For greater author income, exposure, satisfaction — all things marketing, sales, and authorpreneurship — Your book or books (and yet-to-be-written books) are part of the larger story of your life and what you have to offer the world. In a way, you don’t just want your work, your writing, your books to be a success, you need them to be. At least in the…

Alternative approaches and wording to bring you business and clients more easily — I need guaranteed results! If I am to depart with my hard-earned money, then I need to know… How do I know I will have success with you? I don’t like people selling me things… A potential client recently verbalized all these things and more over the course of several…

12 life skills advantages to starting a business young — “Wow. Great handshake!” It took me by surprise and lit me up. It was better than those of many adults I’ve met as a business owner. “Thanks,” he beamed back. “I practiced it!” I recently began coaching and mentoring tentative entrepreneurs, budding small business owners, and Kids with Questions at…

Commit to showing up consistently and doing the work from where you’re at — “Isn’t it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do ‘practice’?” — George Carlin I love this line. When you think of the rehearsal sense of practice, it is the realm of amateurs and it is not where you want to find your doctor. But this quote gets to…

What if you had enough of everything in your practice to minimize worries and problems, disappointments and resentments? — In my mind, I’m always pushing at the edges. The next thing. The internal, external, overlooked, and conceptual boundaries. I can’t help it; my brain just goes to those outer colonies. The next frontier. Must be the wiring. Here’s the thing. I used to live somewhat the way my brain…

A book dives into the realities of our current economy; here are my personal compensating takeaways — Dry name, important book: The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition (Jonathan Tepper with Denise Hearn, 2019). Complicated topic, easy explanations: The authors clarify their key points further by summarizing each chapter with a concluding bullet-point list. When it comes to historic labels and concepts like capitalism…

A points-to-remember checklist for thriving and not just surviving what’s ahead — Oof. The news these days is devastating. Inflation. Inequality. Climate chaos. Gun violence. Democracy is on the brink. Supply chains were disrupted. Putin. Yadda. Yadda. I like being informed but I kicked into real defense mode over a month ago, and stopped consuming news first thing in the morning in…

Building hard stops into life and work changes everything — Stopping in the middle of it. I first encountered the idea in the poetic phrasing of Ernest Hemingway: “I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at…

Make each action effective by setting the stage for what’s next — They had us at, “and then the children clean up their work and put it back correctly for the next person to use.” We toured our local public Montessori school when our son was three and we liked what we heard. A fundamental of Montessori education is a child assuming…