Reading Time: < 1 minIf you run a business, it’s important to be aware of the things your company intentionally doesn’t do. For example, at GreenMellen we build amazing websites, but we don’t take on large eCommerce projects. Those are a different beast, and require companies that can focus on those. By knowing that we don’t do those kinds […]
Learning
New information needs to tie to old ideas
Reading Time: < 1 minLast month I shared the idea of “anchor & twist” when it comes to marketing. You need to anchor your new product to an existing idea so that people will understand what you have, and then you can twist them to the new benefits that your product can bring. The same can work for your […]
Discuss ideas
Reading Time: 2 minYou’ve likely heard this saying before: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people“. It’s often attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, but seems to track back to Henry Thomas Buckle, as explained in this great research about it. While I’ve heard and appreciated that quote for a while, it’s only recently that […]
I let the “other” Mickey handle that
Reading Time: < 1 minYears ago, Jerry Seinfeld told a joke about “night guy versus morning guy”. You can see the clip below, but he essentially says that when he stays up too late, that’s him as “night guy”, and he’s not concerned with what “morning guy” needs to deal with. Here’s a clip: I’m finding that I’m the […]
10 Years of Meetup
Reading Time: 2 minBack in February of 2012, I attended WordCamp Atlanta for the first time (and that old site is still up!). During that weekend I met some incredible folks, but the most immediately impactful was Kathy Drewien. We kinda, sorta, vaguely knew each other, and were able to talk more there. She knew I lived in […]
You begin to fail when you deny your mistakes
Reading Time: < 1 minMistakes can often be amazing. I’ve shared ideas from people like Thomas J. Watson and Niels Bohr that literally prefer people that have made mistakes. There’s an important caveat in there though — you must be willing to learn from them. This was summarized perfectly in Carol Dweck’s book “Mindset“, where she shared: “John Wooden, […]
I change my mind. What do you do?
Reading Time: < 1 minThe increasing propensity for people to refuse to change their minds, even when faced with irrefutable evidence, is baffling to me. I don’t like being wrong – no one really does – but being wrong means that I’m now less wrong than I was before. More importantly, as I’ve shared before, most of the smartest […]
Is memorization important?
Reading Time: < 1 minOver the years I’ve read many articles about memorization. Many are against it (“We have the world’s information a Google search away”) while others are for it. I’m heavily in favor of taking time to memorize things, but I’m always open to new perspectives on how valuable (or not) that practice might be. I recently […]
Post-processing
Reading Time: 2 minAt the end of a productive span of time, such as a team meeting or reading an article, spending a few minutes processing what happened can make the time investment 10x more valuable. For example, after I read a book or an impactful article, I spend some time to pull out the highlights so I […]
Intentional mistakes can help
Reading Time: < 1 minI talk a lot on here about making mistakes, generally from the angle of “try hard to learn from your mistakes”. That certainly holds true, but there is some evidence that intentionally making mistakes can be helpful too. The Derring Effect A paper from the American Psychological Association showed that when students were instructed to […]