required no technical insight to start, and you can always hire experts to help you scale. The driver of these innovations is an uncommon understanding of what the customer (aka humans) wants or how to deliver an understood solution in a better way. —S”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“What design does—and not one of us who has seen the rise of companies like Apple, Beats and Nike can argue with this—is create value by building emotional capital. Today we expect products and services to be useful—and personalised and beautiful.”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“It’s why we build, not what we build, that matters. DISRUPTION”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“Once upon a time, taking photos using rolls of photographic film was the done thing, as were using keypads that took up 40 percent of the front of your mobile phone and having to return a rented DVD by 6 p.m. the following day. What’s meaningful today can become meaningless tomorrow, not because it no longer works but because what people believe and how they think, act and feel change. The context surrounding what works is in sync with the beliefs and behaviours of the people who support it. As businesspeople, innovators, artists and creators, we have two choices. We can simply keep giving customers what works today, or we can make it our business to understand where those people we serve want to go and take them there.”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind—creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. —D”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“Without meaning, products and services are just commodities and nobody wants to be in the commodities”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“Don’t compete for the moment. Compete for meaning. When you do, you’ll find that people care because they want to ... because you earned it. —B”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“Our job is not to simply obsess about the features and benefits of what we are making; it is to wonder and care about the difference it could make to, or the change it could bring about in, people. Our job, as Steve Jobs put it, is to ‘Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“People are choosing to spend their money with companies that take the time to get to know them and whose actions resonate with their values—companies that thrive by doing the right thing and by making things customers love, instead of by trying to get customers to love their things. Their advantage isn’t necessarily being faster or cheaper, bigger or better; it is that they take time to understand their customer before making what she wants.”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“The best inventions are never finished. Great inventors don’t just stand there, rub their hands together, and say ‘My work is done here’. They’re not Damien Hirst, freezing their creativity in formaldehyde. They keep working furiously to create something even better. It’s part love, part necessity. Because if they don’t reinvent their ideas time and again, someone else will—rendering their life’s work irrelevant, or worse still, extinct! —ERIC SCHMIDT, GOOGLE It’s”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“The value isn’t just in the data that businesses collect. What counts is how they use it to make our lives better.”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“Success is not what you make, but the difference that it makes in people’s lives.”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“There’s something magical about the experience of taking a blank sheet of paper and being able to make it take flight with just a few careful, strategic folds. The art of paper plane making has been used for generations, not just to prototype big ideas and lofty innovations—without the humble paper plane, there might have been no Wright brothers’ first flight—but also to teach children about engineering, physics, possibility and small miracles. With one or two simple folds, a child learns that her actions can affect her results and that the way she builds something matters.”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“[Y]ou’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“What companies and entrepreneurs sometimes forget is that the purpose of innovation is not simply to make new, improved products and services; it is to make things that are meaningful to the people who use them.”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“we really need to care about the people we are designing for, understand what their dreams and desires and priorities are, and then we have to use that understanding as the driving force of the work we put forward, because the second we know what questions … are important, then all we have to do is answer them. —B”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“our customers are more than just passive consumers of our products and services. They are partners, co-creators, patrons, advocates, evangelists, collaborators and community members.”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“Success isn’t guaranteed even if you make the best plane in the world. John Collins spent three years perfecting his paper plane model, the ‘Suzanne’, in the hope of claiming the Guinness World Record for the longest paper airplane flight. He did indeed have the best paper plane in the world, but he recognised that he didn’t have the best throwing arm. It wasn’t until he partnered with Joe Ayoob, a former college-football quarterback, in 2012, that the pair broke the record that had stood since 2003.”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

“the purpose of innovation is not simply to make new, improved products and services; it is to make things that are meaningful to the people who use them.”
― Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly