Being the best means more than being nice
Doak's, a shop selling hand-made oil paints, won't sell difficult colors to novice painters.
There's a waiting list.
Murky Coffee in Arlington set off a hailstorm of press when they refused on principle to serve iced espresso to a blogger.
They're packed every morning.
The staff at the Varsity, a legendary hot dog joint in in Atlanta will skip you if you don't order fast enough.
They serve 30,000 guests on game days.
You can't have it
Creating passionate customers is about more than being nice.
Nice is ok. Nice is good enough. But nice doesn't make you the best.
What if you stopped trying to be nice? What if you said "no" more often?
Have you noticed how the most remarkable innovations are also the most obvious?
We begin life with the world presenting itself to us as it is. Someone - our parents, teachers, analysts - hypnotizes us to "see" the world and construe it in the "right" way. These others label the world, attach names and give voices to the beings and events in it, so that thereafter, we cannot read the world in any other language or hear it saying other things to us. The task is to break the hypnotic spell, so that we become undeaf, unblind and multilingual, thereby letting the world speak to us in new voices and write all its possible meanings in the new book of our existence. Be careful in your choice of hypnotists.
~Sidney Jourard
People conform without realizing it.
We take up knitting of our own accord, not because there’s a knitting bubble
We drink wretched mud-coffee from a machine that’s older than sputnik.
We accept that paint comes in horrible metal cans. Toothpaste comes in tubes. Search doesn’t make money. You get 3 flavors of ice-cream. Don’t like it? Tough.
The most remarkable innovations are always the most obvious…in hindsight. In a blinding flash they make us realize that things don't have to suck.
But they are also the most difficult, because they challenge what you learned as a kid. Your first day on the job.
Adding a new feature (version 1.0.20389.2) is much easier. That's why everyone does it.
