-
Define your work
What do you do? Who do you do it for? Why? Answering these questions, and others like them, is hard work. It can also feel painful, because you commit to being labelled. Even though you contain multitudes, you’re making a decision: you will be known for one thing, for now and in the future. Your…
-
Participate, even if you’re not prepared
In an ideal world, you’d be prepared for everything you want to participate in. That’s not realistic though. New opportunities pop up all the time. It can feel tempting to want more time to prepare for all of it. What tends to happen is you don’t have energy to, or you’re not able to prioritize…
-
You meet ten people…
Two will like you. There is potential to become best friends. Seven will feel indifferent towards you. You will become acquaintances at best. One will dislike you. At best, you will both treat each other with civility. You can’t please everyone. Sometimes—perhaps many times—in order to meet the two people, you need to sort through…
-
Customer satisfaction builds momentum
A business delivers a good product or service to a customer. A satisfied customer tells other people about the business. Those people find the business and become customers. As the years go by, the business builds enough of a reputation and customer base to sustain itself. If we agree that’s the core loop of a…
-
Style = best traits + taste + flair
In her book Executive Style, Judith Price covers a lot of really cool offices from the 1970s—think Diane Von Furstenberg, Estée Lauder, Malcolm Forbes. What won me over was this paragraph in her introduction: Style isn’t something you’re born with or something you acquire when you reach a certain age. It isn’t something you earn…
-
Practicing
Most days, I write and I don’t think about it much. Some days, I write and it doesn’t come out as nice as I’d like for it to. I publish it anyway, though I wonder if I hit a plateau. It makes me reconsider this whole practice. Maybe this isn’t helping me write better. Maybe…
-
Your own project
You should always have at least one project, or a performance, that you can complete with no meetings, no bosses, and no external accountability. Just you doing something for yourself, where you don’t need to explain yourself at all, or need to make money doing. If it resonates with other people, it’s even more special…