Walks of My Life

As a youth with little a plan, My dad oft asked, “What footprints are you going to leave in the sand?” It meant little then, But with time, This became a motivating line. If up to me, What will be, My ultimate legacy? A legacy for me, It would seem, A far off, lofty dream. After all, who am I? I’m just average, Somewhat shy. Then I realized something you see, It is up to me, My ultimate legacy. Social media, search, Mobile, and more, Leave digital footprints on the floor. Digital shadows, If you will, Following all that I fulfill. My grandchildren and great grandchildren, What will they see and think of me? What is my digital legacy? Will they see that I pursued my dream, Or that I settled, For something in-between? That I lived a life doing things l loved, Or one filled with, Should of, could of? Digital footprints remain for all time, So I can’t commit, The ultimate crime. What is that crime, you say? It is, o...

We love to believe that willpower determines our actions. “If I just try harder,” we tell ourselves, “I can lose that last 10 pounds.” Or save $200/month. Or improve our time management. The problem is, it doesn’t work. Willpower is important, of course, but there’s more to behavioral change than just trying harder. Think about all the things we know we “should” do: Exercise regularly, eat healthily, max out our retirement accounts, save more, travel, call Mom.... In one study, researchers tried to understand why people weren’t investing in their 401(k)s. In the first example, less than 40% of people contributed to their 401(k). But after they made it automatic—in other words, the day you joined, you’re automatically contributing a small amount to your 401(k)— enrollment skyrocketed to over 90%. We know we should fill out that paperwork—and it’s probably costing us a lot of money to not be investing— but we just can’t seem to get around to it. It t...

Getting things done is not the same as making things happen. You can… …reply to email. …pay the bills. …cross off to-do’s. …fulfill your obligation. …repeat what you heard. …go with the flow. …anticipate roadblocks. …aim for “good enough.” Or you can… …organize a community. …take a risk. …set ambitious goals. …give more than you take. …change perceptions. …forge a new path. …create possibility. …demand excellence. Don’t worry too much about getting things done. Make things happen. ~Gina Trapani

What Would Buddha Tweet? Here is our paradox. We have never had more communications tools at our disposal, and yet we have never been less effective at communicating. It’s human nature to want the shiny new things. The amateur golfer thinks that with that new titanium driver she’ll be as good as Tiger Woods. And we believe that social marketing will magically transform our mediocre messages into the word of God. Like all good Buddhists, I believe that when things become chaotic and complicated, it becomes ever more urgent to cut through the noise, simplify and hone in on what really matters. Here are three timeless principles of good cause-related communications that will be as important in ten years as they are today: heart, simplicity, and story. Heart – engage your community from a place of passion and compassion. Facts matter less. Simplicity – if you can’t tell your brand story to a 9- year-old it’s no good. Story – t...

For 2,500 years in the West, we’ve tried to settle matters, because that’s what it meant to know something. Hyperlinks have revealed that that’s really just a result of using paper to codify knowledge: Books settle matters because they’re self-contained, fundamentally disconnected from other books, written by a relative handful of people, and impossible to change after they are printed. So, our basic strategy for knowing has been to resolve differences and move on: There’s only one right answer, and once it’s known, we write it down, and go on to the next question. That works fine for a small class of factual information. But, much of what we want to understand is too big, complex, and arguable to ever be settled. The hyperlinked world—the Web—is made for this way of networked knowing. A hyperlinked world includes all differences and disagreements, and connects them to one another. We are all smarter for having these differences only a click away. The challenge now ...

Why, exactly, do humans smile? This question puzzled anthropologists for hundreds of years. The smile is instinctive, one of a thousand fascination cues we use to persuade others to connect with us. Yet from an evolutionary perspective, the smile makes no sense. In the animal kingdom, retracting the mouth corners and baring teeth is a sign of aggression. Yet in humans, this same gesture signals openness. {So why are humans different?} The answer: Bigger animals have bigger mouths, and therefore lower vocal vibrations, which conveys dominance. Smaller animals have smaller mouth cavities, and their higher voices communicate friendliness or submission. It’s why a Rottweiler’s growl is more threatening than a Pomeranian’s.* When humans smile, we pull our cheek flesh back against our teeth, which makes our mouth cavity smaller, and raises the pitch of our voice. Presto, we sound friendlier essentially turning ourselves from a big animal into a sm...

Expertise is typically over-rated. Sometimes you have to rely on feedback to grow. My first SEO website had a serious error which earned me a chastising email, which at that the time didn’t feel so good. I responded to his email and fixed the error and today, the sender does not remember writing that email and has a big promotion for my site on his website. If you care and are receptive to feedback appropriately, eventually the market will help sort things out for you. People will come across your work and suggest helpful tools and ideas. Some will be rude, some will be condescending, and some will be generous and kind. But if you keep everything in your head then you can’t expect anyone else to appreciate your genius or trust your knowledge - they don’t know it exists. Ignorance can be an advantage, and feedback an incredibly useful tool. It allows you to share the journey, which helps make writing accessible to beginners. And it allows you the courage to do...

Confidence is rocket fuel for your business life. Confident people have a come-this-way charisma that generates a following. When you possess total confidence you are willing to take risks. When you have it, you propel yourself and your team forward into the future. Problem: Most people don’t cultivate confidence – it just lands on them due to favorable conditions. I call this spot confidence. Good times make for confident people. Bad times crush them, along with their daring point of view. The secret to unbreakable confidence is a lifestyle of  motional/ mental diet and exercise. 1. Feed Your Mind Good Stuff Stop reading negative information, listening to negative people or watching cable network news. You are loading up with fear. Replace that information with studies about the future or an improved you. You’ll soon emerge as a solution provider instead of a Chicken Little. 2. Exercise Your Gratitude Muscle Gratefulness is a muscle...

Markets have been through a rough patch lately. But it’s time for us to give them a new job to do. The powerful economic forces that have trashed our planet are the only forces powerful enough to save it. So are we doing all we can to put markets to work to drive down global warming pollution —the most serious environmental problem— while there’s still time? We need to magnetize ourselves. Markets, acting like a magnet, create a pull on people and businesses. So when a market is designed to protect the environment, it attracts brainpower and capital toward green solutions, aligning private incentives with the public good. It’s all about getting the rules right. The global warming crisis, like the recent turmoil in the financial system, shows why we need to design markets well and regulate risks appropriately. A worldwide carbon market will combat global warming by pulling inventors and investors—and you and me and everyone—toward low-carbon energy solu...

Some people ask, “What if I haven’t found my true passion?” It’s dangerous to think in terms of “passion” and “purpose” because they sound like such huge overwhelming ideas. If you think love needs to look like “Romeo and Juliet”, you’ll overlook a great relationship that grows slowly. If you think you haven’t found your passion yet, you’re probably expecting it to be overwhelming. Instead, just notice what excites you and what scares you on a small moment-to-moment level. If you find yourself glued to Photoshop, playing around for hours, dive in deeper. Maybe that’s your new calling. If you keep thinking about putting on a conference or being a Hollywood screenwriter, and you find the idea terrifies but intrigues you, it’s probably a worthy endeavor for you. You grow (and thrive!) by doing what excites you and what scares you everyday, not by trying to find your passion. ~Derek Sivers

A troubled teenager named Bobby was sent to see his high-school counselor, John Murphy. Bobby had been in trouble so many times that he was in danger of being shipped off to a special facility for kids with behavioral problems. Most counselors would have discussed Bobby’s problems with him, but Murphy didn’t. MURPHY: Bobby, are there classes where you don’t get in trouble? BOBBY: I don’t get in trouble much in Ms. Smith’s class. MURPHY: What’s different about Ms. Smith’s class? Soon Murphy had some concrete answers: 1. Ms. Smith greeted him at the door. 2. She checked to make sure he understood his assignments. 3. She gave him easier work to complete. (His other teachers did none of the three.) Now Murphy had a roadmap for change. He advised Bobby’s other teachers to try these three techniques. And suddenly, Bobby started behaving better. We’re wired to focus on what’s not working. But Murphy asked, “What IS working, today, and how ...

You can buy attention (advertising). You can beg for attention from the media (public relations). You can bug people one at a time to get attention (sales). Or you can earn attention by creating something interesting and valuable and then publishing it online for free: a YouTube video, a blog, a research report, photos, a Twitter stream, an ebook, a Facebook page. Most organizations have a corporate culture based on one of these approaches to generating attention (examples: Procter & Gamble primarily generates attention through advertising, Apple via PR, EMC via sales, and Zappos via earning attention on the Web). Often, the defining organizational culture is determined because the founder or the CEO has a strong point of view. When the CEO comes up through the sales track, all attention problems are likely to become sales problems. Chances are that you’ll have to work on your boss to get him or her on board with option four. Since most organizat...

“Social media” facilitates direct engagement with consumers to an unprecedented level, fundamentally shifting the concept of customer service. No one expected the CEO of Pepsi to ring their doorbell or call on their birthday. It wasn’t feasible. But now, the cost of interaction has plummeted. I can thank someone by texting “thnx” from my cell phone between meetings, or hang out on Ustream answering questions, or send an @ reply on Twitter. All at minimal cost. Every CEO and business must recognize that customer service is now their primary business. What was unreasonable becomes essential; the empowerment of the individual consumer affects every brand. In this world content creation becomes imperative, the initial engagement. When you are transparent and engaging, the result is what I call the “thank you” economy. I gave away information for free—online videos and keynotes with content similar to my book. Monetizing that scenario sounds difficult but wasn’t. Peop...

Analog computing, once believed to be as extinct as the differential analyzer, has returned. Digital computing can answer (almost) any question that can be stated precisely in language that a computer can understand. This leaves a vast range of real-world problems—especially ambiguous ones—in the analog domain. In an age of all things digital, who dares mention analog by name? “Web 2.0” is our code word for the analog increasingly supervening upon the digital—reversing how digital logic was embodied by analog components, the first time around. Complex networks—of molecules, people, or ideas —constitute their own simplest behavioral descriptions. They are more easily approximated by analogy than defined by algorithmic code. Facebook, for example, although running on digital computers, constitutes an analog computer whose correspondence to the underlying network of human relationships now drives those relationships, the same way Google’s statistical approximation to meani...

Nobody has the answers. Nobody is listening to you. Nobody is looking out for your interests. Nobody will lower your taxes. Nobody will fix the education system. Nobody knows what he is doing in Washington. Nobody will make us energy independent. Nobody will cut government waste. Nobody will clean up the environment. Nobody will protect us against terrorist threats. Nobody will tell the truth. Nobody will avoid conflicts of interest. Nobody will restore ethical behavior to the White House. Nobody will get us out of Afghanistan. Nobody understands farm subsidies. Nobody will spend your tax dollars wisely. Nobody feels your pain. Nobody wants to give peace a chance. Nobody predicted the Iraq War would be a disaster. Nobody expected the levees to fail. Nobody warned that the housing bubble would collapse. Nobody will reform Wall Street. Nobody will stand up for what’s right. Nobody will be your voice. Nobody will tell ...

A long time ago, starting a company that made software for computers was dumb. Microsoft and Apple may beg to differ. A company that manufactures cars: dumb. Putting a college yearbook online: dumb. Limiting updates to just 140 characters: dumb. Here’s what’s easy: to recognize a really smart new business concept as just that. What’s hard is recognizing that the idea you think is just plain dumb is really tomorrow’s huge breakthrough. But what makes dumb, smart? e ability to look at the world through a different lens from everyone else. To ignore rules. To disregard the ‘why’s’ and ‘how’s’ and ‘never-succeeded-befores’. Then you need conviction, and the ability to stand by that conviction when other (smart) people look you in the eye and say, “no way, nuh uh.” So, how do you tell a good dumb idea from a bad dumb one? Good dumb ideas create polarization. Some people will get it immediately and shower it with praise and affection. Others will say it’s ignorant an...

I’ve been thinking about how big our world is and how small-minded we’ve become; how quick we are to judge and how slow to understand. Technology places the resources of the world at our fingertips, yet we have trouble seeing past the ends of our noses. For every trend there’s a countertrend worth considering. Resolve to leave the screens of your virtual world momentarily behind, and indulge your senses with a real world adventure. St. Augustine said: “The world is a book, and those who don’t travel read only one page.” My advice? Adventure calls. Blaze a new trail. Cross a continent. Dare to discover. Escape the routine. Find a fresh perspective. Go slow; gaze absentmindedly and savor every moment. Have some fun! Invest now in future memories. Journeys are the midwives of thought; Keep a journal. Leave prejudice and narrow mindedness behind. Make for the horizon and meet new people. Navigate the unknown. Observe, a...

Neoteny is the retention of childlike attributes in adulthood. Human beings are younger longer than any other creature on earth, taking almost twenty years until we become adults. While we retain many our childlike attributes into adulthood most of us stop playing when we become adults and focus on work. When we are young, we learn, we socialize, we play, we experiment, we are curious, we feel wonder, we feel joy, we change, we grow, we imagine, we hope. In adulthood, we are serious, we produce, we focus, we fight, we protect and we believe in things strongly. The future of the planet is becoming less about being efficient, producing more stuff and protecting our turf and more about working together, embracing change and being creative. We live in an age where people are starving in the midst of abundance and our greatest enemy is our own testosterone driven urge to control our territory and our environments. It’s time we listen to children and allo...

Our word is dangerously polarized. There is an imbalance of wealth and power that has resulted in widespread alienation, suspicion, and resentment. Yet we are linked together more closely than ever before ~ electronically, politically, and economically. One of the most important tasks of our generation is to build a just and viable global order, where all peoples can live together in mutual respect. We have it in our power to begin the world again by implementing the ancient principle that is often called the Golden Rule: Always treat all others as you would wish to be treated yourself. We need to make this compassionate and empathic ethos a vibrant force in private and public life, developing a global democracy, where all voices are heard, working tirelessly and practically for the well-being of the entire human race, and countering the dangerous mythology of hatred and fear. At this crossroads of history, we have a choice. We can either emphasize the exclusive a...

You are immortal. The result of everything you do today will last forever. Everything you buy, own, consume is likely to last forever somewhere in a landfill. Even the majority of the the recyclable materials you use will not be processed and these ‘green’ items will be found piled up in deep far-off valleys whether you like it or not. When our great great grandchildren finally work out how to solve the selfish errors of our time, we will be considered primitive: our  balance with our habitat ignored in pursuit of progress. But as humans we strive for progress. We will not live alone self sufficiently on our rural hectare and therefore we must bring simple common sense to everything we buy, own & consume. If they will last forever, then we must make these items as useful as they can be for as long as possible. Products needs to be kept, repaired, loaned and shared. Packaging needs to be reused and returned. That is progress. Yes, the futur...

How does news shape the way we see the world? Distorted, bloated, and not representative of what is happening. Too often, American commercial news is myopic and inwardly focused. This leads to a severe lack of global news. And increasingly, a shortage of “enterprise journalism” – journalistic depth built over time through original sources – that provides the context and enables thoughtful response. Too often, the news sticks to crime, disasters, infotainment, and horse-race politics. Many important topics such as education, race and ethnicity, science, environment, and women and children’s issues are oen less than 5% of all news combined. Much of widely-seen online news isn’t better – it’s often just re-circulates the same stories. The result: much of our news can’t be called “knowledge media” – content that builds insight about our world. It’s difficult to understand the world, if you haven’t heard much about it. But we also know many...

“It’s nothing personal, it’s just business.” We spend more than 50% of our lives at work. Why would anyone want to wake up in the morning and go to work with that attitude? If you don’t make it personal, and if you don’t make it count, what’s the point? Business is missing one important core value: compassion. “Between work and family, I have no time for community.” This is something everyone feels at some point in their lives. But think about it: What if we made community an integral part of our business? What if we recognized that we can’t have strong businesses without a strong community and we can’t have a strong community without compassion? The real way strong communities are built is through the compassion we extend to others. Both to those we know, and to those we don’t know. The Internet is amazing because it connects us all. Compassion for those around us now extends globally and beyond our physical boundaries. We...

The future belongs to people who can spread ideas. Here are ten things to remember: 1. Create a cause . A cause seizes the moral high ground and makes people’s lives better. 2. Love the cause . “Evangelist” isn’t a job title. It’s a way of life. If you don’t love a cause, you can’t evangelize it. 3. Look for agnostics, ignore atheists . It’s too hard to convert people who deny your cause. Look for people who are supportive or neutral instead. 4. Localize the pain . Never describe your cause by using bull shiitake terms like “revolutionary” and “paradigm shifting.” Instead, explain how it helps a person. 5. Let people test drive the cause . Let people try your cause, take it home, download it, and then decide if it’s right for them. 6. Learn to give a demo . A person simply cannot evangelize a product if she cannot demo it. 7. Provide a safe first step . Don’t put up any big hurdles in the beginning of the process. e path to adopting a ca...

The word harmony carries some serious baggage. Soft, namby-pamby, liberal, weak. Men who value harmony aren’t considered macho. Women who value harmony are considered stereotypical. Success is typically defined with words like hard (sell, line, ass). Successful people are lauded for being argumentative, self-interested, disruptive. But those assumptions are the dregs of a culture that celebrates the lone hero who leads with singular ambition all the while damning the sheep who follow him in harmonious ignorance. No. Harmony is a springboard. Harmony supports teamwork. And teamwork creates energy. An energy that fuels creativity. When focusing on harmony, success becomes defined by different terms. Contribution. Dedication. Cooperation. Harmony takes bravery, an open heart. It takes lying awake at night when one of your co-workers is having a rough patch and dreaming up ways to help. In the true sense of karma, to achieve harmony, you must always do...

Power provokes ambivalence. Power-seeking is politically incorrect. So power remains cloaked in mystery and emotion, the organization’s last dirty secret. John Gardner, the founder of Common Cause, noted that nothing gets done without power. Social change requires the power to mobilize resources. That’s why leaders are preoccupied with power. As Michael  Marmot and other epidemiological researchers show, possessing the power to control your work and social environment—having autonomy and control over your job—is one of the best predictors of health and mortality. Obtaining power requires will and skill—the ambition to do the hard work necessary, and the insight required to direct your energy productively. Power comes from an ability to build your reputation, create efficient and effective networks of social relations, act and  speak in ways that build influence, and from an ability to create and employ resources—things that others want and need. Stop...

There is little evidence that we will solve the environmental challenges of our time. Individuals too readily allow responsibility for the solutions to fall on larger entities like governments, rather than themselves. I find one very significant reason for hope amidst this largely hopeless topic. We are learning to measure consequence. Galileo said something akin to “measure what is measurable, make measurable what is not.” We are slowly gaining expertise in measuring our impact in terms of carbon, energy demand, water use, and toxicity production. Why is this hopeful? Now that we can say definitively that even the production of a soda bottle has a measurable (if tiny) increase in greenhouse gases, it’s hard for a thinking individual not to acknowledge that they are working against the things they say they want. After a century of isolating the product or service from its resulting impact, the tide is turning. We are making consequence visible. We will witness the first gene...

Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an “Outlier.” He is, of course, right. My mother says practice makes perfect. She is, of course, right. A billionaire friend once told me to read one of the best stories on successful living, The Tortoise and the Hare. He says, “Every time I read that book, the tortoise wins. Slow and steady wins the race.” He is, of course, right. Whether it is branding or wealth building, I call it the Momentum Theorem. FOCUSED INTENSITY over TIME multiplied by GOD equals Unstoppable Momentum. Not many people in our A.D.D. culture can stay FOCUSED, but those who can are on their way to winning. Add to the focus some serious pull-your-shirt-off-and paint yourself-blue-at-the-football-game INTENSITY, and now you have a person who is a difference-maker. But very few companies or people can maintain that FOCUSED INTENSITY over TIME. It takes time to be great, it takes time to create critical mass, it takes time to be...

BUSINESS IS A GAME Everything I know about business I learned from poker: financials, strategy, education, and culture. FINANCIALS • The guy who wins the most hands is not the guy who makes the most money in the long run. • The guy who never loses a hand is not the guy who makes the most money in the long run. • Go for positive expected value, not what’s least risky. • You will win or lose individual hands, but it’s what happens in the long term that matters. STRATEGY • Learn to adapt. Adjust your style of play as the dynamics of the  game change. • The players with the most stamina and focus usually win. • Hope is not a good plan. • Stick to your principles. EDUCATION • Never stop learning. Read books. Learn from others who have done it before. • Learn by doing. Theory is nice, but nothing replaces actual experience. • Just because you win a hand doesn’t mean you’re good and you don’t have more learning to do. You m...

Management isn’t natural. I don’t mean that it’s weird or toxic – just that it doesn’t emanate from nature. “Management” isn’t a tree or a river. It’s a telegraph or a transistor radio. Somebody invented it. And over time, most inventions – from the candle to the cotton gin to the compact disc – lose their usefulness. Management is great if you want people to comply – to do specific things a certain way. But it stinks if you want people to engage – to think big or give the world something it didn’t know it was missing. For creative, complex, conceptual challenges – i.e, what most of us now do for a living—40 years of research in behavioral science and human motivation says that self-direction works better. And that requires autonomy. Lots of it. If we want engagement, and the mediocrity busting results it produces, we have to make sure people have autonomy over the four most important aspects of their work: Task – What they do Time – When they do it ...

Education has a ripple effect. One drop can initiate a cascade of possibility, each concentric circle gaining in size and traveling further. If you get education right, you get many things right: escape from poverty, better family health, and improved status of women. Educate a girl, and you educate her children and generations to follow. Yet for hundreds of millions of kids in the developing world, the ripple never begins. Instead, there’s a seemingly inescapable whirlpool of poverty. In the words of a headmaster I once met in Nepal: “We are too poor to afford education. But until we have education, we will always be poor.” That’s why there are 300 million children in the developing world who woke up this morning and did not go to school. And why there are over 750 million people unable to read and write, nearly 2/3 of whom are girls and women. I dream of a world in which we’ve changed that. A world with thousands of new schools. Tens of thousands of new libraries...

Forget about working on your weaknesses —> Focus on supporting your strengths. I worked on my weaknesses for 40 years to little avail. Still “needs improvement,” as they say. Why? Easy. We hate doing things we’re not good at, so we avoid them. No practice makes perfect hard to attain. But my strengths – ah, I love my strengths. I’ll work on them till the purple cows come home. When we love what we do, we do more and more, and pretty soon we’re pretty good at it. The beautiful thing about being on a team is that, believe it or not, lots of people love doing the things you hate. And hate doing the things you love. So quit diligently developing your weaknesses. Instead, partner with someone very UNlike you, share the work and share the wealth and everyone’s happy. Relatedly, women are rather UNlike men and often approach problems and opportunities with a different outlook. Yet books and coaches often encourage us to adopt male strengths and, lacking underst...

Imagine any and every field possible. There are so many brands, so many choices, so many claims, so much clutter, that the central challenge is for an organization or an individual is to rise above the fray. It’s not good enough anymore to be “pretty good” at everything. You have to be the most of something: the most elegant, the most colorful, the most responsive, the most accessible. For decades, organizations and their leaders were comfortable with strategies and practices that kept them in the middle of the road—that’s where the customers were, so that’s what felt safe and secure. Today, with so much change and uncertainty, so much pressure and new ways to do things, the middle of the road is the road to nowhere. As Jim Hightower, the colorful Texas populist, is fond of saying, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” We might add: companies and their leaders struggling to stand out from the crowd, as they play by t...

The past decade has been an extraordinary adventure in discovering new social models on the Web—ways to work, create and organize outside of the traditional institutions of companies, governments and academia. But the next decade will be all about applying these models to the real world. Atoms are the new bits! Just take one example: making stuff. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participants and participation in everything digital—the long tail of bits. Now the same is happening to manufacturing—the long tail of things. The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and little bit of self-taught expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and ...

Speaking soon? Keep this in mind: people at events are hungry for authenticity. Saying something you might not have said elsewhere is a good way to find your authentic voice. For my own conference, I oen give advice to speakers before they come on stage. Here’s an exercise for anyone who wants to connect with an audience. A few weeks before the event, when you start preparing the talk, write out everything you spend your time doing - professional work, side projects at home, everything. Now pick the one thing you’re most excited about. Now consider: why is that so important to you? Design your talk from that point, as if you started by saying, “My name is X, and I’m passionate about XYZ because...” ~Mark Hurst

Two tech executives with no food experience and no marketing budget launch a product called Bacon Salt. Next, they search for people on social networking sites who profess a love for bacon, then friend them. Among a small percentage of those people, enthusiasm begins to spread about Bacon Salt. What began as a tribe quickly multiplies into 37,000 fans on Facebook and MySpace. Months later, the buzz spills over into newspaper articles, TV interviews and the holy grail of PR, an appearance on Oprah. Two guys who knew nothing about the food business and had no marketing budget now had a certifiable cult hit. Inspired, they create several other bacon-flavored products. It’s the birth of a brand. Their success began with a small – very small – group of self-identified fans of a category. Even if social networks have millions of members, it will never translate into millions of buzz-spreaders. The Bacon Salt story illustrates that it’s usually a small percentage of the ...

We are all on a search – a search for more meaning in our lives. Through choosing to enrich other people’s lives, you add meaning to both their life and your own. Some simple steps to follow: 1. Commit : Commit to lifetime-relationships that span events, companies, causes and geographic boundaries. 2. Care : Care for the concerns of others as if they are your own. 3. Connect : Aim to connect those who will benefit and enrich each other’s lives in equal measure. 4. Communicate : Communicate candidly. Tell people what they should hear rather than what they want to hear. 5. Expand Capacity : Aim to expand people’s capacity to help them give and get more from their own lives. The Litmus Test : If you are truly enriching someone’s life, they will typically miss you in their past. They think their lives would have been even better if they had met you earlier. You are only as rich as the enrichment you bring to the world around you. ...

Vision is the lifeblood of any organization. It is what keeps it moving forward. It provides meaning to the day-to-day challenges and setbacks that make up the rumble and tumble of real life. In a down economy—particularly one that has taken most of us by surprise—things get very tactical. We are just trying to survive. What worked yesterday does not necessarily work today. What works today may not necessarily work tomorrow. Decisions become pragmatic. But after a while this wears on people. They don’t know why their efforts matter. They cannot connect their actions to a larger story. Their work becomes a matter of just going through the motions, living from weekend to weekend, paycheck to paycheck. is is where great leadership makes all the difference. Leadership is more than influence. It is about reminding people of what it is we are trying to build—and why it matters. It is about painting a picture of a better future. It comes down to pointing the way and saying, “C...

We are the strivingest people who have ever lived. We are ambitious, time-starved, competitive, distracted. We move at full velocity, yet constantly fear we are not doing enough. Though we live longer than any humans before us, our lives feel shorter, restless, breathless… Dear ones, EASE UP. Pump the brakes. Take a step back. Seriously. Take two steps back. Turn off all your electronics and surrender over all your aspirations and do absolutely nothing for a spell. I know, I know – we all need to save the world. But trust me: The world will still need saving tomorrow. In the meantime, you’re going to have a stroke soon (or cause a stroke in somebody else) if you don’t calm the hell down. So go take a walk. Or don’t. Consider actually exhaling. Find a body of water and float. Hit a tennis ball against a wall. Tell your colleagues that you’re off meditating (people take meditation seriously, so you’ll be absolved from guilt) and then actually, secretly, nap. My radical suggestion? ...