As an entrepreneur, you solve problems for a profit. That's your job. Your business success is built on creating real solutions to real problems for real people. In the case of people, "real" means getting specific enough that you can identify an actual human being who
A thriving business is built on a simple purpose: creating real solutions to real problems for real people. In fact, clarifying those real choices in a "Purpose Statement" is the first lesson I teach any entrepreneur I'm working with. The statement follows a particular pattern: I
Without a doubt, 2020 was the hardest year of my 30 years on planet Earth. I lost both my grandfather and my dad to cancer within the span of a few months. That alone would have been emotionally catastrophic, with the double dose of grief compounded by the immense burden
When you build something new, you are nose to the grindstone with your creation and it is easy to lose sight of the big picture—but you need to keep your eye on the prize and the outcomes you’re after. Get clear on what you're chasing, and
Every creator wants more people to consume their content, so you want as many views as possible on every post, right? Perhaps that is true, but not all views are created equal. Some viral posts have tens of thousand (or millions) of views without a significant spike in subscribers or
We tend to throw around the term “high leverage" when talking about where to focus time, effort, and resources, but what does that actually mean? In context, "high leverage" typically describes an opportunity that yields disproportionate results where very little effort can lead to a large success,
When your world has something ugly going on, should you talk about that in your content or customer communication? So many creators struggle with that question, whether the ugliness is controversy around a specific person, an industry norm, or an ugly political debate. You don't want to come
Do you work more like a manager or a maker? That’s the question Paul Graham, accomplished entrepreneur and venture capitalist, prompted in July 2009. He was exploring a concept that was new at the time, but which has since become much more important as the rise of creators has
Right now, you can probably think of a dozen different things you could be doing to grow your audience, right? You could text a few friends, launch a live video, run a paid Facebook ad, or submit a guest post to an industry website. There are so many options that
In the life of your target customer, how do your products fit together into a cohesive selling story that is believable, and clear? As you’re developing your product offerings, you should repeatedly come back to the question about how you are creating real solutions to real problems for real
The Age of Information has ended. It may take some time for most people to realize that, but the end has been coming for some time. Like all stages or “ages” of mankind, change happens around innovation. As computers and internet use spread throughout the 1970s and 1980s, most limits
So, you want to publish a book, eh? Nobody can blame you. Publishing a book is a great way to capture your thinking in a snapshot that boosts your credibility as the person who literally "wrote the book on" your niche. The only problem is, at least 80%