Category: Creator Confidential
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From implementation to strategy
The closer you can help a business get to where it wants to go, the more strategic your work. (Perhaps the most strategic work involves helping business leaders figure out what outcomes they’re trying to achieve with their businesses.) It adds more value to the business, which also means they’re willing to pay you more…
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Pounding the pavement
I’m constantly reminded of how hard successful people work to get their work out there. Last week, I met up with a NYT-bestselling author who took an interview with me, and told me he’d been cold emailing people on TikTok offering to send them copies of his book. Even with over a million copies sold,…
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Practice like an expert, speak like an enthusiast
Gary Vaynerchuk says, “Speak like you’re an enthusiast, not an expert. Expertise positioning is very dangerous for a lot of people because it leads them to imposter syndrome and insecurity. You don’t need to be an expert, you need to be a practitioner.”
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The time it takes
Some of the most dangerous driving happens when a person leaves late and still tries to make it to the destination on time. They figure they’ll save time in traffic. Or, in other words, they rush. Experts do not rush. Experts know how long a process inherently needs to take. They embrace the German word…
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3 life lessons I learned from one of the world’s best executive coaches
Nobody gets to the Olympics without a coach, the saying goes. The concept clearly applies to business leaders and entrepreneurs, whose performance influences dozens, or even thousands, of people. Marshall Goldsmith is among the most prominent of these executive coaches. I knew him through his cleverly titled book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You…
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The decisiveness advantage
David C. Baker writes in The Business of Expertise: “After looking at 1,340 examples of successful experts, the only consistent trait was that they were risk-takers. That means that they were wrong a lot — but that they were usually right about the important things. It also means that they always made decisions. They weren’t…
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Seasons
People who seem to get a lot done don’t make progress on everything at the same time; rather, they make focused progress in spurts on one thing at a time. These experiences can seem like seasons, though it can happen more than four times per year (i.e., quarterly planning). One perspective is microseasons. Another is…
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Value ≠ compensation
Opportunities present themselves in different costumes. Heuristics can be helpful, though only to a certain extent; sometimes good opportunities present themselves as bad ones first. You have to know what you want to get out of a project. Is there something specific that you want to learn? Will it be a case study for a…
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Painkillers, vitamins, and trophies
While I’ve worked with a lot of really great clients, I’ve also had some prospects tell me that my business’s services were way too expensive. In fact, some of them seemed to get offended when they saw Wonder Shuttle’s rate card, or when I told them the price over the phone. I’ll always remember one…
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Direct sales vs. branding
On average a podcast episode probably doesn’t generate that many direct sales of books, products, and sales, especially given the number of people that listen. If you’ve spent a dozen hours pitching or networking, and then another couple of hours preparing, and then finally one hour actually appearing as a guest, you might think that’s…