5 Manifestos That Can Change Your Views About Almost Anything

Manifestos are powerful. By publicly stating your views and intentions, you create an obligation for taking action. All great people and organizations have their manifestos to live on. Here is five such manifestos we have found immensely entertaining and powerful.

The Holstee Manifesto

The Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright

Via Gretchen Rubin, the write of the Happiness Project

• An honest ego in a healthy body.
• An eye to see nature.
• A heart to feel nature.
• Courage to follow nature.
• The sense of proportion (humor).
• Appreciation of work as idea and idea as work.
• Fertility of imagination.
• Capacity for faith and rebellion.
• Disregard for commonplace (inorganic) elegance.
• Instinctive cooperation.

Seth Godin: The Marketer

• The greatest innovations appear to come from those that are self-reliant. Individuals who go right to the edge and do something worth talking about. Not solo, of course, but as instigators of a team. In two words: don’t settle.
• The greatest marketers do two things: they treat customers with respect and they measure.
• The greatest salespeople understand that people resist change and that ‘no’ is the single easiest way to do that.
• The greatest bloggers blog for their readers, not for themselves.
• There really isn’t much a of ‘short run’. It quickly becomes yesterday. The long run, on the other hand, sticks around for quite a while.
• The internet doesn’t forget. And sooner or later, the internet finds out.
• Everyone is a marketer, even people and organizations that don’t market. They’re just marketers who are doing it poorly.
• Amazing organizations and people receive rewards that more than make up for the effort required to be that good.
• There is no number 9.
• Mass taste is rarely good taste.

The Writer: Leo Tolstoy

• Get up early (five o'clock).
• Go to bed early (nine to ten o'clock).
• Eat little and avoid sweets.
• Try to do everything by yourself.
• Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for every week, a goal for every day, a goal for every hour and for every minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater.
• Keep away from women.
• Kill desire by work.
• Be good, but try to let no one know it.
• Always live less expensively than you might.
• Change nothing in your style of living even if you become ten times richer.

The Company: Apple Manifesto

When Steve Jobs went on medical leave in 2009 and financial analysts were making dire predictions, Apple COO Tim Cook boiled the company’s culture down to what was essentially an 8-point manifesto.

1. We believe that we're on the face of the earth to make great products.
2. We're constantly focusing on innovating.
3. We believe in the simple, not the complex.
4. We believe we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.
5. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can focus on the few that are meaningful to us.
6. We believe in deep collaboration and cross pollination in order to innovate in a way others cannot.
7. We don't settle for anything other than excellence in any group in the company.
8. We have the self-honesty to admit when we're wrong and the courage to change.