Playing Big

This my third and final (promise!) post regarding Jeff Bezos’ 2017 letter to shareholders. I’ve already written about his high-velocity decision-making and his Day 1 philosophy. Today’s topic is “embracing external trends early,” and it’s an interesting coincidence that yesterday’s big news was about Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods. If Prime Pantry was dipping a […] See More

In last week’s post, we talked about why waiting—putting off our goals and dreams until some arbitrary future date—is often a waste of precious time.  Sometimes, all we need is to look at things in a completely new way. A few years ago I had a great coach named Jeremy Stover.  I told him to […] See More

How often have we heard that we need to have a five-year plan or a 10-year plan? Several things have occurred recently that made me think about why we wait. The rationale for waiting is typically completely made up. I started thinking about all the time I’ve wasted waiting for certain things to happen. But by […] See More

As many of my readers know, I really like to beat the “niche drum.” For the last six months or so, I’ve really thumped on about this because finding the right niche is one of the most important things a business can do. So it’s probably no surprise that I get excited whenever I see anything […] See More

A version of this post originally appeared in Omaha Magazine’s Fall, 2016, Women in Business issue. As my regular readers know, I successfully completed a work-from-abroad experiment this last summer. It was by far the most satisfying “put your money where your mouth is” adventure I’ve had in a long time. Recently  I interviewed my friend […] See More

I love the term “Misery Olympics” and wish I’d thought of it first. Google it and you’ll get about 549,000 results, but who has time to get to the bottom of that rabbit hole? We all watched the Olympics in Brazil last month, but the Misery Olympics never end—they go year-round, and they’re everywhere. Basically, […] See More

Coach Ben Ryan is this ultra-gingery London guy: red hair, red face, red beard. He’d been the coach of Great Britain’s sevens rugby team, but they fired him about four years ago. It was humiliating to get dumped. In a kind of self-exile, Ben took a job in Fiji (sort of like Napoleon moving to […] See More

When it comes to business advice, I can never get enough of the Oracle of Omaha. That’s right, it’s time for another Buffett-based blog. This fits in nicely with what I’ve been talking about all summer and is really a continuation of the niche (and niches) theme. We’ve been spending a lot of time lately discussing […] See More

I’ll just say it—I’m a sucker for reinvention stories. I love to see emails like the one I received yesterday from my friend Kris Kluver. This guy is your classic entrepreneur and really embodies the spirit of adventure. He started the first of 14 companies when he was only 19. If you know him only […] See More

In a recent New York Times piece, “The Incalculable Value in Finding A Job You Love,” Economics professor Robert H. Frank validated much of what I say about developing a niche market. To be happy, research suggests, earning a high salary isn’t enough. Once  your basic needs have been met, satisfaction comes from achieving mastery […] See More