Category: Growing Your Business

Failure Is an Option

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18 COMMENTS

Today’s brain teaser: Can you think of an activity that… #1. Can’t be unlearned. #2. Does not require understanding how it works to be proficient at. #3. Is easy to teach by demonstrating, but impossible to teach by simply talking about. If you said sex, I’m going to give you partial credit. But no, the answer I am looking for is riding a bicycle. Once mastered, it’s known by you forever. But no matter how good you become at doing it, you can’t transfer that knowledge to another person verbally. […] Click to read more…

Risky Business 

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We were down in Atlanta this past weekend, visiting our son Evan. For reasons we fail to understand, Evan prefers mild winters, friendly inhabitants, and modern airports over whatever the opposite of all that is that we offer here in Massachusetts. As it happens, Evan is in the market for a new living room couch. And so, in between eating a month’s worth of food in a single, three-day period, we visited a few stores to help him decide. When it comes to buying furniture – bed, chair, couch, whatever […] Click to read more…

Eyes Wide Shut

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I was standing on the second-floor landing of a hotel lobby waiting for my wife. I knew she was coming soon, so I just stood there. I wasn’t looking at my phone … I wasn’t walking around … I was just standing there. Suddenly, I heard a door unlock and immediately realized I was directly in front of somebody’s room. Uh oh. I didn’t want to run away as if I had been deliberately lurking. But I couldn’t just stand there either without looking like someone who had been deliberately lurking. Fortunately, there […] Click to read more…

Presumed Competent

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4 COMMENTS

Long ago, I had a client, a financial planner. One day, while visiting his home office, I noticed a BMW sportscar sitting in his driveway. He had always driven a pickup truck, so I assumed it wasn’t his. But he said no, it was. Except pretty much the only time he drove it was when he was going to meet with a client. As he explained, “If your financial planner shows up in a pickup truck, you assume he’s not very good.” That seemed to make sense. And I guess it […] Click to read more…

It’s *Not* in the Knowing

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(Listen to this post, here.) I don’t know how it began; I must have clicked on something. Because suddenly, in addition to the familiar scraps filling up my Instagram feed – NBA highlights, home maintenance tips, Key and Peele clips, male incontinence remedies (it’s for a friend) – I suddenly began seeing people doing card tricks. I don’t know why, but there they were. One day, I watched this one. I know, pretty amazing. But what’s most interesting – and the woman in the video says this right at the beginning – […] Click to read more…