When the energy of your tactics is to convert, you will most likely lose. When your energy is to disproportionately bring value and let the chips fall where they may, you will win. It will change your behavior, it will change the energy of the execution and it will change you game.

Numbers don’t lie and sales is absolutely the foundation of your business. There is simply no other way.

Your religion in sales has to be attention. Before you even think about how to sell your SaaS product or your wine, or your agency, or your open house or your book, or whatever it is, you have to understand where the consumer actually is.

There’s a lot of shortcomings when sales are automated. In most businesses, it’s a high-touch 1-1 conversation where you are attempting to bring value to the other person. It’s not a LinkedIn messenger bot that is going to do the trick.

The truth is, sales is about people. You have to build relationships first. You have to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and empathize with their position. No app is going to teach you that.

You don’t get to decide whatever 13 to 25 year olds want to do with their hair, their clothes, their bodies, their cell phones, their friends, their time, or their money. You just have to observe and react.

99% of the time your customer is going to be searchable and accessible online. And for those of you that don’t know, consumers now spend 10 hours a day in front of their screen with roughly half of that time spent on a mobile device. Clearly the internet, and our glowing black boxes have our attention

Like anything else in life, I think sale comes down to putting in the work, providing value, building relationships and doing the research.

If you want to win, you have to be practical with your understanding and execution. You have to go where the consumer actually is, and use the right tools to reach them.

The reason I have done so well in sales, is because I don’t do things with the expectation of a return. I do things to provide value, no matter what.

If you are intelligent, and you understand that you have no control over THE MARKET, then you begin thinking about where the potential upside is.

Being tied down by the idealistic vision of how you made your money in the past is wrong. The world is changing! And the way you were successful yesterday definitely won’t be the way you are successful today. You need to look forward and become utterly unromantic about what you did in the past that got you “here.”

Technology has changed the way we sell, and most of your actions as salespeople aren’t rooted in that reality. It’s all out there, you just have to go out and take it!

If you want to win in sales, you need to be utterly unromantic about consumer behavior. You need observe, analyze and adjust to where the consumer actually is. No one can deny that social media takes up our time.

I grew up in an underprivileged home.

I knew I could not cope with the future unless I was able to rediscover the past.

As a public personality, I keep things related to my children and partner to myself. They are private matters.

Friends and relatives might be surprised that I think of myself as lonely. I'm married to a man I not only love but like, and we spend a lot of time together. If I feel like socializing, I can usually find someone to meet for coffee or a drink.

In order for a man to be truly evil, he must be a woman.

What is social proof? Put simply, it's the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something. It's also known as informational social influence.

Obama is not Bill Clinton. I don't think he's willing to let conservatives have any victories at all.

The biggest risk I've ever taken is going on American Idol and trying to be myself. I wasn't going to try too hard to conform, and I knew that it could possibly not work out.

I strongly suspect that there would be a positive economic advantage to the U.K. in leaving the single market.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.

When I was at Brown, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I was too scared to take a creative course. I signed up for one, got in, and just didn't have the courage to go. I was a tremendously shy person, almost pathologically shy. The thought of peers critiquing my work - oh, God.

I definitely don't like anyone messing with my friends or loved ones. I'm quick to step up to the plate if there's a problem.

But what I like to sing mostly is blues and cabaret style.

Great souls suffer in silence.

That was something that I learned: It's actually okay if the way that I do my best is when I'm treated well.

I am a positive person. I am not cynical. If you are born in this world, no matter who you are, negative things will happen. If you aren't positive as a person, you'll be very unhappy. It's extremely important to be positive, to laugh, to be happy, to accept life as it comes.

I don't think there is a guy that played more gay characters than I have done in my life.

I could be happy doing something like architecture. It would involve another couple of years of graduate school, but that's what I studied in college. That's what I always wanted to do.

Whether it's a penalty or a tax, it's all one in the same. It's coming out of somebody's hard-earned money in their pocketbooks and that's the point. So in some ways, to me, it's a distinction without a difference.

If there were a better clearer shorter way of saying what the fiction says then why not scrap the fiction

I can't tell you the number of times in high school I was allowed to be disappointed for not making the grade; it's a part of life. So the young students who are being taught by radical leftists in this country today are going to end up growing up in a world for which they are totally unprepared and unequipped.

I just started using this app called Wine and Dine. It's like Instagram, but only for food. You post what you're eating and follow your friends, and then you can say, 'I wanna try that,' and so when you go on your 'wanna try' list, it'll tell you where it is.

I've made some movies that I really loved that nobody saw.

Gandalf saves the world and saves the soul of the world, really.