Humans tend to find comfort in community. We like to be with other people that are similar to us and we often strive to be like people that are similar to us. We’ve evolved to understand that being different is often dangerous. If all the members of our tribe were hiding in their caves and we decided to be different …

At one point or another in our lives, we’ve all crammed for a test. The night before (or right before) a big exam, we tried our best to learn a whole bunch of information in a really small amount of time. We know that we’d have been better off studying a little bit of the material every day, taking in …

Our lives would be so much easier of we could just jump right to the good stuff. Skip all the fluff, all the filler, all the starts and stops and dead ends, and just put our best stuff out there. No gradual increase, no iterations, no changes to make it better, just start out with a finished product. We don’t …

When most people start out in a new business, they try to generate a lot of buzz to get their name out there. They use some type of big marketing splash, cards and brochures everywhere, social media blast across networks, huge parties, hiring a skywriter (OK, no one really does that anymore…), to make sure that everyone knows that they’re …

In today’s always on, interconnected world, it’s pretty easy for us to ask for (and get) feedback from our customers. Ask (or sometimes you don’t even have to ask) and ye shall receive. But what do we do with that feedback? What’s the point of all that information? Lots of times, the customers that take the time to leave us …

We’ve all heard the claim that people in modern society have got the attention span of a goldfish. While that claim’s been debunked, attention is still one of our most valuable resources, and it tends to be in very short supply. We don’t have a lot of time for it, and everyone and everything wants a piece of it. The …

Vires acquirit eundo. (We gather strength as we go.) Virgil, from Aeneid All too often we let things get to us. I can’t do it. It’s too hard. I’m just not cut out for this. I’m gonna do something else. I give up. We succumb to the pressure and move on to something easier. We reason that everybody else does …

Every business has their own set of FAQs, frequently asked questions; even ours. The most important questions, for us anyway, is do we know the answers. If our job is to help our customers (and that’s really the job of every businessperson), we need to know the answers before they even ask the questions. Hell, we should know all the …

From a young age we’ve been taught that humans have five senses: touch, sight, taste, hearing, and smell. The reality is that we all use many more “senses” to figure out what’s going on in our world, especially when we’re interacting with other people. We all give off and receive subtle cues when we’re communicating, and astute listeners can pick …

I’m reading an amazing (and quite easy to digest) book right now called “The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph” by Ryan Holiday. It’s for anyone who’s feeling stuck. It reminds us that we should focus on the things that we can control, and let everything else pass us by. A few quick lines …