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People love to introduce complexity for no reason.  Especially when they’re insecure about their ideas and abilities. After all, complexly feels like progress and gives people a sense of power and importance.  What’s not to like?  And so, I completely understand where they’re coming from. Simplicity is hard. It requires more energy, more brainpower and more courage that complexity. Think about it. The last time you generated an incredibly…

Last year I delivered a keynote presentation to 350 seniors at Sycamore High in Cincinnati, OH. This particular clip tells the story about belonging, finding your people and consistency. Enjoy! LET ME ASK YA THIS… What are your centers of belonging? LET ME SUGGEST THIS… For a copy of the list called, “46 Types of Marketing,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free! *…

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…

Hendricks suggests that we choose to become the source of attitudes, rather than waiting for the events of life to inspire us to adopt them. Otherwise we remain locked in consumer mode rather than producer mode, keeping ourselves trapped in scarcity, forever making the situation responsible for how we feel.  It’s the difference between people with an external locus of control and people with an internal locus of control….

My biggest competitor is apathy.  That’s what cripples my earning capacity most frequently. That suffocating feeling of insignificance. That paralyzing dread that nobody is going to notice my work anyway. Ugh.  And typically, it shows up just moments before I publish something new. I silently ask myself, hang on, does the world really need me to do this? Do I honestly need to add another layer to the slagheap of…

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…

There is nothing that can’t be solved with greater commitment. The way my brain works is, if commitment isn’t the answer, I rephrase the question.  Hendricks, however, makes a powerful point in his daily devotional about how commitment gets you started and propels you through the early stages of the game, but it’s recommitment that ignites your reserves when you feel like you’re going to give up.  When I…

One of my colleagues created a tool called an opportunity filter. It’s a simple rating system that evaluates the asset value of a potential new client, assignment or project.  Before agreeing to accept new work, he literally takes out a governing document that serves as a guidance system for new opportunities. This filter takes into consideration the new project’s earning potential, movement value, labor intensity, leverage amount, learning capacity,…

I used to be notoriously hard on myself for not always living up to the standards and ideals that I so prolifically promoted. The cognitive dissonance would be crushing.  If I were to sleep through my alarm on a weekday, for example, instead of loving myself and enjoying the extra hours of sleep and forgiving myself for falling short, I would spend the rest of the day trying to…

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…