Humans are very opinionated. It’s part of our make up. The problem comes in when that opinion belongs to someone we’re dealing with: a friend, relative, significant other, or (worst of all for our business) our client. What are we supposed to do when their opinion doesn’t seem to line up with the facts? How far we make it in …

Stop me if you’ve heard this joke before. 10 different home inspectors are inspecting a house… If 10 different inspectors check out the same house, you’re likely to get 10 different opinions on the condition of the home (and 10 different inspection reports). That doesn’t necessarily mean that 9 of them are wrong and only one of them is right. …

Most of us aren’t that good at figuring out time. We tend to exaggerate how quickly things happen for us in the short term and underestimate how long extended-timeline-type things will take. If we all had instant success when doing something big (like starting a new business, advancing our education, or getting healthy) don’t you think that everyone would be …

We use words every day. It’s part of our job and part of our life. But the job part is what we’ve really concerned with; the words that make up our technical jargon. We know exactly what it is we’re talking about when we use these words, we do it every day. There’s no question about what we’re saying; we’re …

What is our level of responsibility? Whenever something goes wrong (and something will always go wrong), we try our best to deflect responsibility. It’s outside our scope. We couldn’t get to it. It was like that when we got there. Yes, it’s important to establish boundaries, to make sure that our clients know what it is we do and don’t …

Most of us are trying our hardest to serve the same people: the average customer. Most people are average. Most of them are searching for an average product. Most of them are looking to pay the average price. What if we want to offer more than an average product? The first thing we’re going to have to do is find …

It’s only natural that we feel a desire to share our stories of failure: to let our friends know when we’ve been wronged by fate, when karma kicks us in the teeth, or when bad luck follow us everywhere we go. That’s our natural response, to tell everyone our story. And it’s the easy way out. The hard work comes …

We’re all looking for success in our business, but it usually doesn’t come around right away. There’s often a delay between getting started and becoming profitable, and we’re often frustrated when that victory doesn’t happen overnight, struggling to figure out what’s going wrong. One way to deal with this situation is to use our imagination, projecting ourself two years into …

Think about it. We’re going to be in most relationships for the long haul. Business relationships; personal relationships; they’re both going to be around for a long time: years, often even decades. Maybe it’s time for us to start thinking differently about how much we need to invest into these relationships. If we’re going to be connected to someone for …

We all work within limits. Limits on the amount of time we can spend on each job. Limits on the size and scope of our work. Limits on the amount of investment we can make on each different customer. Limits on what we can and can’t do under the rules. The most successful business owners among us are the ones …