Daily Inspire

SUPPORTED BY SQUARESPACE Hey Reader, Have you ever felt like you know exactly what to do, but are scared to actually do it? Even when something's good for you, change is scary. The trick for overcoming that fear and doing the thing you want is this: You can either make the thing less scary OR make the scary matter less. Make it less scary This is possible by priming our brain, and there's only two ways I know how to do that: Take on little bits at a time. Have a public talk coming up? Make a...

SUPPORTED BY SQUARESPACE Hey Reader, What do you get when you put 40 extremely generous creative entrepreneurs in a room with unlimited coffee, curated dinners, and prompts for sharing best practices, personal blocks, and underrated opportunities? You get The Lab IRL. This in-person event by Creator Science takes its online community offline for an opportunity to collaborate, share, and connect in an industry which is more lonely than any of us care to admit. We met in a boutique hotel in...

Supported by Kit Hey Reader, I'm sitting at a coffee shop in Phoenix––the first ever specialty shop here––reminiscing about the start of this spot. Back in the day, it was about pretentious baristas and great coffee. They were the leading local roaster for years, and knew it. Not only did they know it, but were kind of assholes about it. The comments and reviews were always about the pretentious vibe and the stuck-up staff, but we all dealt with it. They could afford to be assholes. And that...

Supported by Kit Hey Reader, When I was a kid, there was this bright red tunnel-slide in the park. Maybe it's still there; maybe there's a version of it in every park. But it's fully enclosed and the inside has an orange tint from the sunlight. And depending on your proportion, you'd either fly down and skip your butt on the grass or get stuck mid-way and have to scoot down. But the best part of that slide was turning around and climbing up from the inside. It defied design and reason, and...

SUPPORTED BY GUSTO Hey Reader, 55% of people in the US are experiencing real burnout right now. I believe it. Do you? Because it doesn't feel like just a statistic. It feels like real life: my inbox, my feed, my conversations with clients. We're all feeling the weight of having opinions about everything because everything requires an opinion these days. It's a particular exhaustion of caring deeply in a world that keeps adding things to care about. I don't want to add to that, so I'm not...

SUPPORTED BY HELLUVA PARTNERSHIP Hey Reader, You don't need more followers. You need the right ones. The people you actually connect with, the clients you actually want to help, the friends you want to grow alongside. The Myth of More Somewhere along the way, we were sold the idea that reach equals value. We were told the goal is always bigger, broader, louder, and that if you don't have ten thousand (or more!) followers, you don't have a real business. Bollocks. I went viral on TikTok and...

SUPPORTED BY HELLUVA PARTNERSHIP Hey Reader, I've got such an incredible announcement today. But first! A bit of philosophy for our soul. How to Be a Rebellious Spirit I’m reading a collection of short stories called Spirits Rebellious by Khalil Gibran, and I can’t get over how something written more than 100 years ago feels like it was written today. The stories are about power, authority, love, and the tension between what the world expects from you and what your spirit actually wants. But...

SUPPORTED BY A Human Tech Company Hey Reader, In 2018, I stood in front of the City of Phoenix Department of Transportation and told a room full of government employees they needed to fail more. Lol. I know. When I tell you the room went quiet...all of their faces said: This is startup thinking. This doesn't apply to us. And that's exactly why I was there: to teach these well-established leaders how to think like entrepreneurs. The 20% Nobody Talks About That hesitation isn't unique to...

SUPPORTED BY MORE HUMAN HOSTING Hey Reader, Most people have moved once or twice in their lives, and if you've done it, you know it's not easy. As my lease is coming to term, I've been thinking a lot about moving, the word migration and what it means: to move from your usual place of residence to a new place of residence––home to something rebuilt as home. There's many reasons we do that. Here are the most common: Seasonal: like the snowbirds in Phoenix flocking to cooler summers (less than...