“Your call is very important to us.” If you hear that, it means someone is not just lying, but also isn’t good at arithmetic. Your company spends $6 on digital ads to get a click,… | Continue reading
Here’s what someone posted yesterday in The Freelancer’s Workshop discussion board: I was really just hoping to pick up a few insights from Seth. I got one of those yesterday, but meeti… | Continue reading
If your little bagel shop suddenly had everyone in the world waiting in line to buy a bagel, that would be stressful indeed. You’d need riot police to keep order and you’d run out of se… | Continue reading
I’ve come to realize that this is a controversial statement for some people. Two issues, it seems: Better implies that what we have right now is imperfect. Better requires change, and change … | Continue reading
Beloved 1,000-year-old buildings disappear in the blink of an eye. Celebrities we’ve never met die young. Babies are born. Music goes from cutting edge to current to oldies. Technology that w… | Continue reading
Deadlines work. They work because they focus the mind and create urgency. They work to get us to file our taxes or finish an assignment. They’re an external lever for the work we have to do. … | Continue reading
“and you’re in luck, since I’m just about anyone.” It’s time to start avoiding the Fiverr trap. You can fill your day as a freelancer taking easily accessible work fro… | Continue reading
What ever happened to details? The red sole of a Louboutin shoe, or the elegant tag on a pair of Tom’s? The sweeping fenders of a Porsche 911 or the needless complications of a fancy watch… Today, … | Continue reading
I broke two bowls today. I was emptying the dishwasher, holding both small clean bowls in one hand. One of them slipped, and I watched, aghast, as it started to fall in slow motion toward the hard … | Continue reading
Traditional courses, online or off, are linear. They’re based on a direct connection between the instructor’s content and the student’s attention. Write this down, memorize this, … | Continue reading
is that there aren’t any. That’s precisely what makes them so interesting. The null set. The impossibility of it. A unicorn is not a black swan, which is a rare bird that proves a point… | Continue reading
Disneyworld is stressful. The occasional visitor has far less fun than you might expect. That’s because without habits, every decision requires attention. And attention is exhausting. And it&… | Continue reading
Are you a freelancer or an entrepreneur? It’s not simply semantics, your answer changes everything. Freelancers get paid when they work. We’re not focused on scale… and we’r… | Continue reading
It was 100 degrees outside, and far hotter inside the barn (which had no air conditioning.) But SwissMiss invited me, and I’m glad I followed through. Watching this video a year later, I̵… | Continue reading
There are two kinds of marketing, and the gap between them keeps widening. You’ll need to choose. Do marketing to people or with them… Actually, there are a few other gaps worth conside… | Continue reading
As the news cycle has trained us to find out results the moment they happen (or sometimes, as polling promises, before they happen), it’s easy to lose track of a simple truth: There’s a… | Continue reading
There was an outcry when they banned cigarettes from bars in New York. The restaurant owners were certain that disaster was imminent. And there was panic when we began to switch to LED bulbs, with … | Continue reading
That’s a hard sell. It’s difficult to get someone (a client, a boss, a voter, a partner) to say those three words. Difficult to say on our own behalf, too. Which is why we so easily get… | Continue reading
If you wait until you really want an avocado, the market won’t have any ripe ones. You need to buy them in advance. If you eat an avocado that’s not quite ripe, you won’t enjoy it… | Continue reading
There are at least seven realistic ways to get from my home near New York to a meeting in Washington DC. None of them are wrong. Each offers its own advantage in terms of resilience, speed, cost or… | Continue reading
Books sell better in bookstores than they sell in butcher shops. In a bookstore, surrounded by all the competition, a book is in the right place to be seen, compared and ultimately purchased and re… | Continue reading
The press release from Comcast, perhaps America’s most hated monopoly, begins as expected. “In order to serve all of our customers better, we’re delighted to announce several new … | Continue reading
There’s a common safe place: Being busy. We’re supposed to give you a pass because you were full on, all day. Frantically moving from one thing to the other, never pausing to catch your… | Continue reading
Judge people by where they came from … Judge people by where they’re going Choices come with responsibility … People can’t be trusted to make good choices Dominate … A… | Continue reading
Intellectual horsepower is overrated. “I’m too stupid to do that,” isn’t helpful and it’s probably not true. We’re capable of learning Photoshop, We can figure out the… | Continue reading
Are you a bottleneck? Sometimes it’s a good thing. It would be impossible to guzzle a Pepsi if it were served in a saucer–the bottleneck creates the path of maximum slam. It would be di… | Continue reading
I hope we can all agree that the long run is made up of a bunch of short runs. That seems obvious. The surprising thing is that we live our short runs as if that isn’t true. | Continue reading
I didn’t say this clearly enough in my book. While there are a few outlier organizations and individuals who ‘have’ a tribe, more often than not, we simply have the privilege to t… | Continue reading
Every time you talk about reaching everyone, that you imagine changing “the world,” you should fine yourself a nickel. It’s almost impossible to reach everyone. The most popular p… | Continue reading
It takes discernment to do this. Most problems don’t require more data. They require more insight, more innovation and better eyes. Information is what we call it when a human being takes dat… | Continue reading
Centralized control is fabulous until it isn’t. Centralized control gives us predictable, reliable, convenient results. Until it suffocates. Google promises websites free attention at a time … | Continue reading
The best solution to a persistent, apparently non-solvable problem is to make the problem itself obsolete. Go around it. Cease to need it to be solved. Redefine your process or goal so that the pro… | Continue reading
It doesn’t really matter, does it? All of your bad habits (and some of your good ones) exist to fill that hole, or to protect it from being seen. And as long as our mission is to fill the hol… | Continue reading
The smallest group that could possibly sustain you in your work… If you could pick the members of this audience, who would you choose? Their dreams, their worldviews, their energy, all up to … | Continue reading
The smallest group that could possibly sustain you in your work… If you could pick the members of this audience, who would you choose? Their dreams, their worldviews, their energy, all up to … | Continue reading
Traffic at work isn’t just a metaphor. It’s real. We get stuck. Surrounded by people who are just as stuck. It can seem like progress is at a crawl. And then, we see a different way. So… | Continue reading
Words like חמץ and kx’āhã don’t appear in English. These words, like thousands of others, include sounds that aren’t part of the normal spoken range of the language. We don’… | Continue reading
Resilience is what happens when we’re able to move forward even when things don’t fit together the way we expect. And tolerances are an engineer’s measurement of how well the part… | Continue reading
Some people, every time they engage with others, are an energy drain. They take persuading, cajoling and enthusiasm to get going, and require ever more of it to keep going. And some people are a fa… | Continue reading
That is where breakthroughs lie. If you keep poking around the expected, it’s unlikely you’ll be surprised by what you find. | Continue reading
…because ‘breaking things’ isn’t the point of your work. How about, “Move fast and make things better,” or “Move fast and create possibility”? The re… | Continue reading
When your day gets made, how long does it last? A made day–is that different from a normal day? Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a made hour or, if we’re going to be quite t… | Continue reading
It’s not that difficult to write a headline that people click on. But a headline that people click on is rarely one that earns trust, sustained attention or action. Which means that if you… | Continue reading
If you believe in the benefits of the free market, then the logical conclusion is to oppose policies that a market-dominating monopoly decides are in their best interest. Adam Smith and his descend… | Continue reading
…doing things that they don’t understand, for managers who have no sense of strategy, in an organization that measures all the wrong things. Everyone involved unable to honestly answer … | Continue reading
Rarely true. “Everyone loves it.” “No one wants to be my friend…” More effective and accurate to replace these words with, “someone.” | Continue reading
All day we interact with others. And sometimes, they’re bots. Perhaps you’re in a chat room, and after a few Eliza-quality backs and forths, you realize that this helpful voice isn̵… | Continue reading
How much of your inbox activity is initiated by you? What percentage of your email threads started with an email you wrote? And how much is spent replying to others? And finally, how often are you … | Continue reading