People who don’t have the authority to buy paper clips call meetings every day—at an enormous cost.

What does a meeting cost you?
More than you think.

I recently sat in on a meeting attended by 12 people. The meeting lasted 2.5 hours. That meeting cost $12,250, or $82 per minute.

Since nobody had to write a check for the meeting, the cost went unnoticed. And that is exactly how people get fooled. It might have seemed the meeting was free, but in fact it was very costly.

During the meeting (yes, it was a boring meeting) I did a quick calculation, adding up everyone’s annual salary. I divided the total by 2,000 (average working hours in a year) and then multiplied by the time we all sat there. The total was read more »

Courage is overrated.
At least, overestimated.

You don’t have to live courageously.

In fact, you can be a coward 99.9305556% of the time (to be exact).

You only need to be courageous for 20 seconds at a time.

Those 20 seconds when…

…you pick up the phone to call that “big kahuna” prospect.

…you see your dream client enter the networking meeting.

…you walk up to a circle of strangers and introduce yourself.

…you volunteer to come up on stage.

…you contemplate jumping read more »

Matt Damon on SUCCESS, July 2013

Until recently only the elites atop corporate ivory towers had the keys to the vault of the world’s wealth.

Power, thus wealth, was controlled by access—access to knowledge, technology, capital, resources and distribution through print publications, broadcasting, cable and store shelves.

Now the vault door has been blown off, and everyone has direct and unlimited access to all the wealth they want by becoming entrepreneurs.

I co-founded an Internet company in early 2000. We raised several million dollars to get started. Building the website, the software to run it and servers to deliver it cost nearly $1 million.

Today that website could be built for less than $5,000. We spent the other millions to hire experienced tech talent (we paid a high price because of limited supply) and on marketing in the days before Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.

The business failed. Do you know how many times I could have launched with the same effort, time and money today? Guess. read more »

We hear a lot about finding and strengthening your strengths.

Sure, you should figure out what you are really good at, as it is also usually the thing you like doing as well, and then yes, strengthen it to give you further leverage on that strength.

That’s a good idea. But…

Do not neglect, you must also find and strengthen your weaknesses—those attributes or skills that you are not good in, but are critical for you to accomplish your important goals and aspirations.

You must also ATTACK your weaknesses!

I remember a time, many years ago, while working out at a Gold’s Gym in South Beach Miami, I complimented this bodybuilder guy on his calves. I know, weird, but you should have seen them! My calves were something I struggled with. I had all the typical calve exercises in my own routine but they never seemed to grow like my other muscle groups. I just figured they were like your jaw muscles, no matter how much you work them out they aren’t really going to change much—you either have great calve muscles or you don’t.

So I asked this guy what he did to have calves like that. He explained read more »

Today and more and more in the future, all selling is social and the connection points to all your relationships will involve a component of online.

To thrive in the future you will need to learn to connect, network and foster relationships online.

Here are a few statistical wake-up calls:

Nearly half of all people report socializing online more than they do face-to-face.

You don’t have to LIKE the statistics, but you will have to deal with them.

Here is another, 61% of LinkedIn users use it as their primary professional networking site. Every single second of every day, one new user joins LinkedIn.

What does that mean to you? read more »