We could mark the very moment that we stopped laughing at the laugh track. Yesterday I released a new single, “Silicon in My Soul.” That makes four in total so far this year, one per month. I doubt I can keep up this pace: It’s expensive, it’s a ton of…

Just kidding. It's not 1994, and we're not "desktop publishing" anymore: No One Wants to Read an Email Newsletter.

Listening, Learning, and Some Unlearning Too — Everyone seems to be making major life changes lately. It’s only natural that during a pandemic of this scope and scale, we realign our priorities. We focus on what’s important to us. If there’s anything positive to come out of the past 10 months, it’s this. As I mentioned in…

We will soon be rid of Trump. But not Trumpism. — Well, now we know. I don’t just mean the results of this election. Now we also know a little bit more about the state of our culture. And it’s not great. Turnout was supposed to be the solution, but in actuality it revealed that 70M people approve of the past…

From Portfolio to Platform to Preparing Your Pitch — In the publishing world, most agents won’t even consider a prospective author without an established platform. Same goes for the music industry. Without a platform, you are simply not worth the risk to them. …

Getting Serious About Marketing Your Creative Work — You love what you do. It’s your passion. You’ve devoted every waking moment to your craft — be it writing, music, or visual art. You find yourself thinking about it all the time, capturing ideas, sketching concepts, and planning projects. It’s invigorating. In some ways, you may feel like…

Breaking Down the Myths that Hold Us Back — There’s a myth that creativity and business don’t mix. That creatives can’t be good at business, and that business can’t be creative. I think that the opposite is true: It’s never been more important to bring creativity into business. There’s never been a better time to make creativity into…

Going Against the Grain to Find Success in Building Your Business — There are a set of new business principles that fly in the face of the lessons I learned when I was in the corporate world. These principles are often relegated to the back row, because conventional wisdom cements the status quo every day. Business is still about relationships —…

Counterintuitive Strategies for Attracting Customers and Earning Their Business — Marketing is different now. This is great news for smaller players like you and me. The old “spray and pray” model of marketing never fit well with us anyway — it was expensive and ineffective. There’s a good reason that traditional marketing often feels “icky” to small business owners…