Blog

Do you love food, but don’t like waiting around for it to cook? Omni, the outdoor appliance company, recently launched an amazing portable pizza oven. It’s capable of heating up to nine hundred degrees, almost double the capability of conventional ovens. With its revolutionary gas powered technology, this appliance can cook a small neopolitan pizza in sixty seconds. Only sixty seconds! This is great news for the restaurant world….

My mentor used to joke that he was going to write a personal development book that only contained one sentence. You know what you need to do, you just need to do it. Guaranteed to become a bestseller by the holidays. But looking back, his insight might have been inaccurate. Because for so many of us, myself included, the issue isn’t a matter of knowing or not knowing. The…

Holiday marketing campaigns used to be centered around joy, gratitude, appreciation and love. Now the universal sentiment that companies use to coerce customers is some version of: Just don’t screw it up. The message they’re sending is, love it or resent it, this special holiday is about covering your ass. This is the wrong kind of pressure to put on people. It comes from a narrow place of fear,…

Are you the kind of person who always felt a disharmony between how the industry works and how you work? You’re not alone. Many professionals feel this way. We’re not agreeable to having our pride and joy changed from beginning to end by producers, mangers, committees and other horsemen of the creative apocalypse. This is our art, damnit! The question we have to ask ourselves is: Can we find a…

Life has not cheated you. Because in order for it to have cheated you, it first needed to promise you something. But nothing was promised, and so no fraud was committed. It’s very hard for us to wrap our minds around this cold truth. Maybe because we enjoy being the victim of betrayal. Maybe because it reinforces our view of the world as an atrocious carnival of horrors that’s…

If you’re a growing company, there are an infinite amount of creative tactics for hiring more great people. Running hyper targeted social ads, securing press mentions about your cool, laid back culture, building out an email marketing campaign to applicants, getting listed on career communities, creating a social media presence that shows a fun day in the life of an employee, utilizing the referral networks of your current team, and…

Coming of age in the nineties, before search engines, social media and digital technology existed, being an artist and doing business was profoundly different than it was today. Standard principles of production, marketing, sales and distribution were basically the same, but the path to success was longer, harder, more isolating and more expensive. In my teenage and college years, playing concerts, recording, promoting and selling my own albums was…

The sanity tax is a minor cost that’s disproportionate to the massive value we get in return. It’s when we pay a little bit more to get what we need rather than settling for less out of guilt, pride, consistency or frugality. Like spending a hundred bucks an air conditioning unit for our bedroom so we don’t sleep in a puddle of our own sweat all summer. Doesn’t that…

Mentoring has been a cornerstone of my personal and professional growth since the age of sixteen. Bill, my high school writing teacher, was the first person to show an interest in guiding me. He still does today. In fact, since adolescence, there have been dozens of other mentors who have been critical in helping me become the person I am today. What’re more, I have personally mentored dozens of…

Stress doesn’t exist. Not out there in the world like we think it does. Like most things in life, stress is an inside job. It’s a subjective, inner experience within our consciousness. The reality is, the source of what we call stress is actually our body responding to what is held in our mind. When somebody complains about how stressed they are, for example, that pressure is a choice….