If you aren’t an entrepreneur or someone in a creative industry, it’s possible you might not be able to imagine how much disappointment I go through.

I create things constantly. New ideas. New solutions to problems. Some ideas have worked so well people pay for them. Most don’t.

Same with my writing. I put things out there I think might get some momentum on places like Twitter and Facebook. Some go crazy. Most don’t.

I love Bill Murray’s take on this:

Bill: You gotta commit. You’ve gotta go out there and improvise and you’ve gotta be completely unafraid to die. You’ve got to be able to take a chance to die. And you have to die lots. You have to die all the time. You’re goin’ out there with just a whisper of an idea. The fear will make you clench up. That’s the fear of dying. When you start and the first few lines don’t grab and people are going like, “What’s this? I’m not...

I saw something the other day that really impressed me on how a coffee shop near me has stepped up the game of their loyalty program. If you have customers who you’d like to be more loyal, I think we can learn a lot from this.

Your typical loyalty program at a cafe is your average punch card. Buy 10. Get 1 free. Who doesn’t have one these days? They’re all the same. A punch card is a bit of a start into using psychology to help influence customers. Usually companies stop there.

“Do we have a punch card? Check. Let’s hope people keep coming back.”

What’s funny about these cafes and their loyalty programs is that I’m completely disloyal to all of them.

There’s a never ending supply of coffee shops near me. I can go to Starbucks, of course, or to Intelligentsia. I have oodles of others. It’s really hard to be loyal. I really like coffee.

And as much of a creature of habit as I am, I...

Dyson loves the color pink and sparkly things.
Sometimes he wears dresses, and sometimes he wears jeans.
He likes to wear his princess tiara, even when climbing trees.
He’s a Princess Boy, and his family loves him exactly the way he is.

My Princess Boy

A few weeks ago I had the tremendous pleasure of getting to spend time with my two year old niece.

For just a few days I got to glimpse into the life of someone who gets see the world fresh for the very first time. Without any prejudices or preconceptions. What I saw those few days continues to inspire me.

One day my wife and I were watching her, and my wife was going to read one of my niece’s books to her. I was nearby and asked what she was going to read. When I heard the title “My Princess Boy”, I thought I misheard. My brain didn’t quite make sense of those words together in a title. Then I heard what the book was about.

...

I thought this was a unique and non-intuitive marketing device from Coldwater Creek, a women’s clothing store.

I’m curious if anyone reading this knows someone who works in marketing for Coldwater Creek who can shed more insight into how well this worked, or if you’ve tried a similar promotion and seen it outperform something more traditional? Email me if you want to share something.

My initial reaction was that this won’t outperform a typical online sales promotion, for example: “This weekend, for 3 days only: 30% off!”

A premise of this particular sale is to get a shopper to start worrying about scarcity, a common marketing tactic. You don’t want to miss buying something now, and risk missing the item you want because someone else purchases the inventory before you do.

Hence the “Tomorrow they may be gone!” sub-headline.

But if you are successful at getting people to start...

A junior at my old my high school, Loyola Academy, just got a perfect score on his ACT test.

A piece of advice from the article:

He also discovered on the ACT test that in the reading section, if he read the questions first, he had a better idea of what to focus on when he went back to do the reading.

I’ve constantly found this same technique to not just be invaluable for taking tests, but helpful in all sorts of things life presents you.

It’s how I passed through my entire Spanish language requirement in college even though my skill at Spanish was weak.

Before college started we were required to take a set of placement exams. As I was going through the Spanish placement test, I would read the questions first. Then as I was reading the Spanish passages for reading comprehension, even though I didn’t understand ¾ of what I was reading, I could locate the blocks of text the questions...

One thing I’ve noticed about many of the people whose creativity inspires me is that they seem to be obsessed with something.

A few random examples are folks like Jason Fried at 37signals and his obsession with cars. Or there’s Monet and his obsession with water lilies. Or the folks at OXO and their obsession with hands & gloves.

Sometimes the obsession is completely tangential to what they usually work on, but somehow eventually it finds its way back into their work. Often as inspiration.

Sometimes as gold.

One of my very favorite examples of this is Aaron Draplin and his obsession with graphic design heritage from the last 100 years. Especially old manuals, vintage ledgers and agricultural memo books.

I started finding out he was a collector of these types of things from some post of his. If I remember correctly, he was talking about going to an estate sale and going into some...

On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest.

-Brian Clark @copyblogger

No idea where Brian got this number from or what kind of testing went into the statistic. Regardless of knowing its accuracy, I can attest that I would have had a much better reaction from a blog post I wrote last week, if I had followed his rule of thumb.

So. Last week I wrote a post I was hoping would further the thought in people’s minds that we use way too many masculine metaphors for courage. We don’t use racist metaphors for achieving more success or being smarter, so why do we still so often read advice like “You need to have the balls to be a great designer”?

I went ahead and tried to get clever with the title of that post, not so much as to bait users into reading, but I thought that the title would lead to a clever dramatic irony, since the post...

Nice article, aside from the fact it should be proofread.

-MrDavidChan

I hate to nitpick, but it’s very difficult to not get distracted by the horrible punctuation and spelling.

-sneak

I want to share a a few things that have helped me be more creative, and more importantly more authentic, in my writing. I’ll address a couple of my vocal critics soon.

First, I’d like to share a story about a kid I met a little over a year ago.

I was volunteering for an organization here in Chicago where we helped high school kids prepare for their college applications. These kids were part of the program because they were usually the first in their families, often underprivileged, to be applying to college. We were there to help them through the college application process.

So there’s this one Saturday I met a student who wanted help writing and editing his college application essay.

We went...

Please let me set the stage.

Ad re-targeting is driving me fucking crazy.

For those who don’t know this term, re-targeting is the process advertisers and ad networks use to track you on the internet so that if you land on a website, say for example Coca-Cola’s site, you’ll then start seeing Coca-Cola ads on a ton of other websites you visit that show ads from that same ad network.

Since Google and its Adsense block are on a ton of websites, it ends up feeling like Coca-Cola is EVERYWHERE. Even though if your friend visited those same websites, they might not see those Coca-Cola ads, if they’ve never visited cocacola.com.

My problem isn’t that re-targeting exists. In fact, as a marketer myself and as someone who has spent thousands and thousands of dollars on ads from places like Google and Facebook, I know very well how powerful something like re-targeting can be.

Re-targeting...

It’s odd how often the phrase “growing a pair” or “do you have the balls?” comes up when talking about courage. Especially in the fields of business, technology and entrepreneurship. Things like ‘Do You Have The Balls to Make it?“ or "It takes balls to build the best product ever. Grow a pair” are often the titles of advice we read or hear around us.

The phrase is usually a slang term defined as:

to act with fortitude, strength, determination; “man up”.

-The Online Slang Dictionary

Of course it’s figurative. But what strikes me the most about this phrase is how ridiculous it would be for me to say something about changing the color of your skin or the shape of your eyes, in order to achieve a highly desired goal of humanity.

I’d likely get punched in the face (and rightly so) if I stated things like: “You want to be more successful? Change the color of your skin” or “To be a...