In his day job, The Wizard of Oz sold hokum. Patent medicines guaranteed to cure what ailed you. And none of them worked. Deep within each of us is the yearning for the pill, the neck crack, the organizational re-do... | Continue reading
Deliberate, focused, generous, confident, thoughtful, these are all good things. Being pushy isn't. Imagine you had a check for $100,000 made out to someone else. Someone you don't know but can reach out to. How hard would it be for... | Continue reading
It really ought to be called the core list, because it's fundamentally misunderstood as something in the background, an afterthought. The backlist is the stuff you sell long after you've forgotten all the drama that went into making it. Book... | Continue reading
The best way to build a brand that matters, a story that spreads, an impact that we remember, is to understand a simple but painful trade-off: If you want to stand for something, You can't stand for everything. "Anyone can... | Continue reading
Organic chemistry doesn't care if you believe in it. Neither does the War of 1812. Truth is real, it's measurable and it happened. Truth is not in the eye of the beholder. There are facts that don't change if the... | Continue reading
It's possible that you're the way you are, that you do what you do, that you react as you react, and that it can never be changed. Believing this is incredibly sad, though. Each of us is capable of just... | Continue reading
Fear, loneliness, anger, shame & hunger. They drive us. They divide us. They take us away from our work, our mission, our ability to make a difference. And yet, sometimes, they fuel our motion, leading to growth and connection. When... | Continue reading
Imagine a supermarket (or any store, for that matter), where the items are arranged by price. At one end is the salt and the chewing gum, and at the other end are mops and steaks. We always think about the... | Continue reading
Hobson's choice is no choice at all. Take what's offered, or walk away. Occam's razor is a rule of thumb: the simplest explanation is often the best one. Wheeler's which teaches us that the answer to "one egg or two?"... | Continue reading
"You can have any color car you want as long as it's black." Henry Ford made cars in black because black paint dried four hours faster than any other color. That fast drying meant that the line worked faster, which... | Continue reading
Unraveling has precisely the same meaning as raveling... when we pull on a thread, pull and pull, as it unweaves what came before. It's nice to have the next thing clearly laid out, planned and sure to work. It would... | Continue reading
More honest, more caring, more generous. It's all a choice, isn't it? We can choose to dream better, connect better and contribute better. Sometimes, in the rush for more, we get confused about what better means, and how attainable it... | Continue reading
And that's enough. It has to be. It's all we've ever had. The challenge is in realizing this and working with it, even when we're secretly hoping for something more, some external force. You and me, kid, you and me... | Continue reading
Opposite of the naysayer, of course. This is the person who will find ten reasons why you should try something. The one who will embrace the possibility of better. The colleague to turn to when a reality check is necessary,... | Continue reading
It snowed last night here, so it must be almost time for the holidays. Some thoughts as you think about holiday gifts for you and the people you care about: There are fewer than 2,000 copies of my huge new... | Continue reading
Where do conspiracy theories come from? More than 10% of the population still believes that the moon landings were faked. (Even though we can see the landing modules with a telescope). People make up inane theories about various cabals that... | Continue reading
Is it possible that you misunderstood them, or they misunderstood you? With your client, employee, vendor, partner, or that random passerby? The thing that just happened, it sounds terrible, and if they did it on purpose, the way it sure... | Continue reading
It's fun to imagine what we'd do if we had a magic wand, something that with a wave, could produce us the introduction, the funding, the open door, the technology, the breakthrough, the insight, the inspiration, the shortcut... They stopped... | Continue reading
It's easy to dream of a strategy or a set of tactics that will make your forward motion feel less like an uphill slog. A perpetual motion machine of progress. These are few and far between. The single most important... | Continue reading
A million things happened to you today. The second bite of your lunch. The red light on the third block of your commute... Tomorrow, you'll remember almost none of them. And the concept that you'd remember something that happened to... | Continue reading
To watch people at work, it seems like we never have enough: We need more social media likes We want more market share We demand more quick wins And to see them at rest, it seems as though we never... | Continue reading
Organizations are built on the work of people who don’t get paid very much, don’t receive sufficient respect and are understandably wary of the promises they’ve been hearing for years. Calling these folks the bottom of the org chart doesn’t... | Continue reading
I've just created an intensive video course designed to help you think differently about what you make and why. It's for marketers, founders, freelancers, fundraisers, teachers and change agents that understand that nothing works unless it works for your audience.... | Continue reading
"Sorry" doesn't mean you caused the pain. It merely means that you see it, that you've felt pain before in your life as well, that you are open to a connection. Our ability to bring people along is critical because... | Continue reading
It almost doesn't matter what the question is, really. Everyone is an independent actor, now more than ever, with access to information, to tools, to the leverage to make a difference. Instead of being a cog merely waiting for instructions,... | Continue reading
Is there anything more difficult? Showing up day after day, week after week, sometimes for years, as your movement slowly gains steam, as your organization hits speed bumps, as the news goes from bad to worse... Showing up, it turns... | Continue reading
Fill in the missing number: π, 1, __, 3, 11, 15, 13, 17 Some people, when confronted with an artificial problem like this, simply throw up their hands. It's a trick, it's a waste of time, there's really no value... | Continue reading
Sometimes, the wind is at our back, the resources are easily acquired and good karma increases our ability to do great work. Sometimes. Other times, it feels like we're up against it, that the wind has shifted, that there's not... | Continue reading
When we're sure it's not going to work, when we can't figure out where to turn, when we don't know what to do next... Sometimes, our ability to do the best we can in small ways is enough to start... | Continue reading
Care a little more. Show up. Embrace possibility. Tell the truth. Dive deeper. Seek the truth behind the story. Ask the difficult question. Lend a hand. Dance with fear. Play the long game. Say 'no' to hate. Look for opportunities,... | Continue reading
This thing you're making... This day you're spending at work... This interaction you're having... Is it merely the next one in a long string of next ones, good enough to get you through? Or is it special enough to be... | Continue reading
The easiest way to win an election is to get the people who might vote for your opponent to not vote. TV has proven an effective engine behind this strategy, and voter turnout has plummeted since campaigns began running significant... | Continue reading
When a stranger treats you poorly, tries to rip you off, brings discourtesy instead of respect ...how do you treat the next stranger? Paying bad behavior forward hurts. | Continue reading
Every website your organization puts up is going to reach a moment when it is obsolete, out of date or buggy. How will you know? And what will you do about it? Big organizations have this problem every day. When... | Continue reading
Four ways to look at the state of our world. What sort of story are we telling each other? | Continue reading
Have you noticed that authors often happily recommend books by other authors (even though an MBA might call them competitors)? Not only that, but books sell best in the bookstore, right next to the other books. It would be a... | Continue reading
Ignorance—We're too busy doing our jobs to notice that. Dismissal—That? It's trivial. Kids. Nervousness—Let's take a look at what they're up to, benchmark it, buy a research report... Bob, can you handle this? Poor Copies—See, I told you it was... | Continue reading
Bean to bar dark chocolate is a revelation. It's got the terroir and backstory of the finest wines, it's a collision of rural farmers and modern technology and markets similar to coffee, and it also brings along the Proustian nostalgia... | Continue reading
It says that people don't understand polls. Even smart marketers get it wrong. What do people think? There's a lot of confusion, much of it intentional, some spawned by a presumed fear of simple math, all of it worth clearing... | Continue reading
In any given meeting, on any given day, most people are merely showing up. It's the 50th time he's performed that sonata. The guy in the outfield had a hard day at home before the game. The folks in the... | Continue reading
Professional wrestling is fake. The blood is fake, the lack of physics is fake, the arguing with the ref is fake, the rivalries are fake... it might be professional, but it's not real. This willful disregard for reality is at... | Continue reading
There's the filter bubble of the internet, in which we willingly surround ourselves only with information sources with which we agree, soon coming to the conclusion that everyone agrees with us. The other kind is the filter we can choose... | Continue reading
...is to get promoted. And the best way to get promoted is to learn something new and get good at it. Take a course. Learn to sell. Public speaking. Statistics. Become the person that your organization wants in a bigger... | Continue reading
Just in time for Halloween, some thoughts on our fear of the other, the people in the shadows, or merely those that don't look like us. It's tempting to rile yourself up about the 'other'. But that's not the real... | Continue reading
Irritation is a privilege. It's the least useful emotion, one that we never seek out. People in true distress are never irritated. Someone who is hungry or drowning or fleeing doesn't become irritated. And of course, irritation rarely helps us... | Continue reading
One bit of economic reasoning says, "If there are no consequences, people will make bad choices." Don't let big banks get bailouts, because if we do, bankers will take bigger risks. So, make sure that the dentist is expensive (and... | Continue reading
This odd behavior mostly shows up when others are criticizing us, disappointed or angry about something we did. Odd because it's so useless. In those moments, there are already plenty of other people beating you up. Save yourself the trouble.... | Continue reading
Peeves make lousy pets. They're difficult to care for, they eat a lot, they don't clean up after themselves. | Continue reading