Engines of growth

New customers come from the actions of past customers.

• Word of mouth
• Side effect of product usage, e.g. seeing your bag/car/clothes on the street or online. (Seeing the business you're shopping with is using PayPal to accept payments - my example)
• Funding advertising
• Repeat purchase

Eric Ries, The Lean Startup, p208

Exponential growth & anchoring

"Give an enormous sheet of newspaper which folded over on itself 100 times let's imagine that's possible how thick would would the eventual wad of paper be? The thickness of a brick? A shoe box? As Sam Harris points out, to prove a similar points about intuition in his excellent book The End of Faith, the correct answer is that the resulting object would be as thick as the known universe. Again. we anchor ourselves to the initial smaller measurements."

Derren Brown, Tricks of the Mind, p257

Personal growth is an endlessly iterative process

"Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When we learn something new, we don't go from being 'wrong' to 'right'. Rather we go from wrong to slightly less wrong. And when we learn something additional, we go from slightly less wrong to slightly less wrong than that and then to even less wrong than that and so on. We are always in the process of approaching truth and perfection without ever actually reach truth or perfection."

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson, p117