You don’t actually need to know anything

The idea of painting yourself into a corner has traditionally been viewed as negative. Taking the idiom literally, imagine you applied paint everywhere in the room except where you were standing. That's a difficulty from which you can't extricate yourself. It leaves you no choice but to step on the freshly painted floor and damage it, or wait in that spot for six hours until it finally dries. But what if painting yourself into a corner was a positive thing?...

Working as a valet parker a luxury hotel taught me numerous life lessons. Like, don’t try to teach yourself how to drive a manual transmission on the guest’s million dollar sports car. Or, don’t go joyriding in that same sports car down a winding street that has a police station. And for sure, definitely don’t try to parallel park that same sports car in between two monster trucks while singing show tunes as loud as you can, only to crash...

Monsters in children's rooms are an issue that every parent has to deal with. Fear of imaginary creatures can result in kids and parents not sleeping very well or at all. But we have to remember, kids are stupid. Practically everything they know is based on placebos. Perhaps the secret is making the solution appear as real as the problem feels. Introducing my revolutionary new product. Monstero is a bedroom creature vanishing spray that clears away uninvited prowling monsters. Parents...

All of us should enter into our projects with the goal of trying to get other people to pay for our marketing for us. It's not chintzy, it's not cheating, it's simply efficient. And fun. Playing leverage like a game to see how little money you can spend makes you a better business person. Gladwell's groundbreaking book on virality, which coined the term tipping point, found that many of the most successful and infectious ideas found their audience without spending...

There’s a pub on my street with a sidewalk chalkboard that reads:There’s no problem a happy hour won’t fix. Now that’s some good copywriting. Hope they get lots of customers. Because they’re not completely wrong. Hanging out with friends at a bar and drinking our sorrows away has been one of humanity’s most effective coping mechanisms for thousands of years. What’s kind of spooky, though, is when this idea applies to an organizational level. This tactic gets touted in the...