The Road to Realizing Your Dream is Littered with Haters “If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery–isolation. Isolation is the gift.” – […]
You don’t get to be the phoenix rising without the burn. It just doesn’t work that way. For every successful business owner, entrepreneur, or founder, there’s a story of walking through the fire. Transformation, both personal and professional, comes at a cost. The price you pay is presence and perseverance on the journey. Joseph Campbell was an author and scholar renowned for his work in comparative mythology. He identified universal […]
In Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky speaks at length about the nature of power. He discusses various instances of creating leverage, thus creating power. One of his central tenets is the idea of not waiting for permission. In the struggle of radicals of any stripe, it’s almost a given that the establishment will be resistant to surrendering any of their power. Those who want to change the world and those […]
Pablo Picasso once said “I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.” At first that statement might make us laugh, due to the irony in it, but it gets at the heart of two important issues that are often different sides of the same coin: living simply while enjoying the small pleasures in life versus spending our life amassing money and possessions. Like many people, I’ve […]
The concept of team is something that can run as shallow as a jersey or as deep as genetics. It’s based on choreography that’s both brutal and delicate. It’s glued together with strong communication, and it’s built with experience. Your team can be your saving grace in a moment of struggle, the force that pushes you forward to bask in the light of triumph. It’s an open-ended element that refuses […]
As the gig economy starts to reach its stride, an increasing number of professionals are choosing to start a business with no intention of scaling up and adding staff. Known as “solopreneurs,” they share some etymological similarities with entrepreneurs, but the two are very different ways of working and conducting business. Solopreneurs tend to be doers—people who love to work and produce. For a solopreneur, if a task needs to […]
“I need a place and I need a team.” This is what I would say during my last few years as a full time consultant, with escalating urgency and to anyone who would listen. It was clear at the beginning that I wouldn’t last long as a solopreneur working from home. New York City was not conducive to coffee shop meetings, and my apartment lobby was a medical office waiting […]
The purpose of life is a life of purpose. —Robert Byrne How do we keep going in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds? How do we overcome the dark forces of self-doubt and self-criticism which can sometimes cripple our ability to create our best, most purposeful lives? How do we rise above the sometimes ungenerous, unkind stories we tell ourselves as we go about our lives? Sitting around the table at […]
I have a confession to make. It’s something I’ve never admitted before publicly. I still have a fair amount of shame around it and it is probably the number one source for my sometimes crippling self-doubt. It’s been around for decades, easily, and is the number one symptom of a larger problem: Impostor Syndrome. The term has been around since it was coined by clinical psychologists in 1978, but it’s become more widely used […]
Many of you are champions at communication. If you’re in marketing, you may even have a degree to show for it. But as any good leader knows, it takes months or even years for a vision to go from concept to launch. So why, when we’re dealing with designers, do we assume what we want can be instantly understood and executed? The very best web and graphic designers are artists as […]