Category: Voice/Tone/Trust Building

Winning the Content Game

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18 COMMENTS

Amazon doesn’t know it, but its delivery drivers are unwitting participants in a game that my son Evan and I have been playing for the past several months. Here’s how it works… Like most of us, Evan orders a lot of things on Amazon; he might get two or even three deliveries in a single week. And Amazon, you may have noticed, now has its drivers take pictures of the packages after leaving them at your door. The pictures appear with the delivery confirmation emails. Since Evan shares our Prime […] Click to read more…

It Ain’t The Meat, It’s The Motion

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34 COMMENTS

The first job I had after graduating from college was as a bank teller at the Brookline Savings Bank in Brookline, Massachusetts. (Yes, as a matter of fact, I do have a liberal arts degree.) It was a great job – the best one I ever had, before or since. Fast-paced, varied, independent, and thanks to the fact that at the end of each shift you were responsible for “balancing” all the transactions, it had a built-in means of determining how successful you had been over the course of the day. […] Click to read more…

In a Pickle

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19 COMMENTS

Maybe you’ve heard. Tennis and Ping Pong had a baby – they named it “Pickleball.” This game/sport is kind of a hybrid of the two, played with paddles, a wiffleball and a court with painted lines and a net strung across the middle. I’ve been playing it for the last couple of months, something I never anticipated. First, because I decided long ago that I would commit what little competitive testosterone I had left to playing basketball. But with that shut down for the foreseeable future, I was in search […] Click to read more…

Emotional Rescue

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22 COMMENTS

(Listen to this post, here.) Unlike many of my married, male friends, I do a fair amount of the household grocery shopping. Not because I’m so wonderful, mind you (although I am distractingly good looking). Rather, it’s because years ago, as a first-time father, I realized that a trip to the grocery store came packaged with 60 minutes of diaper-free peace and quiet. And so, all these years later, it’s still an activity I share with my wife, Linda. But, as you’ve probably noticed, grocery shopping today is a totally […] Click to read more…

What To Say Now

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12 COMMENTS

(Listen to this post, here.) Assuming the weeks haven’t morphed into one continuous day by then, causing time itself to cease, come this June, it will have been 20 years since I quit my job and went off to work on my own. Back then, this newsletter had about 30 subscribers and was called, Different Rules, Different Tools. I gave it that name for two reasons. First, because I love rhyme and alliteration (even on vacation). Left to my own devices, my daughter’s name would likely have been Kitty.   Second, because back […] Click to read more…