Follow your passions.

Keep it simple.

Get the best people to help you.

Re-create yourself.

Play.

1. Ready. Fire! Aim.

2. If it ain’t broke … Break it!

3. Hire crazies.

4. Ask dumb questions.

5. Pursue failure.

6. Lead, follow … or get out of the way!

7. Spread confusion.

8. Ditch your office.

9. Read odd stuff.

10. Avoid moderation!

The world has arrived at a rare strategic inflection point where nearly half its population living in China, India and Russia have been integrated into the global market economy, many of them highly educated workers, who can do just about any job in the world. We’re talking about three billion people.

This is an essay about what it takes to create and sell something remarkable. It is a plea for originality, passion, guts and daring. You can’t be remarkable by following someone else who’s remarkable. One way to figure out a theory is to look at what’s working in the real world and determine what the successes have in common. But what could the Four Seasons and Motel 6 possibly have in common? Or Neiman-Marcus and Wal*Mart? Or Nokia (bringing out new hardware every 30 days or so) and Nintendo (marketing the same Game Boy 14 years in a row)? It’s like trying to drive looking in the rearview mirror. The thing that all these companies have in common is that they have nothing in common. They are outliers. They’re on the fringes. Superfast or superslow. Very exclusive or very cheap. Extremely big or extremely small. The reason its so hard to follow the leader is this: The leader is the leader precisely because he did something remarkable. And that remarkable thing is now taken so it’s no longer remarkable when you decide to do it.