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The cable guy came by yesterday. (Between 8 and 12, of course.) I almost didn’t order it. I hate TV. Rarely watch it. With the exception of The Simpsons and Bill Maher. And I was hoping my representative from Charter would be like Jim Carrey in his most underrated movie, but to no avail. Just a normal dude. He was hooking up my TV when he noticed a few…

A is for ATTITTUDE B is for BREAK PATTERNS Albert Einstein once said, “You can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it.” The lesson: break your patterns. Every day. But this isn’t just about creativity. It’s about doing cool stuff. It’s about not becoming a slave to routine. It’s about spicing up your day, even in the slightest way. It’s about enriching your life. Because boredom…

This weekend I had lunch with my mentor, great friend and former high school English teacher, Bill Jenkins. I brought along a recently found copy of my notebook from Intermediate Composition (circa 1996). It was fascinating to read through it. I noticed: I had (and still have) crappy handwriting My grades weren’t anything spectacular (lots of 78’s) My writing style wasn’t terribly different than it is now (lots of…

When my website went live in October of 2002, I asked the same question any businessperson would ask: how can I get lots and lots of hits? Because in my mind: hits = good website = success = sweet moolah Not really. In fact, Internet guru Tom Antion once said that H.I.T.S stands for “How Idiots Track Sales.” When I first heard that, I laughed and cried at the…

A common question asked by audience members, readers and strangers alike is, “Scott, in all these years of wearing a nametag 24-7, how have YOU changed?” This brings up one of my favorite quotations by Ben Sweetland, “You cannot hold a torch to light another’s path without brightening your own.” In other words: the world is a mirror. You see, when I started this crazy journey on November 2nd,…

Know your customer Of course. That’s the first rule of marketing. But isn’t just as important to ask, “Do your customers know you?” After all, people will do business with you for three reasons: they’ve heard you, they’ve heard OF you, or someone they trust has heard of you. If you build it, they will come Boy, that’d be nice, wouldn’t it? But it doesn’t work that way. You…

I stopped by the annual St. Louis Book Fair yesterday. It was pretty impressive: thousands and thousands of used books for less than two bucks a piece! I picked up about a dozen rare titles, including an awesome book called A Brief History of the Smile! The entire parking lot reeked of that old book smell. Ahhhhh! I love it. And everything was going great until I found myself…

Last week was my first time in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It’s known as “The City of Churches,” which became apparent to me when I looked out of my hotel window only to see steeple after steeple after steeple! Cool. (Thanks to the Ft. Wayne CVB for the great t-shirt.) My speech was for the Indiana Chapter of Meeting Planners International. Before the program I went out to dinner with…

Out of all the 101 Life Lessons Learned from Wearing a Nametag 24-7 for 2000 Days, I thought I’d pick a few memorable ones and tell their back stories. And I know it’s been quite a while since my last podcast, so I promise that this episode is really, really good. Oh, and my flash player hates me today. So if you want to hear this episode, just listen…

In the Water Cooler section of the latest issue of FastCompany, I was interviewed for an article on online networking; or as I like to call it, internetworking. FastCompany and I discussed the hottest online networking phenoms like MySpace and Seth Godin’s latest gig, Squidoo, as tools to spread WOM and MAGNETIZE more business. Scroll down to see the clip from page 94. You can also click the image…