How to market yourself in a loud world

help one person

Who else hates marketing?

What about posting on social media like a self-absorbed and inconsiderate jerk?

Self-promotion is a necessary part of work, but it feels unnatural to many of us.

A lot of people grew up with an old-school work ethic: Put your head down, do good work, stay modest, and don’t draw attention to yourself.

You learn to fly under the radar and hope your results speak for you.

But if you’re an artist, writer, freelancer, or entrepreneur, people first need to know that your work exists.

And that’s where the discomfort starts. You want to share your work without becoming someone who turns every conversation into a sales pitch.

I’ve been writing online since 2015, and I’m still not interested in becoming an internet personality. But I’ve learned how to promote my work in a way that fits me.

Here are five things that helped me.

Continue Reading

The mind and you: The biggest illusion of your life

In January 2015, I don’t think I got a single good night of sleep.

My grandmother had been in the hospital while I was away on a New Year’s vacation with my girlfriend at the time. My family back home hadn’t told me how serious the situation was. After my grandmother passed away, my mind kept going back to the same question:

What if I hadn’t gone on that vacation?

The relationship wasn’t in a good place either. So that created a new set of questions. What if I had ended it earlier? What if I stayed? What if I ended up alone?

My job also felt wrong. I was dealing with a teammate who was backstabbing me, and I kept thinking: What if I had seen it earlier? What if I quit? What would a hole in my résumé do to my career?

Continue Reading

Balancing quiet focus time and go time

A reader recently asked me this to write about balance:

“I’d like to read your takes on how to balance the tendency of slow living or the one-thing-at-a-time approach to life and staying current in the fast-paced world.

Moreover, how to balance honoring decisions to slow down and also not fall into irrelevance, especially when you’re pursuing professional goals or passion projects you’d like to flourish.”

I had a similar conversation with a friend who runs his own business. He told me, “Man, I’m so inconsistent.”

He kept feeling that he should do more.

His wife finally asked him to stop for a moment and look at his results so far this year. When he checked, he realized he was outperforming last year on all of his goals and targets.

So why did he still feel behind?

Continue Reading

9 things to take pride in (that have nothing to do with money)

Most of what people do all day falls into one of two boxes.

Box one is money: Your income, savings, the next promotion, or the bigger client.

Box two is pleasure and status: How you look, who likes you, where you ate, what you posted, or who saw it.

There’s nothing wrong with those things. Money matters. And pleasure makes life enjoyable. But if those are the only two scoreboards you use, your sense of self-worth will always depend on something outside of you.

Continue Reading
1 2 3 … 172