It was the summer of 2005. I can’t remember the exact text message my friend sent me, but it was something along the lines of:
“Up $5k for the month.”
What?! I knew immediately what he was talking about: affiliate marketing. Here I was having just moved all the way across the country to start work at [...]
Welcome to 2010! It sounds so futuristic.
Sometimes I make New Year’s Resolutions. Sometimes I even write them down. But the more I think about it, the more I think they’re dumb. If something is worth doing, why wait for an arbitrary change in the date to start?
The tradition of New Year’s Resolutions dates back 4000 [...]
It’s been a great year with so much to be thankful for. I figure Thanksgiving is a good a time as any to reflect on all the blessings we have. Happy and healthy. Still self-employed. Wonderful friends and family. Couldn’t ask for much more.
And then there was the food
I had a hard time getting into Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow. It started slow but picked up steam about half way in. Peak is written by San Francisco boutique hotelier Chip Conley, and was one of the books gifted to me during my Zappos tour. The premise of the book [...]
Between costumes, candy, pumpkins, decorations, and drinks, Halloween has turned into a $5 billion dollar business. Billion with a B. I just want my share.
But it’s a great holiday. For trick-or-treating, you get dressed, you go to work, and you get paid — in candy! I like Greg Behrendt, and his comedy bit about trick-or-treating [...]
Traditional means of motivation in the workplace (rewards, incentives, commissions), sometimes do more harm than good. In this video, Dan Pink makes the case that for the complex tasks faced by today’s workforce, “intrinsic” motivators — autonomy, mastery, and purpose — are far more effective than the traditional “carrot-and-stick” methods. It’s kind of long, but [...]
These were just some of the “reasons” I saw in the parking lot at Commission Junction University 2009 this week. There was also a Ferrari and an Aston Martin that were not captured on film.
Clearly some people have got this business figured out. My ride was out of place.
*Disclaimer: Cars don’t equal success. But I [...]
Bryn and I made our first trip to Yosemite this weekend, and summit-ed Half Dome with a group of 16 friends. At over 8800 ft in elevation, Half Dome is the centerpiece of Yosemite National Park. It is a 17 mile round trip hike, with 4800 ft in elevation gain — a serious endeavor even [...]
Twenty thousand of my closest friends and I got up at 5:00am Sunday to run the streets of San Francisco in the 2009 San Francisco Marathon and Half Marathon.
Yes, I totally cropped the people in front of me from this picture to make it look like I’m winning.
I did the Half. The course went from [...]
I had a small victory this week in my ongoing effort to automate and simplify day-to-day tasks. Because shoe inventory is always changing, one of my biggest challenges is keeping all the product links up-to-date.
Up until about 15 months ago, I was doing all this manually, individually checking each link. It was a very slow, [...]
