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The hard part about working alone is the lack of accountability. With the exception of our clients, there’s nobody to say when we’re toast. Nobody to hold our feet to the fire. Nobody to care if we don’t execute. Nobody to yell if we stroll in to work at eleven.  Nobody to bust our chops when sales decline. Nobody to give feedback on a poor performance. Nobody to offer…

Tom Petty said that waiting is the hardest part. That everyday, we see one more card, take it on faith and take it to the heart. And even though it doesn’t feel like heaven right now, we can’t let it get to us, and we can’t let it kill us. Good point. But what happens when waiting feels like the only part? What happens when every day fells like…

Turn on the television for five minutes, and you’ll observe the barrage of celebrity divorces, canceled programming, corporate failures, broken systems, massive layoffs, abandoned projects, public resignations and product recalls. Why? Because our society worships incompleteness. First, because we’re not finishers. That’s too much pressure. We’d rather have ideas than actually execute them. We’d rather talk a big game than actually play one. Otherwise we might actually have to…

LET ME ASK YA THIS… What’s your favorite quotation? LET ME SUGGEST THIS… For the list called, “153 Quotations to Inspire Your Success,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free! * * * * Scott Ginsberg That Guy with the Nametag Writing, Publishing, Performing, Consulting [email protected] HELLO, my name is Host! Did you know you could hire Scott as your emcee, mobile host, roving…

It shouldn’t be this easy to look this good. But that’s the state of our society. Thanks to online anonymity, civility is gone. And since nobody expects manners, sometimes all we have to do is act polite and courteous with people. Thanks to reality television, talent is gone. And since nobody expects ability, sometimes all we have to do is be really good for people. Thanks to social tagging,…

[ View the infographic! ] “Everyone should wear nametags, all the time, everywhere, forever.” That’s my thesis, philosophy, dangerous idea and theory of the universe. My name is Scott, and I’ve been wearing a nametag for past four thousand days. And after traveling to hundreds of cities, a dozen countries, four continents, meeting tens of thousands of people, constant experimentation and observation, building a enterprise and writing a dozen…

Recessions force us to decide if we’re a necessity. That’s a painful conversation to have. Nobody enjoys entertaining the prospect of irrelevancy. But when the shit hits the economic fan, we owe it to ourselves – and to our enterprise – to honestly assess the value we provide. To courageously listen if the intersection of our personal obsession and the marketplace need is worth paying money for. What sucks…

Art is an ongoing process of unsilenting ourselves. If we want to make our name dear to history and give the future something to respect, we have to show the world our accumulated record, not just bits and pieces. Everyone we meet needs to know everything we’ve done. And if they don’t, it’s our job to demonstrate the firepower of our creative arsenal. To help them taste the full…

People buy what we aren’t. If having a brand means taking a stand, then our job is to make it abundantly clear to the marketplace what we are the antithesis of. Who we aren’t, what we don’t want, what we won’t do and what we refuse to stand for. This boundary, this stake in the ground, is the sweetest freedom available. It makes our brand simpler by reducing the…

The last American author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature was Toni Morrison, for her renowned novel, Beloved. That was twenty years ago. Since then, not a single winner has come from this country. I just discovered this during an interview with Alexander Nazaryan, a member of the New York Daily News editorial staff. “American writers are encouraged to write from their perspective, to write what they know….