Wednesday, February 13, 2019, Delray Beach, Florida


From My Work-in-Progress Basket

Are You An Information Addict?

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“Let’s have lunch,” DK said in his email. “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

Two days later, we were eating chopped chicken salads at City Oyster on Atlantic Avenue. We talked a bit about family news, but it was clear that he wanted to talk about a question that was on his mind.

The question: Should he spend $100,000 on the highest level of an internet marketing program that he had been looking at?

“It looks really good,” he said. “But I’m not sure it makes sense for me to invest that kind of money.”

“A hundred grand is a lot of money,” I said.

“But you get an awful lot for it,” he explained. “They do all the technical stuff for you, which I’m not very good at. All I have to do is come up with the product idea.”

The waitress filled our drinks.

“So if you invest in this marketing program… what kind of products would you sell?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“How about this: If you had all the money you could ever need, how would you spend your time? What would you do to give your life purpose?”

“That’s a good question,” he said. “Actually, I like the idea of purposefulness. Maybe I’d do something along those lines.”

I told him that if I were he, I’d not spend a hundred grand on a program that gave me marketing and operational tools until I knew what I was going to do with them.  READ MORE

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From My Work-in-Progress Basket

An Unavoidable Hazard of Success

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Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Delray Beach, FL – If you’re smart, hardworking and persistent, you’ve got what it takes to be successful at any career you choose. But as you climb the ladder, you’re likely to face a problem they don’t talk about in business schools: too many attractive opportunities.

For 90+% of the population, this is a problem that will never arise. But you – you are in the top 10%. And the farther you travel down the road of success, the more opportunities will come your way.

I’ve heard this complaint from good people I’ve mentored for years. Just recently, GR, an up-and-coming copywriter, put it this way:

As one becomes successful, it seems more and more opportunities present themselves. It’s tempting to want to go after every single one of them.

    So how do you spot the opportunities that are right for you? 

Or, how do you decide which ones to say “no” to and which ones to place your bets on?

Here’s a quick answer, the answer I gave to him…

I don’t think there is a failsafe strategy for selecting and rejecting career opportunities.

If you are a thinking person, you will recognize in every opportunity a complex assortment of costs, risks, and benefits. The most obvious of these will be financial. But there are emotional, intellectual, political, and social costs, risks, and benefits too.

If you did a matrix that included all of these variables, it would quickly become very difficult to read. And that’s one reason smart people like GR have trouble deciding which opportunities to take and which to reject.

Here’s the thing. Opportunities are inherently complicated. You can’t un-complicate them.

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