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People are fond of using the its not what you know, its who you know adage as an excuse for inaction, as if all successful people are born with powerful friends. Nonsense.
Tim Ferriss
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Connections can help, but success also depends on individual effort and skill.

Tim Ferriss highlights the common belief that success is solely dependent on knowing influential people, arguing against this notion. He asserts that while having a network can be beneficial, it does not replace the importance of personal effort and capability in achieving success, thus encouraging individuals to take initiative rather than rely solely on connections.

Themes

SuccessConnectionsActionEffortSkill

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in a motivational speech about entrepreneurship to emphasize the importance of hard work.

More from Tim Ferriss

It isn't enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.
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The way we measure productivity is flawed. People checking their BlackBerry over dinner is not the measure of productivity.
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It's just astonishing to me, but not surprising in some respects, how dependent we are on the somewhat meaningless and certainly ephemeral feedback that we get from strangers on the Internet. I think that's a dangerous dependence to develop.
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I always point people to the article '1,000 True Fans' by Kevin Kelly. If you choose your thousand ideal customers or readers properly and find the single author blog that targets that audience, you never have to do any more marketing. You're done. That is a lesson that very few product developers and marketers have learned, and it's unfortunate.
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By using money as the scapegoat and work as our all-consuming routine, we are able to conveniently disallow ourselves to do otherwise: 'John, I'd love to talk about the gaping void I feel in my life, the hopelessness that hits me like a punch in the eye every time I start my computer in the morning, but I have so much work to do! I've got at least three hours of unimportant email to reply to before calling prospects who said 'no' yesterday. Gotta run!
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Being busy is a form of laziness - lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
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