Ideas are free, execution is priceless.

Speed is a powerful source of leverage. If you’re fortunate enough to be the first one through the door, then it puts you in a position where you can achieve a goal that would otherwise be insurmountable. Hell, even if your work isn’t the best in the world, it doesn’t matter. You’ve got the first mover advantage. Everyone else is forgotten. Here’s one of my favorite case studies of…

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…

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…

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…

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…