It’s pretty straightforward when trying to solve a problem with something in our homes. Your roof is worn and leaking? Pay for a new roof. Your water heater isn’t heating the water anymore? Buy a new water heater. The carpet is dirty, tattered, and torn? Get some new flooring installed. Solving problems with inanimate objects is fairly easy. It gets …

We often find ourselves bemoaning the fact that we’ve got to deal with competition. If only I didn’t have to compete with all these other companies… But if we stop and think about it for a moment, it’s really a good thing that we’ve got competition. If we didn’t have competitors, it would mean that we’ve chosen to work in …

We’d all love to be able to sell everything, offering our customers a one-stop shop for all their needs. And some businesses do. But, all too often, they don’t do it well. We can be really good at something. We can be quite good at two thing. We can be pretty good at a few things. But, let’s face it, …

Too many of us start out asking. What’s it gonna take to get you through the door? We want your business. When are you going to buy from us? We’d love to work with you. Would you please leave us a glowing review? Maybe if we started out from a place of giving instead of taking, we’d find ourselves in …

Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough. Alain de Botton We’d all like to think that we’ve acquired enough knowledge to achieve success, especially those of us who’ve been in our industries for a minute. But time and again, experience teaches us (if we’re paying enough attention to notice) that we’re woefully deficient …

Too many of us, in our all-out sprint to achieve success, spend every waking hour working. Doing our job. Prepping for our next job. Working behind the scenes on our business. Marketing our business. Thinking about our business. All that work can be overwhelming, and will eventually lead to burnout. If we find ourselves stressed, not getting the rush that …

For better or worse, we find ourselves stuck in a hierarchical world, where we’re arranged according to our (perceived) importance. If we look around us, we can see people at different levels/stages of life and career, with those people at the bottom working to move their way up the hierarchy. In general, there are two different personality types we find …

If we’re not sure where we want to be, what we’d like to do, or in which direction we’d like to take things, we should look for some assistance and guidance. And who better to look to than the people we admire. We should use our friends and mentors as a type of “people compass” to help guide us toward …

Knowing that someday, maybe sooner, maybe later, we’re going to have to deal with a failure of some sort is a powerful thing. Denying that we’ll ever experience difficulty is a horrible way to run a business, as keeping our head stuck in the sand doesn’t do anything to protect our backside. Planning what we’ll likely do when setbacks occur …

Time. It’s tempting to think of it as a never-ending resource. But it’s not. It’s the most precious resource we have. How are we spending ours? Our trouble is not ignorance, but inaction. Dale Carnegie