Category: taking action

  • The Short and Sweet Guide to Being Fucking Awesome

    People will tell you that there are all kinds of yardsticks to measure progress. What they don’t say is that most of them are worthless. Money, career, fame… whatever. That’s all fine and good, but the bottom line is that there is one thing– just one– that really matters. Being fucking awesome. You can be […]

  • Let the Idea Free

    You are stupider than you think. So am I. I may not like it, but I are wrong a lot. You were wrong about Twitter, I was wrong about Facebook, and we’ve all been wrong before about a huge number of things. This is normal. The bad news is that we’re not geniuses. The good […]

  • Being Smart is Useless

     You get noticed for what you do, not what you think. You may think you’re smart. You might even be right– but you should still get over yourself. What happens in the head might as well happen in a fantasy world. No one will ever give you anything unless you put it to use. You […]

  • Expand, Contract, Experiment, Iterate

    Xeni Jardin put up a great slide in a presentation I saw at MIMA, seen at right. Those four words represent a lot about life, growth, business and strength. Put those four words together and you have a continuous, cyclical process for how to try new things and what to do once you have. Chris […]

  • Balls

    Your fashion choices, your words, your decisions–all need more BALLS. You worry what people think about you because they won’t like you, or they’ll talk behind your back. But really, they’ll admire your courage and adjust just fine. You’ll question yourself at the last minute, maybe think you’re crazy, but sometimes, you need to be […]

  • The Body Remembers

    If you have been healthy before, you can get there again, easier. Research shows that muscles that have been strong remember how to be strong again. Your body remembers where it has been and what it has adapted to, and even years later, it keeps that adaptability the same way those that have been fat […]

  • Life Doesn’t Start Tomorrow

    There isn’t a single thing in this world that’s made better by starting tomorrow. Everything you care about, everything you are about, needs to begin today or it may never happen. If you don’t want to do it now, you clearly don’t want it bad enough. Momentum comes from pushing, not from planning. Confidence comes […]

  • Your World is Not a Corridor

    In Sept 2004 I had just moved out of a trendy neighbourhood apartment, and into a nightmare. The loft that I moved into was 3000 square feet, had huge windows across the entirety of two of the four walls. It was huge, it was a disaster area, and I had moved in willingly… because of […]

  • Being Supremely Useful

    “I literally could not come up with a better use for my time.” I’ll never forget the phrasing of this sentence at the GEL 2010 conference, spoken by Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy. He was justifying why he had created the largest, most exhaustive library of free educational videos on the web (over 1100 […]

  • How Confidence Works

    Dogs are great people trainers. Those of you that have dogs know this already, but my girlfriend and I have been learning it over the past few weeks with a new Whippet/Lab mix. It’s amazing. A dog will try to exert dominance over you again and again. If you don’t react appropriately, the dog realizes […]