Archive for 2010

I found myself zipping down the freeway yesterday morning en route to meet with a client, thinking about an upcoming house move, when I pulled in behind a huge house moving van. Nothing unusual about that. But this moving van happened to catch my eye because the rear, roll up door and one entire side…

Do you deal mostly with urgent tasks in your day-to-day work? Unless you are a fire fighter or paramedic most of your work should consist of well-planned, directed tasks. Tasks that should have been decided upon well in advance, days or perhaps even weeks ahead of time. You should be able to predict, with a…

Live in an apartment? Own a house? Spend your entire life on a boat? On the road in a motor home? It is almost a certainty that no matter where you live, your home has a kitchen. Whether you are a gourmet chef or are so incapable (or clever) that you can burn the water…

Shoes that don’t fit, at any price, no matter how cheap, are worse than useless. I do not understand people who buy cheap shoes that don’t fit. Why do you do the same thing when seeking out vendors and business deals?

“I need money, I just don’t need your money.”

You don’t hit a billion dollar valuation with an idea, a few weeks of brainstorming and bumping into the right technical co-founder. Football games (American ones at least) are not won on a single — the first and only — Hail Mary pass. Each game is won by a few yards of gain in one…

If the work you do is worth doing because it positively impacts the lives of others, because it changes the world for the better, you should be willing to put your name on the work. Putting your name on your work isn’t to take away from others’ efforts, or to take focus from the world…

Work for free for yourself. Never work for free for someone else (unless it is your spouse, your Mother or your Mother-in-law, you cheap bastard). The only thing that free work builds for you is the reputation that you will work for free.

Start-up accelerators and incubators are built for one purpose – to give birth to the next hot new start-up. I’ve talked to a lot of just starting-out entrepreneurs over the years and based on my notes, over half of them won’t apply to accelerators until they have a working prototype or MVP. This refusal to…

Society suffers from a short-cut mentality. We watch training montages in movies and believe it takes a few hours, a few days or a few weeks to become brilliant at karate or kung-fu that ordinarily would take years of physical conditioning. We watch someone go from high school dropout to brilliant scientist or computer hacker…