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Dreaming is the easy part. The human imagination has no trouble with that. What kills us is when we demand excessive permission to make our dreams a reality. Because we wouldn’t dare follow our heart’s desire until we were ready, until the time was right, until we had enough money, until all the planets were aligned and until the risk of failure was minimized. No, that would just be…

I was flying to Denver when it happened. I was preparing my notes for a speech called, The Entrepreneur’s Dilemma. The focus of the presentation was how loneliness was an inevitable landmark of the entrepreneurial landscape, and how to manage it. A topic near and dear to my heart. The guy next to me couldn’t help but notice my screen. After about twenty minutes of sneaking glances, he finally…

We’ll never run out of reasons not to do something. Our capacity to rationalize our way out of anything will always be available. Human beings, more than any other species, have an infinite ability to procrastinate their way to inaction. We can put things off like bumblebees can fly. Eventually, though, we have to decide. To move our dreams out of dream form, we have to figure out what’s…

I recently chatted with woman who ran a mom and pop garden center. When we got on the topic of word of mouth, Ellen bragged about how her customers rarely told people about her plants. I was confused. Anonymity didn’t seem like something to be proud of. Until she told me what one of her customers told her. “I love your flowers, so please don’t send me your catalogs….

It’s hard to be healthy alone. When it’s just us, there’s no accountability. Nobody to keep us conscious of portion control. Nobody to meet us at the gym before work. Nobody to remind us that we don’t need another drink. When it’s just us, there’s no incentive. Nobody to motivate us to get better. Nobody to celebrate with us when we reach our goal. Nobody to bust our chops…

Not everybody reflects. Thanks to our backwards school system, most of us were never taught us how to reflect. Only to sit in straight rows, follow the rules, solve the next problem, memorize meaningless facts, take the test, accept our grade and move on to the next assignment. God forbid we stop for a moment to look back on life. No, that would require independent critical thinking. That might…

[ 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…

Every time we get lost, we make our world bigger. Our most valuable teachings come when our plans are disturbed. Our greatest transformations occur in the moments when we’ve lost our way. And our finest symphonies assemble when we turn a humble ear to the most unintentional music. But when we make gods out of our plans, when we scrub our world clean of surprise, and when we preserve…

A hundred years ago, most scientists completed their best work before age forty. Einstein, who identified his theory of relativity at age twenty-six, claimed that if a scientist had not made his greatest contribution by that age, he would never do so. Of course, it’s all relative. Life expectancy was dramatically lower. There was fraction of the information available. And the population of the world was under a billion….

Every day we make art not knowing if we will get recognized or paid for it. This is both a beautiful and terrifying reality. On one hand, everything we create is an arrow shot into eternity. We’re just winking in the dark, without feedback, without closure and without metrics. It’s just us, our art and a heaping pile of trust. What a pisser. On the other hand, the ambiguity…