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As retail goes, so goes the world.  The everyday interactions we have with cashiers, waitresses, taxi drivers, front desk attendants, customer service reps and sales associates are perfect microcosms of our society, both good and bad.  One day we walk into a store whose employees never let us forget how it feels to be good people. They act as if it’s an honor to spend time with their customers….

When I first started my company, I had a bad habit of counting my chickens before they hatched. The minute a request would come in about a prospective client, a new project or a potential business opportunity, in my mind, the deal was already done.  Let me give that no thought. Sounds great. Count me in. Sign the contract. Put it on the schedule. Tell the world. It’s happening.  That’s…

The other day a friend of mine was telling a story about his wife. Once upon a time, her indy apparel company was featured on one of the biggest television shows in the world. As the narrative often goes, within hours of the broadcast, the company received so many new orders that they couldn’t make shirts fast enough to keep up with the demand. Instant publicity, instant credibility. And…

People say there’s nothing new under the sun. But considering the sun is eight hundred and sixty four thousand miles in diameter, if you can’t find something new under it, you’re not very creative. And to be fair, sustaining originality of voice is no easy task. Especially over the long haul of a career. In fact, even some of the world’s most successful creators struggle with this issue. In…

I’m a big believer in awareness plans. That’s a metacognitive procedure or mental recipe for perceiving and thinking about the environment around us. A lens for interacting with the world. A plugin for the human operating system. It’s a framework for inspiration. A strategy to help inspiration seek you out. Let’s say you decide to start writing a blog. Like it not, you’ve just installed a new awareness plan. Because the metacognition of…

The creative process commences with input. You build a framework for inspiration by living your life in a way that your art gets done over and over. This helps you populate a unique inspiration pool that nobody can replicate, solidifying the originality of your work, guaranteeing you’ll never get blocked. The creative process continues with throughput. You establish a discipline for getting your ideas to ground zero, assuring that…

Anyone can be a prolific creator if they have a prodigious memory. And so the question is, does the ability to remember things come as part of our genetic package, or is it a muscle we can train? Yes and yes. On the hereditary side, certain people are innately wired with superior memories and they naturally and habitually recall almost everything in their lives, from images to numbers to…

The creative mind is open twenty four hours a day. Even when you’re sleeping. And if you want to become a prolific creator, you have to practice being proactive with your unconscious mind. You have to view it as idea processor, waiting at your beck and call, begging you to assign it a problem so it can immediately go to work for you. Eric Maisel, psychologist and creativity coach,…

My grandfather has long and prestigious history in the closeout industry. As a discount retail pioneer, he founded his business in the early seventies. Nearly four decades later, his company remains a global leader. Naturally, he’s seen everything, from depressions to recessions to floods to industry shifts to product recalls to lost palettes to technology innovation to stolen trucks to entire ceilings spontaneously collapsing in warehouses. And something he…

The process of fully fleshing our your work hinges upon movement value. It’s the discipline of recognizing conceptual beginnings, witnessing ideas in their nascent state and thinking to ourselves, hey wait, I think there’s something here, and then using that moment of conception to spawn as many creative offspring as possible. Turning a seed into a forest, essentially. This is the crucial process that separates the creatively blocked from…