Sam Walton Quotes

If everybody is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going exactly in the opposite direction.

Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you're headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.

Success lies in the opposite direction of the normal pull.

There's a large opportunity for Bon Iver to be a special thing, even from a business standpoint - just trying to do cooler things. Every band sells t-shirts and plays certain auditoriums, but I'm sick of being like everyone else, because I'm not.

I've always shied away from conventional wisdom, though I know the power of it.

You gotta stick your neck out and put out a record that isn't safe... that's the Green Day way!

You need to be naive enough to do things differently. No big publishing house would have allowed us to co-create a fully designed, four color business book in landscape format - because it was contrary to the publishing industry logic. However, we thought of Business Model Generation as a product, not just a book - similar to Apple products.

If you want to be in the world I live in, which is a creative world with new ideas, then you've got to get away from the norm. You've got to go for it.

I don't think we ought to base our policy on what the conventional wisdom is.... The conventional wisdom usually is wrong.

I did not want to do things the way they are usually done in Hindi cinema.

You have to think outside the box.

Sometimes the best way to find out what you’re supposed to do is by doing the thing you’re not supposed to do.

If I have smashed the traditions, it was because I knew no traditions.

If everyone thinks you're doing the right thing, then everyone would be doing it. Have a controversial strategy.

I don't ever want to do anything that's obvious, and I also want to find ways to do things that are extremely new and exciting and can make sense in bizarre ways. I always want things to make sense in really bizarre ways.

If you want to have a better performance than the crowd, you must do things differently from the crowd.

I think it takes a little bit of crazy to make a difference in this world.

I think anything you do that's different, that doesn't take the typical approach, invites differing opinions.

To use your head, you have to go out of your mind.

You know that scenario where roses are red, leaves are green, I love arguing that. ‘Why should they be?’. I hate rules and formulas. That’s so boring. It’s the opposite of creativity. Rules are ridiculous things that are meant to be broken.

I have created a life by stepping out of the box of people's limitations. I call it zigging when others are zagging.

I've never believed it's really so important that you conform to the ways of the system in order to beat the system. I think that the system follows a great deal.

But now the world breaks in on us, the world is shocked, the world looks upon our idyll as madness. The world maintains that no rational man or woman would have chosen this way of life - therefore, it is madness. Alone I confront them and tell them that nothing could be saner or truer! What do people really know about life? We fall in line, follow the pattern established by our mentors. Everything is based on assumptions; even time, space, motion, matter are nothing but supposition. The world has no new knowledge to impart; it merely accepts what is there.

We have been doing things that are contrary; the things that people tell us won't work from the beginning. In fact, the only way to get ahead is to find errors in conventional wisdom.

And in not learning the rules, I was free. I always say, you're either defined by the medium or you redefine the medium in terms of your needs.