That phrase is so funny to me. A gumball machine that gives you stale gum for a quarter is a million dollar idea if you sell four million pieces of gum out of it.

The point is that no idea is worth a million dollars. Execution is. And you can execute on, if not every idea, at least many more than you think.

Some questions sound really good. They just seem neat. We can’t help it – we hear something like “if you could be any animal, what would it be” and we just sort of get lost in the possibilities. So we imagine that there’s some wisdom to be gained from what people say.

And sure, there might be. That actually might be a neat icebreaker question at a party or on a first date to just learn more about people in general. But it’s an abysmal question from the standpoint of trying to find out something specific, it’s abysmal.

There are times when you want to start with a question and go from there, and times when you want to work backward from the answer. Knowing which is which will do wonders for your ability to effectively gather information.

To start, there are really two reasons you ever want information: to learn or to make a decision.

If you want to learn, then being open-ended is the way to go. Trying to get to a specific answer when you want to learn is counter-productive. It opens you up to all sorts of bias, limits what you actually learn, and causes you to focus on rote memorization instead of true understanding. In these cases, it’s best to ask open-ended questions, things that could lead you anywhere. Whether you’re exploring a new topic or a new person, it’s great to just dive in and absorb without trying to get to some imaginary endpoint.

If you want to make a concrete decision, then you have to know what you don’t know. To take a very basic example, let’s say you’re facing the decision of whether to extend a job offer to a candidate or not. To make that decision, you have to figure out the answer first – you’re essentially looking for “will this person reliably perform these job duties at or above expectations?” Now ask yourself why you don’t already know that.

It’s likely because you don’t know enough about their past work or past reliability, so you should ask questions directly related to those subjects. It’s very not likely that it’s because you don’t know what sort of animal they would be if they could.

Today is my father’s birthday. The first one of my life where he isn’t here.

He was the coolest. He was the baddest. I miss him every damned day.

You are not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. Not professionally, not personally, not ever. You shouldn’t try. In fact, you shouldn’t even necessarily try to improve the numbers in your audience.

The numbers are already there! You just have to find them.

The world is large. No matter what you do, there are thousands upon thousands of people – if not many more – who will love it. They’ll love you. You don’t need to convert people. You need to find people; you need to filter out the people who are wrong for you.

Most people don’t do this nearly aggressively enough.

When I first got my start in sales, my very brilliant manager pointed at a crowd of people. “In that group are a hundred people. Three of them want what you’re selling and would buy it if they knew about it. Let’s be ultra clear about your job: it’s to find those three people. It’s not to go through the whole group and badger each one into buying until they punch you in the face. It’s to be an efficient detective.”

So someone doesn’t like you? Isn’t picking up what you’re putting down? Cool – ask why, then move on. Don’t argue, don’t dwell. Gather the feedback, incorporate it into your search, and then move efficiently toward your people.

They’re out there, waiting for you. You’re exactly their cup of tea – find them before it gets cold.

Whenever someone makes a claim to me that someone else is a bad communicator, I first ask them if they understood what the person was trying to communicate. They usually don’t – that’s why they’re making the claim. But if you don’t understand what someone is saying, then you can’t make the claim that they’re a bad communicator!

Consider: I don’t speak French. Voltaire was, by all accounts, a wonderful communicator. But if he spoke to me in French, I wouldn’t understand a word of it. If I then said, “everything that guy said was gibberish, he’s a terrible communicator,” I would be quite the fool.

Sometimes I understand perfectly what someone else is communicating, and I cringe at the way they said it. I see myriad opportunities for misunderstanding or I look around the room and see mostly glazed eyes. Then I can claim bad communication technique on the part of the speaker.

While a communicator is responsible for communicating, that doesn’t mean they’ve failed just because you don’t get it. So don’t immediately write them off as not being worth listening to; it could be that there’s a lot of brilliance just on the other side of a little more fluency on your part.

“The energy debt charges interest,” someone said to me today. Wow.

So many of our personal struggles can be approached the way you balance a checkbook. You can’t be financially stable just by making more money, nor can you reach stability solely by curbing your expenditures. You need a balanced flow – expenditures shouldn’t outpace income, and ideally at least some of those expenditures should produce income in a virtuous cycle.

The same is true of energy, of joy, of all the other things you need to live. We use the term “live below our means” in terms of money – spending less than we’re capable of in order to save more and insulate against shocks. But how often do we do that with time? With passion?

Are you “living below your means” when it comes to how much you put in your schedule? Are you balancing the checkbook of things that give you energy versus things that cost it? Are you making sure that whatever pain you endure, you find a way to balance out?

All bills come due, sooner or later. The more you push them off, the higher the final tally will be. Someone is counting – it should be you.

The title of this post was typed entirely by my middle child, The Squish (she also typed the word “Squish”). My youngest, my son Buddy, then typed this part: hhhhiiiii

As soon as they saw me sit down to write, they raced over: “Can I help you?”

The answer to that should just always, always be yes. Not just with kids. With anyone. There are few things that can build stronger relationships than accepting the help that’s offered.

The world is absolutely full of people who want to help you. Some want to help you because they want something for it, but that doesn’t make the offer less genuine. Some want to help you even though they aren’t really able to, but they want to just be there with you during your own journey.

Sometimes it’s just a bored sales associate in a department store and helping a genuinely pleasant and appreciative customer will be the highlight of their day.

Look for ways to help others, certainly. But don’t forget to let others help you.

I think people get caught in traps around “informal” meetings or groups. You hear from someone in a professional context that they just want a quick, “casual” coffee or something like that, and suddenly you have no idea what that means.

When something is formal, it has – by definition – rules. And rules make things easy. They give you a set of things to do (or in some cases, tactically not do), which also means you know how to prepare.

Let me take the mystery out of an “informal” meeting for you – it also has rules. In fact, it has pretty much the same rules, but you don’t wear a tie.

Here are the “rules” – for any meeting:

1. Before you go in, think about what you want to come out with. Don’t think about the meeting, think about the time after the meeting. How do you want your life to be different? If you don’t have a goal, then it’s just hanging out. That’s fine if that’s what you want, but it probably isn’t if you’re having an “informal coffee” with a potential new business relationship.
2. Now that you know what you want (people very frequently skip this step, which is why none of the rest of this makes sense), write down three different ways to ask for it. Just ask directly, but three different ways. If a potential client wants to grab coffee, write things like “What do you need from your website development,” and “Tell me about your biggest challenge on website development right now,” etc. Those sound really similar. They are. You want to have options – you might ask all three with variations, or you might just want to have an idea of what you can use in an adaptable conversation.
3. Ask those questions, write down the answers. Be polite. That’s about all you have to do during the meeting.
4. Use the answers to follow up after the meeting. Take those answers and ask yourself “how does this new information get me closer to the thing I said I wanted?”

Don’t make this more complicated than it has to be. That’s how you get value out of every meeting – formal or not.

We so often hide the worst parts of us, shielding them from observation by others. But the worst parts of us are like mold. They thrive and grow in the darkness; they die in the light.

Our insecurities, our fears, our failures. These things will haunt us if we let them take up permanent residence in the dark recesses of our memory, forever protected from the hard light of public scrutiny. If we let them out, they diminish to nothing.

It’s the black mold itself that tells you that you should hide it, because it knows. But that darkness is a terrible advisor. Exile it into the sun, and leave no room for its growth.