It might be that you’re losing money on every sale (Which means that each and every item you sell, every service you perform, costs you money. Bigger won’t make you better…) Becau… | Continue reading
It might be that you’re losing money on every sale (Which means that each and every item you sell, every service you perform, costs you money. Bigger won’t make you better…) Becau… | Continue reading
If your habit is to clear your throat, apologize a few times, minimize the quality of the work you’re about to share and in general, apologize for the assertions you’re about to make… | Continue reading
John Cage pointed out they’re different processes. Doing one will interfere with the other. What will you create today? You can analyze it tomorrow. | Continue reading
The bar is dark and dingy, well-used, with a bit of danger in the air. The sort of bar that wouldn’t be out of place in a Clint Eastwood movie. The anecdote has been through a lot. There̵… | Continue reading
The bar is dark and dingy, well-used, with a bit of danger in the air. The sort of bar that wouldn’t be out of place in a Clint Eastwood movie. The anecdote has been through a lot. There̵… | Continue reading
You might be surprised at your company’s reimbursement policy for education. Not only can you expense that book that will change the way you do your job, but you can probably take a course on… | Continue reading
If you participate in a database about people or their work, the first rule is simple: it should be as simple to fix an error as it is to make one. If you mischaracterize something, get a digit wro… | Continue reading
There’s a button on my email program that allows me to postpone an incoming email to a future day. Sort of like a snooze button. The snooze button is a trap. It’s a trap because not onl… | Continue reading
Wouldn’t it be great if we always had a map? A set of step-by-step instructions on how to get from here to there, wherever we were and wherever we wanted to go… Steve Pressfield relates… | Continue reading
Short-term profits are a lousy way to build a sustainable community. There’s always a shortcut, a rule to be bent, a way to make some more money now at the expense of the people around us. Th… | Continue reading
The throughline of the last twenty years of tech has been new ways to speak up and connect. We’ve built platforms for email, video, writing, short fiction, daily updates, chat, discussion, cl… | Continue reading
Charisma is a magical power. It enables humans to hotwire connection and build bridges long before the facts on the ground are clear. Charisma creates rock stars, powerful scientists and con men, t… | Continue reading
“I followed the recipe exactly, and it failed.” That’s how many reviews of online recipes begin. Then the poster explains that he replaced the sour cream with yogurt (it’s w… | Continue reading
The paradox of choice is real, and it gets worse when the choices aren’t even multiple choice. Confronted with the unlimited selection offered by any music streaming service, people choke. Th… | 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
Wouldn’t it be great if we always had a map? A set of step-by-step instructions on how to get from here to there, wherever we were and wherever wanted to go… Steve Pressfield relates th… | Continue reading
Some people say that marketing doesn’t work on them. That all they want is a good product, a fair price, and they’ll be on their way. But that’s a marketing story as well. Who dec… | Continue reading
“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
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