I love the beginning and end of the year more than any other time. As a strategy-obsessed and goal-oriented person with countless projects, ideas, and ambitions, only January and December present an opportunity where I feel that I can truly breath, think, reflect, and plan. For me, the rest of the year is for executing the plan and adapting. Without the process I follow every January and December, I don’t think I would be able to accomplish a fraction of what I’ve been able to over the last decade. So, whether or not you are like me in this regard, you likely have things you want to accomplish, and I thought it might be helpful to share with you what my process looks like. This is the blueprint for how I plan my year. Overview This is the outline for what I do each year. I’ll break each of these down and give examples. My Three Words I start out the year picking my three words. Instead of resolutions which tend to get abandoned, these three words are themes that I keep in mind throughout the year. I’m not resolving to do anything. I’m thinking about who I want to be and choosing three words to remind me of these commitments. These words are something I tend to think about throughout the previous year as I notice areas I’m falling short, places I need to grow, or ways to enhance what’s already working. As I think of words that may work for the upcoming year, I’ll add them to a note for future reference. This year the three words are Author – Reduce – Delegate. I make myself a phone lock screen wallpaper so I see these everyday. Yes, it always involves spider-man Once I have my themes, I move to Goals. Goals While themes are meant to color and flavor my year, goals are tangible outcomes I’m hoping to accomplish. These are generally S.M.A.R.T goals wit

If you’re not familiar with My Three Words yet, please read this page for more context. As I’ve done every year since 2013, here are my three words for the year. Author I wrote a book…and I’m really proud of it. It is being released on January 25th, 2022. I am now officially an author. I chose the word Author because after all the time and energy it took to write this book I damn well better honor that work by promoting it. I have a tendency to work really hard on something and then as soon as it is done, moving onto the next project. Not this time! Every single day of 2022, I will remind myself that I am an Author. I also see Author as a reminder that I am the one who is writing my story through my actions. I like the empowering feeling that being the author of my story gives me. P.S. You can pre-order The Lovable Leader now on Barnes & Noble and Target. Amazon coming soon. Reduce I take on too much. I pursue too many ideas. I’m overly optimistic about my capacity. As a result, my attention is often fragmented and scattered. There are only so many hours in a day, and so many days in a week. This year, I plan to live according to that reality. I’m going to actively focus on reducing how much I work on. This means killing off the lower priority projects that stop me from completing the most important work I could be doing. By reducing the number of things I’m trying to accomplish, I give myself the opportunity for depth instead of breadth. Delegate With 1 day for planning and content, and 3 days for clients, there’s not a lot of time for me to spend on setup or maintenance tasks, I don’t have the bandwidth for things that take too much time, and I have little chance of scaling beyond trading time for money. I’ve been building multiple streams of revenue, but nearly everything is only partially built. This is why I need help and it’s why I’ve hired help. I’ve never been good at delegating but this year I’m going to get a hell of a lot better. … So, this is what I’m focusing on this year. If you’re reading this, I hope that you hold me accountable. What are YOUR three words? If you’ve never done this before, there’s no better time to start. Pick your three words and write up something to post on your blog or on Medium. Share it on social media and add the hashtag #my3words so other people can find it. Feeling shy? Don’t want to publish your own post to share with the world? Just post your three words in the comments of this post. Thanks as always to Chris Brogan for the inspiration to do this every year. Becoming Superhuman My 3 Words For 2022 Play Episode

As part of my commitment to growth and belief in the importance of self-reflection, I’m adding a new component to this blog, newsletter, and podcast: retrospectives. The purpose of the retrospective is pulled directly from Agile Methodology. As stated in the Principles from the Agile Manifesto: At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly. I’m adopting the retrospective to look back on what worked, what didn’t, and collect some thoughts on future actions. Starting with this post, the retrospective will be my last post each year. Now, every year my blog, newsletter, and podcast for Becoming Superhuman will start with My Three Words and conclude with the Retrospective. I encourage you to do this retrospective exercise for yourself either in private, or in public on your own blog or newsletter. If you don’t have a blog or newsletter and would still like to publish your retrospective, feel free to leave it in the comments. I’m always interested to learn more about my audience. This is the last post of 2021, it’s primarily an exercise that I’m doing for myself, but I’m doing it publicly to share my process. I hope you enjoy it. What I did well My second full year of solopreneurship has been a resounding success. Here are a few things I’m particular proud of. I’ve maintained a 4-day work week schedule. I use Monday as a planning and content day, Tuesday through Thursday to work with clients, and I take every Friday off to be with my daughter, reading books, watching cartoons, playing with blocks, dolls, and various singing and musical toys. I’m proud of the consulting and coaching I’ve done to help clients work through challenges in Brand strategy, marketing, sales, and productivity. This year also marked the start of really getting back into public speaking. Something I’m extremely proud of was delivering my Becoming Superhuman Keynote as the opening for a conference on Heroic Leadership to 500 high school students. 2021 has also been the year where my greatest professional accomplishment was realized. I began working with Page Two publishing to bring my book, ***The Lovable Leader***, into the world. Having gone through the entire editing, proofing and design process, I can honestly say that I’m unreservedly proud of the final product. The book will be released January 25, 2022. You can join the waitlist for the pre-order here. I read 27 books so far this year, which a new record for me. Finally, this has been an excellent year for content. My blog became both a newsletter and a podcast as I muddled through a few different email marketing solutions and finally pulled the trigger on an audio version. I’m proud of what my content platform has become. I’m also very proud of the content that I put out this year and think it represents some of my most useful and thoughtful insights and explorations. Not including this post, I’ve published 78 blog/newsletter posts in 2021. Here are some of my favorite posts from 2021:Leadership & CultureHow to change the world

All of the worst jobs I’ve ever had in my career were the ones where I worked for somebody else. The only times I’ve ever felt truly happy in my career are the times where I was working for myself. About two years ago I made a pretty fundamental shift in what it meant to work for myself. I decided to start a company of one. Today, I want to revisit with you why I decided to go the solopreneur route, why I intend to stick with it, and why you may want to consider it. Labor Exploration We go to work to make money. Ideally, we enjoy that work and find it meaningful, though this seems to be the exception, not the rule. Whether we make a living working a job, starting a company, or working for ourselves in a company of one, we’re all trying to make a good living. We want to make enough money to cover our costs of living, save for college or retirement, and have some left over for leisure. I would argue that among the options, self-employment provides the simplest path to making the best living. Not necessarily the easiest, but certainly the most simple. A Job If you have a job, your labor is an expense to the company. Therefore, it is in the company’s best interest to keep salaries and payroll low while trying to get as much revenue generating productivity out of each laborer. Even in a well-paying job, a good portion of the revenue that your labor produces is taken by the company to cover fixed costs, to pay the higher salaries at the top of the organization, or dividends and profit-sharing for shareholders and investors. In order to increase your salary, you are relying on someone else giving you a raise or venturing out to find a new position with the requisite salary. The new job will come with pre-set expectations and possibly a team that you did not choose. In a job, it’s mostly out of your hands, and an uphill climb. This is roughly what it’s like when you work for someone else. A Company When you start and run a company, unless you are a co-op, you must continually generate significantly more revenue per employee than they are paid, in order to cover costs and generate profit. Every dollar you bring in must first go toward covering the cost of overhead and labor. As a company, your labor costs are more than just salary and also include things like healthcare benefits and 401K matching. As you scale, your total labor costs will increase as do your requirements for capital in the bank to cover you in case the business takes a downturn. If you don’t have enough in the bank, when you lose a client or have a weak quarter for product sales, you may need to layoff one or more members of your team. As your labor force grows, your business becomes more complex. Now, you need a human resources department, an IT department, and you’re offering new benefits to keep team members and lure top talent from competitors. You may need office space to legitimize your business in the market, or maintain a place to bring the team together. Once you do that, you’re buying coffee and snacks, office equipment, and that ping-pong table your company culture so desperately needs. After all of that, if there’s anything left, you get to take money out of the company for yourself. So, if you’re looking at starting a company, you need to know that your entire company must first reach a point of sustainability and then profitability, before you are able to start taking a salary. Ask any owner and 99% will tell you that they get paid last. Even though you’re working for yourself, a lot of people get paid before you do. So, who are you really working for? Alone As the owner of a company of one, much lik

I’ve been doing Brand work off and on, in some capacity, for about a decade. Most of the time I didn’t think of it or call it Brand work. In retrospect, it’s obvious to me now that it was. Brand, for too long, has been placed inside of the marketing department and, over time, has come to be synonymous with visual identity (colors, fonts, logos, etc). So before we go any deeper into this subject, we all need to be on the same page. While visual identity is component of Brand, the discipline of Brand is about substantially more than that. Here’s how I define Brand… Brand is anything dealing with what a company says about itself, what others say about it, how it actually functions across the business to deliver products and services, as well as the intersection between any or all of these factors. So, yeah…pretty much everything is Brand work. Fish 1: How’s the water? Fish 2: What the hell is water? The aspect of this work that I find most fascinating is the process of constructing a cohesive and unified Brand. That is, a business where what they say about themselves, is backed up by what they actually do, and is aligned with what others say about them. So, how do we do it? Most brands are built, either as an afterthought, or an exercise in rationalizing their visual design after the fact. A better approach is to plant the seed of a single idea and see that it grows until its presence is felt in every aspect of the company. Regardless of how one goes about building a brand, I would argue that the process itself is, in many ways, the company’s search for meaning. Raison d’être When I begin working with a client and start asking about their purpose, one of two things usually happens. They tell me the most literal answer possible: that their purpose is to make money.They tell me the most uninspired answer ever: which is to rephrase what they do as a purpose. Since every business, by definition, is required to make money, that is not its purpose but rather a condition of its existence. Since every business offers something in exchange for money, fulfilling that service or delivering that product, is not purpose, no matter how you rephrase it. The work of Brand, it’s not a “wordsmithing” exercise to explain in flowery terms how a business makes money. It is not to hide the fact that businesses must generate revenue. The work of Brand is to communicate clearly: what a company does (solution)how the company is unique (differentiation)what the company values (purpose, mission, beliefs, values)what customers, employees, vendors, shareholders, and

According to relationship researcher John Gottman, the magic ratio is 5:1. That is, the healthiest relationships generally have 5x or more positive interactions for every one negative interaction. Other studies have shown that human beings have a greater ability to recall negative or painful memories than positive ones. As I covered in The Attrition Equation, Prospect Theory would suggest that we are more commonly driven by fear of failure than possibility of success. So what does all of this mean? On the whole, people have a bias for negativity. An Optimistic Take On Negativity Bias Knowing that people have a bias for negativity could sound like a problem.You might want to know how we fix it.You might recognize it in yourself and want to change. I want to offer an alternative perspective: The negativity bias could be one of the most valuable assets you have at your disposal, both personally and professionally. Using The Inversion Method To Find Buried Treasure Every customer persona exercise starts with a guessing game or research into what people like. Every focus group and customer research panel tries to hone in on what people like about a product or service. I’m not saying these are not good things to do, but it paints an incomplete picture and potentially stops you from finding your most useful insights. The real insights can be found by flipping everything upside down. What people don’t like (or even what they hate), can be as much of a pivotal aspect of their identity as what they do like. But what’s even more important is that by saying what we don’t like, we often reveal what we do like. I’ll pause on that point for a moment. Did you catch it? By taking what people say that they dislike and inverting it, we reveal an insight that we may have otherwise never found. Problem: “I hate their ads, they are so annoying and cocky, and they don’t say what the product even is” Solution: Say what the product is in your ad. Don’t be cocky. Problem: “My boss is such a jerk, he never listens to my ideas and treats me like a servant rather than a colleague.“ Solution: Listen to people’s ideas, and alter your language to show respect and your actions to show care. Problem: “I’m exhausted all of the time. I feel like I do everything around the house and my husband acts like he expects it…AND I have to make dinner after a full day of work.” Solution: Share in the household responsibilities and take care of dinner several nights per week. Let your partner know that you appreciate all of their hardwork even after a long day. What people like or want is often cloaked by the negativity bias. So, if people are more likely to remember the negative, more likely to talk about the negative, why not use that to your advantage? The Magic Ratio is a Gift Here are some ways you might use negativity bias to your advantage… When conducting customer research, ask people more questions about what bothers them, what frustrates them, and what they hate, either about your products and services or the universe it a

The greatest leaders are fundamentally no different from you and me. They choose certain ways to behave, either through instinct or education, formal and informal. Great paragons of leadership forge new paths and bring about something remarkable, all because they have one thing in common: people are willing to follow them. Seriously, break it down: Isn’t leadership simply the act of leading others toward something? If you want be followed, you must convince and inspire others to believe that you are worth following. It’s all right there in the job title. But if you’re like most leaders out there, you have a problem… A study by Gallup found that only 15 percent of workers say they are “highly involved in and enthusiastic about their work and workplace.” Furthermore, it’s estimated that actively disengaged employees cost the United States $483 billion to $605 billion per year in lost productivity. So… that’s not great. Not only that, there’s a widespread issue with trust. The Edelman Trust Barometer comes out every year and reports on people’s feelings about trust and credibility. It has shown that trust in our traditional institutions is consistently lackluster. Whether we’re talking about CEOs, experts, or traditional media, the revered gatekeepers and trust signals are now being questioned more than ever. But that’s not all! Job stress is also climbing: The survey of nearly 2,000 professionals, conducted by Korn Ferry, also asked professionals up and down an organization about the impact workplace stress had on them. More than three-quarters of the respondents, 76%, say stress at work has had a negative impact on their personal relationships, and 66% say they have lost sleep due to work stress. A small but significant number, 16%, say they’ve had to quit a job due to stress. The largest source of current stress: bosses. The survey shows 35% of the respondents say their boss is their biggest source of stress at work, and 80% say a change in leadership, such as a new direct manager or someone higher up the organizational chart, impacts their stress levels. Study after study shows that the problem is bad and getting worse. Much of this is brought on or at least exacerbated by technology. The world is changing around us because things are moving faster than ever before. Technology has allowed for more jobs to be performed remotely. Although this is great in some ways, it has produced a few notable consequences. Wages are driven down because less expensive global talent is available. Remote workers can also often feel isolated from their peers and disengage easily. Employee retention has become more challenging as new technologies have opened the communication and information visibility landscape. This means that your teams can find new opportunities, that your competitors have greater access to privately communicate with your employees. Do you have what it takes to keep your best employees, or will they be lured away? For many, leadership is just something that comes with their title. It’s something they were dropped into and that they do without passion or purpose. To those people, I humbly submit that leadership is more important than an afterthought. An employee who feels disrespected, unappreciated, or disengaged at work brings that energy home with them. In some cases, they may not have a healthy outlet for those feelings. What happens at work doesn’t just stay at work. The days of compartmentalizing each aspect of our lives is rapidly eroding, because our “always-on” smartphone culture has changed the boundaries where work and life are supposed to balance. We’ve seen the unhealthy effects of that behavior, and alt

We can all agree that if placed in a leadership position, we’d rather be effective than ineffective. We’d rather people like us than hate us. In short, we’d rather be a great leader than a bad boss. The problem is too many managers still try to gain respect through fear. Too many managers get so caught up in “the work” that they neglect to tend to their people. Too many managers have had no training at all, and are left to follow the bad examples that came before them or react without thinking about the ramifications of their actions. This is where it falls apart. This is how so many managers become bad bosses instead of great leaders. It’s not controversial to suggest that a work environment based in fear and that treats us as a number, isn’t one we’d like to be in. With few exceptions, we would prefer to be somewhere where we feel cared about, trust our managers and team members, and have opportunities to do meaningful work. That’s why if we want to create work environments that are kinder, safer, and more equitable, we need a new path to follow. We need to make sure that every new manager has the training and mindset required to create thriving work cultures and replace the old fear-based model. We can do this…but it won’t happen overnight. It might take a generation, it might take two, but we can do it. Here’s how… Coming Soon In a little less than two months, I will be releasing my book The Lovable Leader. This book is the culmination of everything I have observed, studied, tried, failed, and succeeded at in my career thus far. The lessons are drawn from personal experience but even more importantly, from the vast bodies of accumulated knowledge on leadership, along with psychology, influence, trust, motivation, branding, and more… It is a handbook for new managers that puts trust, respect and kindness at the forefront. It is an easy-to-follow instruction manual for those who want to build loyal teams, resolve conflicts effectively, and accomplish great things as a team. Not only will this book show you how to be more effective, and more well-liked…but it will also show you how to be a great leader with all of the tools to create work environments that are kinder, safer, and more equitable. The book comes out in January 2022. Join the waitlist to be notified when the book is available for Pre-Order. If you are a fan of my work and writing on leadership, consider joining my launch team to help the book climbs the Amazon charts and get in front of more people.

Think back to when you were a kid. I grew up celebrating both Christmas and Hanukkah. I remember that the time from December 1 to the morning of December 25th, felt like an eternity. Now, I’m consistently surprised when my birthday is a week away. Age is one factor in this equation, but there’s something even more important. Anticipation Anticipation alters your perception of time. It creates an energy pattern in your body. It’s a form of excitement. Some people find it uncomfortable. I love it. Two days ago, Sony released their final trailer for the upcoming Spider-Man movie, No Way Home.   Before the trailer came out, fans were eagerly awaiting news of when the next trailer would drop. There were fan-made trailers, fan-made posters, and endless blogs and vlogs analyzing every rumor and leak. I was one of the people who would turn giddy whenever something related to the film would trend on Twitter. At the same time, I tried to fight my urge to look into it, because I want to experience the magic of complete surprise in the theater. I wanted to indulge that anticipation. Goals Whether we’re talking about a service, a product, marketing, or sales, how often are you focused on creating something people would wait for? Do you even know how to do that? One of the problems, is that we’re living in a world where you’re constantly told that in order to keep up, you need to create 5-6 TikToks per day, post to Linkedin 4 times throughout the day, and bombard your audience across every other channel on the internet. You need to turn up the volume, right? But, the real winners are not the ones with the most volume or who apply the most pressure but the ones who can make something that is worth waiting for it. One option is to churn out as much as you can, hoping for a hit, only to then try and keep the attention until your next win. Another option is to slow down, and take the time to create something remarkable. Here’s my suggestion… How to be worth waiting for While you would think quality is the secret ingredient here, it’s actually third on the list. Whether it’s Marvel movies, Mochi donuts, clever Old Spice ads, or the agency with a wait list, the factors that allow for anticipation and a captive audience are this: Create something that cannot be replaced or substituted Create something that is not for everyone If you want a thriving business, you need to be distinctive to the degree that if you couldn’t start work for the client for a month, that they would wait, because you cannot be replaced or substituted. This starts with you brand work and then shows up in every aspect of how you deliver your products and services. If you are a one-of-a-kind, then there will be people willing to wait for it. In order to do this, you need to know who you are for. This means identifying that perfect audience and creating for them. I have countless friends who had no idea there was a new Spider-Man movie coming out. Likewise, I could not tell you much more about Harry Potter than it’s about wizards and Voldemort is bad. Obviously, all this works even better if what you’re creating is amazing. But more important than being good, is being unique, irreplaceable, and for someone specific. I’ll watch every piece of Spider-Man media that comes out regardless of the quality, because there is no substitute, and it’s something I love. As I build my business, I

What is your dream job? I’ve honestly spent a little too much time wondering what that really means. Today, I’m going to indulge in a bit of my own curiosity. I’m going to try to analyze what makes a dream job, try to answer why more of us aren’t working our dream jobs, and finally attempt to figure out how we can create businesses where more people feel that they are working in their dream jobs. Dream + Job A job, by definition, is the exchange of labor for money. Therefore, a “dream job” is the best possible version of trading your labor for money, right? Yet, whenever I’ve talked with people about their dream jobs, I’ve noticed that the answers rarely has anything to do with the money. They might say professional basketball player (like I did as a 13 year old). They might say actor. They might say world leader. While most dream jobs people pick typically pay very well, in most cases the reasons people give for picking a particular job as a dream job has more to do with the work itself, or the impact and outcome of the work, than it does the salary. To test this, ask if they’d switch to another job for the same salary and most would likely say no. Salary is a factor but I’d argue it’s a relatively small factor, once people’s needs are met. The Anatomy of a Dream Job Here’s my hypothesis… If dream jobs do exist, everyone’s dream job will follow roughly the same formula: do something you enjoy and/or that matters to you, with people who you don’t hate and who, ideally, share similar values and respect one another, on a flexible schedule that works for your lifestyle compensated enough cover all of life’s necessities (food, water, clothing, shelter, and healthcare) plus the time off and funds to indulge in leisure activities that you enjoy, Unless your definition of a dream job is to be a billionaire or to literally get paid exorbitant sums of money for doing absolutely nothing, then I’m willing to bet that this formula hits on all of the important points. Never Enough I can hear it now: “My dream job would be all of that, but with more money.” This is one of the reasons why there aren’t more dream jobs. It’s because we’re living in a world where there is almost never enough money to feel truly comfortable and there is virtually no safety net to fall back on. Without living wages or adequate social safety nets, dream jobs and more likely to be dreams than jobs. So, we frantically chase every dollar, hoping to quell the terrifying fear that a dip in the market, an untimely illness or injury, or an extended layoff will leave us hungry or homeless. Therefore, for the dream job formula above to work, it would need to be backed by a safety net that would allow you to move jobs without fear of losing your housing, healthcare, or going hungry. Under the current conditions, the only dream job, is the one that eliminates any fear of not having enough, or getting left behind as a consequence of the “free market.” These jobs are few and far between. Real Math In a world with miners, janitors, and people who work in any form of customer service, it is mathematically impossible for everyone to work their dream job whether that is the “purpose, people, pay, and freedom” version or the “get money for doing nothing” version. Which brings us to the point of this post. A critical examination of dream jobs reveal that we can put it within reach and fix our broken