I got an email this morning that even floored me, the most cynical person in the world. It came from a PR person who was pitching me a new product – A shirt. Yes, a shirt. Nothing special about the shirt, it was simply a new style from a new designer. But here’s what gets me: The subject line of the email was: “Hi! Can I borrow your audience?” (Insert blogging-car-skidding-to-a-halt sound here…) Can you borrow my… Hold up… WHAT? Can you “BORROW MY AUDIENCE?” Are you serious? OK. Not even taking into account the fact that my audience… IS AN AUDIENCE, and not, say, A SPATULA, no, you can’t “borrow my audience.” Let’s understand something – My audience is [...]

So in 2 days, this will happen:     That will be almost 16 hours of uninterrupted writing. Blog posts, my new book (due out in January, being published by Palgrave/MacMillan), emails for my newsletter… Heck, perhaps even a note to my future child (not that there’s anything in the works yet, calm down, mom…) But there will be writing. It seems that planes are the only place lately where I can write uninterrupted, without the real world, or the Internet, or my mobile phone, or my cat distracting me. (Squirrel!) Planes are my last bastion of creativity. I’ve got a handful of new blog posts to write, including… A true story of how a six year relationship with a [...]

Another in the “How to be taken seriously” series. This time: Surviving SXSW and not coming out worse on the other side. Having “been there, done that” multiple times when it comes to SXSW, I thought I’d pass along some helpful advice for you from someone who’s survived the war, and emerged more or less unscathed on the other side. These are tried and true, time-tested tips. I can’t encourage you enough to use them – Especially #1. Especially #1. 1) For the love of all that’s good and holy, don’t drink. SXSW is funny. Take thousands of stressed out people, fly them somewhere. Keep them up late into the night, ply them with free alcohol, then expect them to [...]

About a year ago, I wrote a blog post called “Why you need to get up earlier, and how to do it“. It became an instant popular post, with tons of linkage and referrals from people around the world who were all like “I’m going to get up earlier! This is what I’m going to do!” Cool. Glad it helped, and the basic rules in it still apply. (Use the bedroom for sleeping and sex only, drink a huge glass of water the second you wake up…) etc. Over the past year, however, I learned something really, really interesting, just from my own experience: The type of bed on which you sleep plays a huge part in how well you [...]

When you hire a professional contractor to do the job you could do, so it’ll be “perfect,” as opposed to just “done.”