The other day I was talking to a speaker friend of mine and he mentioned that he’d booked a certain event that I’d done in the past. “Haven’t you already done that one?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said, “They said this is the first time they’ve ever had the same speaker come back.” For the record, he totally deserves it. The guy is an amazing speaker. But the conversation made me think. The event we were talking about is a big deal. It has its own lore in the speaker world. And part of that lore is...
12 days ago • 1 min read
Over the past few months, I’ve been working on a treehouse for my kids. I actually started building the treehouse a few years ago. I got the platform up in the tree, but then the project just sort of…stalled. The problem was that I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to build on top of the platform, but I knew a regular treehouse was out of the question. I mean, anyone can build a regular treehouse. Then one day I was buying birdseed (I’m in my 40s now, so I’ve become a birdwatching guy.) when...
19 days ago • 2 min read
A few years ago, I decided that I wanted to get back into drawing. To help motivate myself, I bought some fancy POSCA markers. POSCA markers are super cool. They come in all sorts of interesting colors, and since they’re paint markers, the color is opaque. That means you can do really cool stuff with them that ordinary watercolor markers can’t do. POSCA markers are also expensive. In fact, if you Google “POSCA markers”, one of the suggested search results is “Why are POSCA markers so...
26 days ago • 2 min read
Many years ago, when I was still new to the speaking world, I was talking to a friend of mine. He’d been in the industry a lot longer than I had, and I was asking him for advice. During our conversation I made an offhand comment about “Yeah, but you’re doing a lot more events than I am.” He looked confused for a second and then said “No I’m not.” “Really?” I asked, surprised. “Yeah.” he said. “I’d rather do fewer events at a higher fee. That gives me more time at home to write, work on...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Yesterday I was speaking at an event in Grand Rapids. I came down early to catch the speaker before me, and I noticed he was having mic issues. Clicks. Hisses. Loud pops. It was rough. Luckily, the guy was a pro. He turned off his mic, projected his booming voice throughout the room, and went on as though it was no big deal. Since I was up next, the client pulled me out into the hall for a quick debrief with his team. “As you can see, we’re having some AV issues.” he said. “The hotel says...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Last week I told my wife I was jealous of her. She’d just gotten back from a hangout with her girlfriends and she was in tears as she recounted something funny that had happened that evening. “I gotta tell you, I’m jealous of what you guys have.” I said. See, my wife has an incredible group of girlfriends. Honestly, it’s the kind of friend group that seems like it only exists on TV. These women have supported each other through pregnancies, miscarriages, and double-digit numbers of births....
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
There’s a dangerous myth in the American psyche that I think kills an inordinate amount of great ideas. It’s the myth of the lone genius. Elon. Kanye. Beyoncé. Taylor Swift. The list goes on. We look at these people with their immense levels of success and think “How did one person do all of that?!” It turns out, the answer is simple: they didn't. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not being a hater. I’m not saying these people haven't accomplished impressive things. That would be ridiculous. What I’m...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Lately I’ve been spending less time online, but not for the reasons you might expect. I’m not cutting back because I’m concerned about screen time or blue light or the cumulative effects of doomscrolling on the human psyche (although those are all good reasons, too). I’m cutting back because it’s a competitive advantage. I’m an ideas guy. (It’s kind of my whole thing, actually.) But contrary to common creative mythology, ideas don’t just pop into existence. They’re made from other ideas. The...
2 months ago • 2 min read
When I was 17, I wrecked my girlfriend’s car. We were driving around aimlessly, because that’s all I could really afford to do. We took her Durango, because it was nicer than my car, but she liked me to drive, so I drove. Right into a pole. In my defense, the pole was basically asking to be driven into. It was a short metal pipe, painted black (incidentally, the same color as the parking lot), and it sat low enough that you could easily miss it if you were in a car that sat a little higher...
3 months ago • 3 min read