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The secret to creating value is answering one question, honestly and deeply. Why do I do what I do? Once we know that, anything is possible. Once we dig down through the many levels of why and find a way to activate our own internal generators, there’s no reason we can’t make a contribution wherever we go. As human beings, each of us is motivated by a small collection…

Ideas don’t sell themselves. If you’re lucky enough to get a meeting with someone who can say yes to you, be ready to present more than just another high concept pitch. After all, single assets in isolation don’t have much value. But when you come through the door with an arsenal of weapons, your ideas will be very hard to resist. Try a few of these. Research is the…

Entrepreneurs secretly want to lose it all. To burn everything down, salt the earth and see if we can do it again. To throw a curveball and test how much faith we have in ourselves. To start from scratch, letting go of everything we’ve tried and built and accomplished, except for the person we’ve become, recognize that we are the only thing we have to offer, and reinvest that…

It happens to all of us. We meet someone, hear something, go somewhere, buy something, use something, find something or join something, and after a short while, after falling madly in love with this new thing or person or place, that we can’t imagine living without, we start to forget what life was like before. Love affects the head, not just the heart. It’s the ultimate delete button. Because…

The last place customers go when they have questions is to the actual company. Instead of wading through the pages of some boring, bloated, antiquated, vain, salesy, marginally helpful corporate website, they’re clicking elsewhere.  Since they’re accustomed to instant informational gratification, they’re off to the message boards, online forums, review sites, search engines, video tutorials, social media platforms and user blogs, to answer all their burning questions, right now,…

Achievement used to mean something. You wrote something worth reading. You built something worth noticing. You shipped something worth buying. You solved a problem that saved money. You discovered a compound that extended people’s lives. You invented a gadget that overturned an entre industry. All because you had the guts to risk, the willingness to fail and the desire to change the world for the better. That’s achievement. But…

We press the refresh button dozens of times a day. From smartphones to tablets to laptops to personal computers, the purpose of the refresh button is to dump the old page, clean out junk files, trigger a metadata update and access the most current information, reflecting any recent changes. It’s how we stay up to date with the digital world. And yet, when it comes to our beliefs, we…

Innovation begins with humility. From a strategic perspective, it’s always helpful to start from the assumption that the marketplace is crowded. That whatever product you’re trying to sell, whatever message you’re hoping to spread, the world doesn’t need another one. When you focus on that, you make sense, not noise. When you act from that place of humility, it’s much easier to smash down the mysterious doors of the…

Once you have email, you want everyone to have email. That’s why it works. It’s a product designed to get better with use. As the idea grows, it becomes more valuable. The more of your friends who sign up, the better it works for everybody. And as the web evolves, we’re starting to see this trend in a number of industries. Media streaming services get better the more they…

Why give up freelancing and work for someone else? I know. I never thought I’d do it either. But in addition to being bored with the work, tired of running my own business, burned out by an incestuous industry, sick of sitting at home all day, sick of waiting for that one email that changes everything, done bloodying my knuckles knocking on a door that was never going to…