It’s so hard to start things, isn’t it OR IS IT?... My first time bowling was in Big Bear Lake, CA. My parents drove us up to the mountains for a long weekend. It was summer, so no skiing. Just fresh air and pine trees.

I hear this. Unsurprisingly this comment on my FB page comes from a mom. You can tell because Moms know ourselves. We know what we like to do and what we don't like to do because... Everybody demands we expend our energy on things we don't like to do all day long. LEAVE US ALONE. Someone else do it for a change. GAWD. I respect this conclusion.

A few days ago I watched a woman give a presentation who is smart, funny, dynamic, a terrific speaker. She's got that Grit. She tells it like it is and she's not afraid to be seen in all her gesturing, funny-face, loud-voice glory. So when she said toward the end of her presentation, "my personality is nowhere on my website or social media channels," I felt... sad.

Back in May I was in Tokyo, jogging. AS ONE DOES. I jogged by a school that had a bunch of German flashcard-type stickers pasted to the side of the cement school building. Because... Japan? I don't know why. Anyway, this was one of those flashcards.

You know that quote attributed to Henry Ford? “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” It means, "Don't give people the product they say they want. Give people the product that actually solves their problem." Right?

My son turned 5 in September. That means my business is about to turn 4. For the first year of his life I worked a full time remote job. I remember clearly deciding to quit my job. It was a lot of little things that added up to a moment.

"The business is not you. The business has its own fans, its own energy. ... You are stunting your business growth by treating the business and you as the same thing, especially if you are a solopreneur." I jotted this down while I was interviewing Denise Duffield-Thomas a couple of months ago.

I remember the first time I’d ever heard of an “Ideal Client Avatar.” You’re supposed to create an ICA to figure out how to market to her. I got disenchanted with ICAs. “They’re not real people!” I got kind of grumpy about the whole idea of dreaming up a completely imaginary person. I wanted to meet real, live people who could benefit from what I sell.

Yesterday I was workshopping an email with a Sweet Spot client of mine.She was telling a harrowing story in her email. She’s a talented writer, so the story was vivid. Snow. A car crash. No cell phone. All alone. When the trucker pulled over to help, my jaw clenched. "He better be a good guy!" I thought. It was that good. Then, at the end of the email, she snailed?

Last week, I wrote about how someone commented on my weight, because I don’t look the way I did before I had my second kid. Anyway, I told you that story because I was pleasantly surprised by how I handled it.