Do you like people, your corner of the world, ongoing learning, variety, flexibility, and being creative? Would having such things in your work be meaningful and fulfilling, fun and easy?

Building a business or income streams around local knowledge — general, specialized, or a bit of both — may be for you. I’ve seen dozens of people create and evolve customized businesses in this area that work for them and their desired lifestyle, that provide good, reliable income…and endure. Some are part-time, some are full-time; some remain solo endeavors, some grow to have 2–20 employees.

What’s beautiful is that it’s…

Two. The minute I had two, it became a collection. Because a pattern had emerged.

I was now the owner of iconic lamps that I had always associated with particular relatives, one from my Uncle Jim, another from my Aunt Lori. They made me smile and added new character to our home, both because they were fine specimens of other eras, and because of who they represented.

Growing up, “The Jim” (above) was always located on an end table just inside the door of the main room of the way-fab rehabbed basement in a ranch-style home near O’Hare Airport where…

Elon Musk hosted Saturday Night Live this past weekend, sparking glee and greater fandom in some and disgust in others. I was in neither camp and had never heard Musk speak before, but I was fascinated from the beginning by the awkwardness and quirkiness of his delivery style. He had opened by announcing in the first moments that he has Asperger’s — new information for all, a suspect reveal for some, and a point of contention for yet others related to language and identity issues, and the re-classification of Asperger’s in 2013 as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

It brought me…

“After month upon month where so much was in flux but our day-to-day experience felt like a boring version of Groundhog Day…it feels simultaneously as though so much and absolutely nothing has happened. But in between the nothing and so much, and beyond the constant swelling of grief and anxiety, many people have found room to reassess their life and what they want to change.” — Sadhbh O’Sullivan, Refinery 29, April 26, 2021

O’Sullivan captures the states of disruption, re-evaluation, and weirdness so many of us have found ourselves in throughout the pandemic and especially now, with a supposed end…

“Don’t wish it was easier, wish you were better. Don’t wish for less problems, wish for more skills. Don’t wish for less challenge, wish for more wisdom.”

— Jim Rohn, American entrepreneur and author

Oh, do I remember where I was when a small business coach sprung this quote on me and I instantly recoiled.

About eight months prior I had just made the biggest sale of my life — sold another book publisher the rights to four of my books for six figures. I took 10% of it for myself and moved into a dream apartment in the landmark…

Solopreneurs, freelancers, micro and small-business owners, and side hustlers committed to ongoing promotion know they need to try a range of things in their quest for greater visibility, increased sales, and new revenue streams.

They also know that when they hit on what works they should do more of those things and eliminate the duds. They further know they should calibrate the things that work so that they’re maximizing their possibilities.

And they need to know about vitamins, spaghetti, and ships:

• “Swallow” a reliable, healthy formulation of activities daily to remain healthy and prevent decline — vitamins!
• Throw a bunch…

“The pandemic made me do it!”

I created an e-commerce business, BigEarrings, sort of spur-of-the-moment during the Great Covid Pandemic of 2020 (and 2021…).

It wasn’t a brand-new idea — it had been on a back burner in my brain with assorted other schemes for at least 15 years. I had monitored the URL bigearrings.com for that long, but it was always unavailable.

But I’m a book publisher, editor, coach, consultant…I didn’t do things as frivolous as selling big earrings! I just wore them. And loved them. And I had experienced a good 10 seconds of joy nearly every morning…

At the very beginning of my foray into book publishing, a corporate executive who retired early to publish a series of hiking and biking guides told me something that registered as significant but took me years to unravel: the number one place where his books sold — to a degree that wasn’t matched elsewhere — were apple orchards.

Don’t we all want to discover such secret caches where our products fly off the shelves at a multiple of other outlets? …