Kondraty Ryleyev was the leader of a rebellion meant to overthrow Russia’s Czar, Nicholas I. The rebellion was quickly stomped out like a discarded cigarette and Nicolas I sentenced Ryleyev to death by hanging. Later, when the trapdoor opened, Ryleyev dangled from the rope for a split second before it broke and the rebel leader came crashing to the ground. At this time in Russia, superstition ran rampant and situations, such as a broken rope, weren’t seen as coincidences but as divine intervention. Believing he was in the clear, Ryleyev climbed to his feet and shouted at the crowd… “You see ..read more

I’d prefer you not follow me around. But, if you were to disobey this preference, I’m afraid you wouldn’t find my life terribly interesting. There is nothing entertaining about watching someone write. I’d say the same for reading. But, I do find it difficult to pull my eyes off of a person enraptured in a book. Perhaps, this is because I’m a writer with ambitions of one day writing books that demand this level of obsession. Perhaps, this is because spying on someone reading a physical manuscript in a world so heavily dominated by glowing screens is a refreshing contrast. (They say vinyl ..read more

Early last week I was in New York doing some writing for a company that helps other companies spot cluster-fucks before said cluster-fucks become costly. It’s a bit more complicated than this but that’s all you need to know for the purpose of this writing. The founder of the company is thirty-two years old and while I don’t know how much he’s worth, I do know that his company raised $1 billion in funding earlier this year. He said something during our time together that I want to share with you now. In a passing comment, he mentioned that in the first five years building his business, he’d ma ..read more

I woke up early this morning next to my girl. She coaxed me into staying in bed with her a little bit longer than usual –– until about 9:30 a.m. –– because I had turned twenty-eight-years-old while I was asleep the night before. After an hour or so of nuzzling and dozing in and out of sleep, I climbed out of bed. I brushed my teeth. I took a piss. I pulled on my clothes. I slipped into my boots. And, I packed up my stout burlap duffle bag that carries me from my place to her's and back again in the evenings that we share together. As she was seeing me out, she asked me if I had anything speci ..read more

LinkedIn is starting to feel like bad reality TV. And, if they’re not careful, I forsee their platform following in Medium’s quickly dying footsteps. Recently, an entrepreneur by the name of Braden Wallake shared a teary-eyed selfie of himself with a trembling finger awkwardly placed over his quivering lips, along with a post that opened with… “This will be the most vulnerable thing I’ll ever share.” Scrolling past it as a viewer creates some momentary pause and genuine concern. It’s a literal picture of a grown man crying after all, and I think you’d be a bit heartless not to find yourself w ..read more

Holier-than-thou advertising agencies like to tell their tightwad clients that they can pick two out of three nice-to-haves: Fast Cheap Good Ironically enough, this applies to restaurants just as much as it applies to agencies. You can have cheap, fast food but it ain’t gonna be good. You can have fast, good food but it ain’t gonna be cheap. You can have cheap, good food but it ain’t gonna be fast. (Swap out “food” for “advertising” and you’ll pretty quickly see what the agencies are getting at… ) Food for thought. This “pick two of three” framing works for just about anything. A sple ..read more

Most of marketing and advertising is hoopla and horse shit. And, if anyone in the business ever tries to tell you anything different, then I’d stick my bare ass in a piranha pond before ever considering cutting them a check.  The internet –– especially LinkedIn and Twitter –– is filled with marketers, advertisers, copywriters, designers and growth hackers that are handsomely rewarded for pretending to have all the answers you’re looking for. But bad things happen when we follow “gurus”. There was once a spiritual guru by the name of Yogi Bhajan who a lot of folks believed had all the ans ..read more

Your company cares about you. But, they care about their bottom line more. Over the past couple of years, AliExpress has laid off 624 employees, Carvana has laid off 2,500, Ford 580, Noom 500, Robinhood 300, Peloton 2,800, Nestle 474, Unilever 1,500 and QVC 1,900. The list goes on. When folks get fired, it hurts. Especially in the United States where "what you do" is so closely aligned with "who you are" that it’d be a chore to run a cheese cutter between the two. I believe in capitalism, just ethical capitalism; and I wish more companies gunning for the moon were a bit more conscientious abo ..read more

If we were really wanting to figure out productivity, we’d lock folks in a room with water, coffee and a sack lunch, give them a to-do list long enough to chock a horse and tell them they can’t come out until they’ve scratched everything off the list. Instead, we’ve reached for more humane (but far less effective) productivity alternatives with the most notorious being, yes, email. Email made us more reachable but less productive. The problem with email –– and the hundreds of productivity tools that came after it –– is that while it made us more “reachable”, it created additional unnecessary ..read more

Back in 1954, George Plimpton –– the first and only editor of the Paris Review –– interviewed Ernest Hemingway at a café in Madrid. (You can read the conversation in its entirety here…) Hemingway came across as a jaded asshole for most of the discussion. So much so, that reading the interview left me with the overwhelming urge to cold-cock his ghost. At one point, Hemingway was so fed up with Plimpton’s questions he asked him why he was taking time away from writing to answer them. Despite this, there were quite a few gems. Midway through the interview, Plimpton mentioned that the day prior H ..read more