Archive for 2011

I will never accept your apology for being late to the meeting if you walk in with a Starbucks.

You’re not in a hiring crisis where you cannot find technical talent. You’re simply not paying enough, not offering enough opportunity and you’re certainly not trying hard enough.

Insurance is not bought, it is sold. Hot dogs are not sold, they are bought. The difference is not in the product itself, but in who appoints themselves the gatekeepers.

Stop asking me questions your damn smartphone can answer.

If you’re a famous personality, renowned athlete, musician or actor and you barely graduated high school, I’d appreciate it if your opinions stayed on Facebook where they cannot do any harm to the rest of us.

I use the word “art” in my speech quite a bit. I identify art as anything with risk that might fail, but should it succeed, it will succeed beyond anything we could have planned for. Any art that is worth doing is inherently risky. And if there isn’t any risk, then it isn’t art. Art…

We frequently measure the wrong things when we measure ourselves against other people. How much we earn, our income, is an easy measurement. Measuring ourselves against another’s income is a losing game. We make more than them, therefore we are better (not just economically better off, but “better people”) than them. We make less than…

An unlimited canvas is one without any physical constraints. But have you ever watched an artist try to paint something when they can paint anything at all? Constraints — monetary, logical, physical, temporal, subject — give us a starting framework in which to paint and build and create. Embrace your constraints. Stop lamenting that you…

It always upset my room-mate of years ago that my cute girl grading curve was a logarithmic scale with a multiplication factor based on her wit and her intelligence.

Voting with your dollars used to be the way to get an organization to change. “I don’t like what you do, so I will take my money elsewhere. Good day.” And that was the end of the story. But as large corporations become conglomerates and consolidation occurs in every industry it becomes increasingly difficult to…

It is easy to claim you are not motivated by money when you either have a lot of it or you have no chance of ever getting it.

When you send me an email or text with a typo, I glance at the keyboard to see whether you made the typo by accident or on purpose. I immediately judge the worth of both your message and your character if the key placement of the mistyped letter is not within reason.

When my g/f offers me a blowjob in the morning, it is time to take a careful look at the credit card statement. When anybody else offers me a blowjob in the morning, it is time to reevaluate my career choices.

I am great believer in practice and deliberate practice especially. Interestingly very few people practice the work they are about to perform. They do the same work over and over and over, and when it comes time to do different work, they haven’t practiced that, so they become trapped doing work they’ve only practiced. Wouldn’t…

If you are going to sell hot dogs, you want to be where your customers are, or where you expect them to be. You may even be willing to pay a premium to get as close to your customers as you can (a ball game). But selling hot dogs is a commodity business. You cannot…

As an Evil-Mastermind-in-training I believe it is my duty to ensure that Jesus did not die in vain.

Entrepreneurs have customers. Small businesses have clients. Subtle difference, but one worth pointing out.

I hold in contempt those that lack a desire to better themselves.

How easily and quickly I can offend you is directly proportional to how stupid and uneducated you are.