A while back—having grown my business to somewhere around the $25 million in annual revenue mark and still growing at 40% year-over-year—an investor looked me straight in the face and said, with a head tilt and a shoulder shrug, that the business growth I was killing myself for “just wasn’t that interesting.” Wait, what? WTAF?! I swear this is true. This comment was so disjointed from my reality that it led me to a hot... read more ›
407 reads
Aug
21
Aug
07
I was recently reminded that the fastest way to succeed is to fail. Literally. And yet the only reason this sounds a little weird, is because we’re constantly falling into a trap. There's No Perfect Plan In fact, I fell into this trap myself not too long ago. I was trying to make this little project work out perfectly (installing a golf simulator at the studio) I was doing all the calcs on paper… Making... read more ›
317 reads
May
22
There’s a saying that goes: Plan for Success, Learn from Failure While I’d anticipated a demand for frequent updates of Best Camera if we succeeded—I’d baked it into the contract—what I had not anticipated was the possibility of such incredibly rapid success. I’d structured an agreement with the developers based on the idea that the app would take a while to achieve liftoff. The revenue split favored me once their initial investment was repaid. That... read more ›
478 reads
Apr
05
For Amanda Crew, art imitates life. While she is largely known for her role as Monica Hall on the HBO series Silicon Valley, she recently sat down with me to talk about the duality between her personal life and experience playing a woman who feels torn between the life she’s created and the life she really wants. It’s a thriller, Amanda tells me, but the underlying turmoil her character faces is something she can relate... read more ›
626 reads
Jan
11
Julia Cameron is a world-renowned, highly acclaimed artistic talent. She created a movement within the art scene in 1992 with the release of her book 'The Artist's Way', and has been inspiring creatives with further reads, songs, films, and plays ever since. Julia recently added another book to her collection with 'WRITE FOR LIFE: Creative Tools for Every Writer. As what she calls a 'love letter to writing, and to writers', it shares some of... read more ›
720 reads
Nov
16
The world of business is notoriously serious and results-driven. But what if we looked at work through a different lens? What if we focused on the creative, abstract side of innovation? This is a question that Mauro Porcini, Chief Design Officer at PepsiCo, strives to answer. With over 1100 design and innovation awards under his belt, Mauro is no stranger to the value of creativity in business. In fact, he's made it his life's work... read more ›
697 reads
Oct
26
I recently sat down with Joey Cofone, Co-Founder, and CEO of Baronfig. Joey is an award-winning graphic designer based in New York. Joey's work appeals to curious minds. He’s released his new book The Laws of Creativity where he helps us uncover the thinking and science behind the creative process and gets us thinking in a whole new way. How To Turn Skill Into Mastery How does skill turn to mastery? When we understand... read more ›
632 reads
Oct
10
We often start out thinking if we can just do the "right" work, we'll breakthrough. When in fact, it's not the what work we should focus on, but how much. We will do everything we can to convince ourselves that something other than volume is more important. Listen to the Podcast Smells like Procrastination We need a new lens to get the right shot. We need to switch to a different writing app with better... read more ›
633 reads
Oct
03
Most of us have been given the same general blueprint for success since birth. Go to school, get good grades, go to college, get a job, work hard and you'll be successful. And for a long time, this was an effective path to success. But in recent years, the idea of what it means to be successful has changed. With the advent of technology and the global interconnectedness of the world, success is no longer... read more ›
795 reads
Sep
12
Do you know how many shots Michael Jordan missed during his career? More than 9000. Take baseball: a legendary hitter, bats a .300 average, which means he succeeds only one in three times at that. Take any famous entrepreneur and her true biography will serve mostly as an index of failures, with a few big wins mixed in. We think otherwise only because of our tendency to minimize failure and dwell on success when telling... read more ›
533 reads