Believing in the wrong voice too long

I’ve caught myself doing it mid-conversation. Someone pays me a compliment, genuine, specific, and I’m already building the rebuttal in my head before they’ve finished the sentence. That’s not humility. I used to think it was. It’s just a...

The sixty day test

​We survive a day away easily. A week, with effort. A month, if the team rallies. Sixty days reveals something else entirely. It’s not a test of people. It’s a test of systems. We build companies around ourselves without noticing. Every approval that...

Buy it once

Cheap has a hidden fee. It just bills you later. The table looked great. The price looked better. Six months in, the joints wobble and the finish peels, and now you’re shopping again. Except this time you’re buying the table you should have bought the...

The won’t sell trap

“It won’t sell” sounds like a fact. It’s usually a guess wearing a suit. Nobody has access to the future. Not the founder who built it, not the investor who passed, not the sales rep who pitched it once and got quiet on the other end of the...

The cost of blending in

We assume differentiation is a marketing problem. Find the right slogan, run the right campaign, and the crowd will notice us. Seth Godin’s Purple Cow argues the opposite. By the time we’re writing the ad, it’s already too late. A brown cow standing...