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When I set out to publish my first book, I was clueless.  Didn’t know the first thing about formatting or editing or designing or printing, much less marketing and selling and making a living as a writer.  But what I did know was that other people out there were successfully earning money from a passion similar to my own. Perfect. And so, after going to their websites and reading their…

Regardless of talent and hard work and passion and commitment, money and success and impact and adulation may or may not ever come your way. Those forces are simply not within a creator’s control.  And so, you must learn to accept getting paid in the pride from having lived up to your expectations for yourself. You must accept with gratitude and celebration the psychological salary of honor and satisfaction…

Jung was a proponent of taking the inner life seriously.  He famously said that he always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come from within. In fact, that insight led him to rename and generalize what became known as the ego and the self, which became central to his theory of personality development.  Similarly, our dreams require a uniting of our inner elements. Even the parts that…

All creativity begins with the moment of conception. That little piece of kindling that gets the fire going. That initial source of inspiration that takes on a life of its own. That single note from which the entire symphony grows. That single spark of life that signals an idea’s movement value, almost screaming to us, something wants to be built here. And so, in this blog series, I’m going to…

I have a chef friend who dreamed of starting her own restaurant, but couldn’t afford the overhead of doing so year around.  And so, instead of going broke going the whole hog, she started small. First, she began selling her dishes at the local food events and farmers markets. Once she attracted enough attention, earned enough money and gained enough confidence, she opened up a seasonal pop up shop…

Patterson has three hundred million copies of his books in print worldwide. He’s the planet’s bestselling author since the turn of the century. Last year, one out of every twenty six books sold had his name on it.  This man is my hero.  James is all about volume. Multiple projects at once. Multiple titles every year. Multiple landscapes to harvest his brilliance. And despite what the critics say about his craft,…

This is a clip from my keynote presentation at ITC’s AgentCon15 in Dallas. This particular module is about the value of invisible labor.  Making sure your clients know how hard you’re working for them. LET ME ASK YA THIS… What’s your invisible labor? LET ME SUGGEST THIS… For a copy of the list called, “11 Things to Stop Wasting Your Time On,” send an email to me, and you win…

Don’t spend a lot of time looking over your shoulder.  As tempting as it is to gaze into the rear view mirror to check out the competition, recount your successes and failures, dwell in the paranoia of external pressures, prosecute yourself for crimes past and regret every decision you made just because it might not have been the best possible choice, just keep your head down, keep the story…

Just because a project doesn’t make money or make history or even make a splash, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worthwhile.  I’ve worked on dozens of ventures over the years, some of which failed to get traction, some of which failed to even seen the light of day. Hell, I’ve written entire books that nobody even read.  But those outcomes never mattered to me. Because if the experience of…

The word boredom has no etymological origin.  In fact, the word didn’t even appear in our language until the eighteenth century. Western society literally invented the concept of being bored. Thanks to our hyper efficient, over stimulated, fast paced, achievement oriented, attention deficit culture, we developed a zero tolerance policy against tedium. Our voracious appetite for new stimuli simply can’t cope with the stillness.  So we invented a word for it.  Gallagher…