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  Moving fast in business is important, because speed is power. As I've gotten older, more experienced and, hopefully, wiser, I've learned that going faster often means slowing down first. In our business, we often have great ideas.  But those ideas are, initially, half-baked, not fully formed, need some experimentation, etc.  When I was younger, I would get excited about an idea and just jump in enthusiastically and start working on it:  Start coding it, start a blog post, start emailing people, whatever.  I would jump right to tactics and implementation.  If the "idea" happened to be email that needed a response, I would [...]

Everything that a business commits resources to is, essentially a bet, so it's important that you make the right bets.  It's also important to make those bets, in as many cases as you possibly can, small.  More small bets beats a few big bets.  Then you double down on the winners.   This kind of thinking has led Amazon to become the powerhouse that it is today.  Jeff Bezos famously said, "Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day…."  More experiments = more successes.  Making experiments fast and easy is [...]

  Peter Drucker once said to Jim Collins, "You spend too much time thinking about if you’ll be successful. It’s the wrong question. The question is, 'how to be useful?'"Artists constantly ask us how they can sell more art, how they can improve their marketing, how can get more exposure. What they're really asking is "How to be Successful?".While those are fine things to worry about, a huge lesson I've learned is that to get better answers, one must learn to ask better questions.And that's a better question to ask yourself, "How can I be useful?"Drucker went on to advise, "Your first responsibility [...]