Quotes from Donald Miller

people don't read websites, they scan them.

The monks) approach was far less narcissistic and our tends to be. Their goal when reading Scripture was to see Christ in every verse, and not a mirror image of themselves.

The reality is when we try to sell passively, we communicate a lack of belief in our product.

When we fail to define something our customer wants, we fail to open a story gap. When we don't open a story gap in our customers' mind, they have no motivation to engage us, because there is no question that demands resolution. Defining something our customer wants and featuring it in our marketing materials will open a story gap.

brand that positions itself as the hero is destined to lose.

WIREFRAMED WEBSITE THAT WORKS

The problem is this: those of us who are never satisfied with our accomplishments secretly believe nobody will love us unless we're perfect.

Part I THE THREE STAGES OF RELATIONSHIP

Plans can take many shapes and forms, but all effective plans do one of two things: they either clarify how somebody can do business with us, or they remove the sense of risk somebody might have if they're considering investing in our products or services.

THE ONE MARKETING PLAN YOU WILL NEVER REGRET

Once a customer gets curious about how you can solve their problem, they may come looking for more information. This is where your website comes in.

Until we've defined a specific desire and become known for helping people achieve it, we shouldn't add too many conflicting story gaps

How are you helping me win the day?

At the end of the day, when I am lying in bed and I know the chances of any of our theology being exactly right are a million to one, I need to know that God has things figured out, that if my math is wrong we are still going to be okay. And wonder is that feeling we get when we let go of our silly answers, our mapped out rules that we want God to follow. I don't think there is any better worship than wonder.

PERHAPS ONE OF the reasons I've avoided having a clear ambition is that second you stand up and point toward a horizon, you realize how much there is to lose. It's always been this way.

God doesn't give us crying, pooping children because he wants to advance our careers. He gives them to us for the same reason he confused language at the Tower of Babel, to create chaos and deter us from investing too much energy in the gluttonous idols of self-absorption.

our customers are in trouble and they need help.

When we're waiting for a story get started, we're really waiting for a problem the hero has to overcome. We're waiting for something tough or difficult or scary or painful to happen.

The only appropriate war rhetoric is more rhetoric that calls our enemies spirits and people with flesh the victims of this war. Satan wants us to fight with one another, and I understand that some evil must be restrained, but our war, the war of the ones who believe in Jesus, is a war unseen. If we could muster a portion of the patriotism we feel toward our earthly nations into patriotism and bravery in concert with the kingdom of God, the enemy would take fewer casualties.

And that's the thing you'll realize when you organize your life into the structure of story. You'll get a taste for one story and then want another, and then another, and the stories will build until you're living a kind of epic of risk and reward, and the whole thing will be molding you into the actual character whose roles you've been playing.

We do not live this life to build a monument to ourselves, but to pass our understanding of life on to those who come behind us so that their stories can be even more meaningful than ours.

And what is sad, what is very sad, is that we are proud people, and because we have sensitive egos and so many of us live our lives in front of our televisions, not having to deal with real people who might hurt us or offend us, we float along on our couches like astronauts moving aimlessly through the Milky Way, hardly interacting with other human beings at all.

Inevitably, whoever designs our website is more concerned with colors, images, and "feel" than they are with the words we are using.

Why? Because story is a trustworthy guide. And if there are not stakes in a story, there is no story.