You are browsing archives for
…if you stopped actively sabotaging your own work. We must be talented, powerful and resilient creatures indeed given how much we manage to produce despite the constant undercutting, ridicule and needless censorship we aim at ourselves.
Your brand is your favorite. After all, it’s yours. You understand it, you helped build it, you’re obsessed with the nuance behind it. Your organization’s actions make sense to you, you sat in the room as they were being argued about… you might even have helped make some of the decisions. So, your brand doesn’t […]
When a homeowner decides to put his house on sale and calls a broker… When he calls the moving company… When a family arrives in town and calls someone recommended as the family doctor… When a wealthy couple calls their favorite fancy restaurant looking for a reservation… Go down the list. Stockbrokers, even hairdressers. And […]
It’s impossible to have a coin with only one side. You can’t have heads without tails. Innovation is like that. Initiative is like that. Art is like that. You can’t have success unless you’re prepared to have failure. As soon as you say, “failure is not an option,” you’ve just said, “innovation is not an […]
Perhaps this sounds familiar: When it’s time to write a resume or talk to a boss or discuss a project glitch with colleagues, the instinct is to spin, to avoid a little responsibility, to sit quietly. Put a best face forward, don’t set yourself up. When reviewing just about anything you’ve done with yourself (in […]
About a year after they were founded, Google was first mentioned in the New York Times. As an aside in a non-news column. Today of course, it seems like everything they do is instantly news. It’s easy to forget that just about every major online service (eBay, Amazon, Paypal, Twitter, Facebook) launched in obscurity. Same […]
Here’s a little-spoken truth learned via crowdsourcing: Most people don’t believe they are capable of initiative. Initiating a project, a blog, a wikipedia article, a family journey. Initiating something even when you’re not putatitively in charge. At the same time, almost all people believe they are capable of editing, giving feedback or merely criticizing. So […]
