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Everybody needs a good on ramp. A ritual that prompts a work mindset to start our day. A process that merges us into the real world and ensures our days have a cadence and rhythm. A routine that gets us in the mood, in the flow and in the zone so that by the time we actually hit the highway of life, we’re traveling at the same speed as…

Most traditional marketing actually becomes less effective over time. As companies continue to spend millions of dollars irritating their way into people’s inboxes, and as buyers behaviorally and technologically tune out these interruptive campaigns, the law of diminishing returns settles in. And organizations end up hurting their brands the more that they market them on depreciating platforms. Unless you give your army the means to convert for you. What…

Human beings are driven by a desire to create. To contribute to the world’s intellectual and artistic commons, to express their individuality and vibrancy, to come alive through the pursuit of their ideas, to satisfy the biological compulsion to render their feelings and to use their imaginative endowments to make cool stuff. The question companies should be asking is, how can we help people use our products to scratch…

Social media isn’t the answer. With every marketer in the world clamoring to make their message heard, social media has gone from the golden child to the pool filled with golden water. The place is so crowded, nobody goes there anymore. And the days of buying likes, tricking people into consuming content and bothering customers into doing business are over. Ten years ago, when the web was just a…

Most entrepreneurs go into business as a byproduct of beautiful timing. Why should their exit be any different? Here are a few clues that it’s time: When you feel like you’ve squeezed all of the juice of this lemon, and there’s nothing left but rind and pulp. When the drug you used to be addicted to, the one that served you well and was good to you, no longer…

Staring harder won’t help. When your brain crashes into a creative wall, the smart thing to do is to get irrelevant on purpose, then come back to the work. By walking away, going perpendicular to the flow of the current activity and mentally and physically displacing yourself, you invite unexpected inputs that change your perspective for the moment, delivering new insights that the work so badly needs. Take a…

Fear is a significant factor in most people’s lives. And if your organization wants to matter to those people, you need a tool that helps customers feel less afraid. Some platform, some interaction or some mechanism that gets their jitters out and gives them something to face the world with. Covestor is the world’s largest online platform for investment management. It’s a world of great investors that allows you…

Reinventing yourself isn’t about changing everything. It’s about springing yourself past a frontier and letting the constellation of your identity expand so you can see the beginning of a different and more courageous dream. It’s about letting go of everything you’ve tried and built and accomplished and accumulated so far, except for the person you’ve become, and using that as the raw material for whatever comes next. It’s about…

I’ve been an inventor my whole life. Making things has always been the most natural way for me to engage with the world. When I get up in the morning, there’s this mechanism inside me that wonders what I’m supposed to make next. And it’s relentless. Like the junkie who walks thirty miles to get twenty dollars, the mechanism doesn’t shut up until it finally gets its daily fix….

If your idea is everywhere, you win. The hard part is, millions of people around the world are trying to make their ideas more popular than yours. And with the exception of the few that hit a run of dumb luck, most of the ideas you want to spread, won’t. Most of your marketing attempts are reminders of just how deaf the world really is. Even the big guys,…