Paul Hawken Quotes

If you are doing what everyone else is doing, there is probably not an opportunity there.

You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy and you die.

It's difficult to innovate, but you must try to create a project under your ideas and philosophies to take you ahead of other clubs.

Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of.

I happened to come along in the music business when there was no trend.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

But now I realize that this record business really needs me. No one else is trying to take a chance or do something different.

I should probably confess that I get bored easily, which explains my reluctance to work with formula, tropes, whatever.

In a society that glorifies the pioneers, it's easy to think that an endeavor is only worth pursuing if you can be the first to pursue it.

The problem with competition is that it takes away the requirement to set your own path, to invent your own method, to find a new way.

Google worries - and rightly so - about how hard it is for a big company to come up with the next hot thing.

If you're ahead of your time, who's going to listen? If you're behind the times, it's boring.

The reality is, is that we love competition, at Apple. We think it makes us all better. But we want people to invent their own stuff.

I don't find myself so exercised by a desperation to be new.

If a man can... make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

Advertising is the price companies pay for being unoriginal.

The most valuable thing in culture is to find something first - so everyone is always looking.

In a startup, there have to be challenges. Otherwise, someone else would have done it already. And that's almost the most exciting part.

If you start shaping everything you do trying to be in step with whatever is going on in the world, you're often out of step by the time people hear it. It's a bit like fashion.

Put two things together which have never been put together before, and some schmuck will buy it.

I want to go out there and do some different things that people are like, "Wow. That's crazy. Why didn't I think of that?"

I don't think my work is so strange. It's just a matter of having the discipline to go the whole way with an idea, to stretch it as far as it can go.

What the world calls originality is only an unaccustomed method of tickling it.

It's quite rare that you make something and think that you did something that no-one else had done.

Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.