Coffee Time

“How much you want to make a bet I can throw a football over them mountains? Yeah. If coach would’ve put me in fourth quarter…we’d have been state champions, no doubt. No doubt in my mind. You better believe things would have been different. I’d have gone pro…in a heartbeat. I’d be making millions of […]

“He was able to turn out thousands of paintings over his lifetime while his contemporaries were lucky to turn out a hundred” – Mike Michalowicz discussing Sir Peter Lely A while back I was talking with a friend and client (Mitch Wilder) about how I’ve been feeling increasingly underwater lately. The firm has continued to […]

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. […] Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility”  – On Pain by Kahlil Gibran   This past […]

“I don’t think I ever sang the same way twice. And I don’t think I ever sang the same tempo. One night is a little bit slower and the next night is a little bit brighter. It depends on how I feel. I don’t know, blues is sort of a mixed-up thing. You just have […]

That was my absolute favorite song for most of my teenage years. I had a visceral reaction to it and it touched me on a deep level. Because it matched what I was going through at the time (or at least what I thought I was going through – “love” at that age is quite the mercurial thing.)

There’s a term in competitive gaming called “Elo hell”. The phrase comes from the Elo ranking system, which was originally created for chess matches in an attempt to match players of similar skillsets to play against each other. The ranking system has since been used by participants in board games, sports leagues, and a number […]

“Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.” ― Mark Twain I’m a big proponent of tracking key metrics in your business. (For those unfamiliar with the term, a metric is simply a quantifiable measure that businesses use to track, monitor and assess the success or failure of various business processes). A large portion of my […]

“I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.” – Richard P. Feynman Hardly anyone is fully content with their current situation – least of all entrepreneurs. If you ask 100 business owners, even those […]

“They used to tell me I was building a dream With peace and glory ahead Why should I be standing in line Just waiting for bread?   Once I built a railroad, I made it run Made it race against time Once I built a railroad, now it’s done Brother, can you spare a dime?” […]

A few years ago, I did a string of articles talking about the importance of charging appropriately. They talked about how customer loyalty can sometimes be fleeting, how low prices can diminish perceived value and the volume of customers you get, and how low prices can attract the wrong type of customers. In the last […]

One of my favorite things in music is when one artist samples another artist’s work. (“Sampling” means taking a portion of an existing song and using that as an element of a new song.) Musicians in all genres do this, but you seem to see it the most in R&B and hip-hop. The sample can […]

“I can do that myself. I don’t need to hire someone else to do it.” How often have you heard the above statement? Someone is capable of doing a task themselves, so they don’t want the “unnecessary” expense of hiring someone else to do it for them. And in some situations, that’s perfectly reasonable. For […]