“If you are passionate about entrepreneurship, jump starting the economy or inspiring a new generation of enterprising young people, read and share my new book: AdVenture.” That was the note that I received from one of my favorite people in business the world, Moira Vetter, about her new book. I pre-ordered it of course and received it this past Tuesday morning…and finished it Tuesday night. It was that good.

Aside from being a brilliantly designed and created book (in fact, I told her its the exact style of book I want to write one day), its full of great advice for anyone that either is an entrepreneur, works for an entrepreneur or simply wants to infuse more entrepreneurship into their organization.

It’s also very affordable, so everyone should pick this book up and spend some time with it. Here are some of my favorite bits:

My favorite line in the entire book comes on page 117 (total of 119 pages): Moira Vetter didn’t get serious about business until the second grade. Now that’s badass.

She defines an entrepreneur as: An entrepreneur is so much more than somebody that starts a business. They seize upon an idea and marshal the resources to make it real. They are much more than business people – they are forces of nature.

There are some phenomenal quotes in the book as well, here are two of my favorites:

• When work, commitment and pleasure all become one and you reach that deep well where passion lives, nothing is impossible. ~ Nancy Coey
• I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done. ~ Henry Ford

There is also great insight in this book on product and company life cycles and anyone that is building something would be smart to read through the steps as she lays them out. She really captures both the power and importance of the entrepreneur as well as the team that surrounds them, each of equal but very different importance. Rarely do I read books on this topic that describe this point so well.

Moira talks a lot in this book about the journey of entrepreneurship. Specifically, she compares the journey to both an Evel Knievel jump and climbing a mountain. Here are two bits about that:

• The success of the jump is simply a moment in time for the entrepreneur who sees the landing zone but is already pacing himself for the next big leap.
• The climb is its own reward. For those that climb, rewards come not only from reaching the peak, but from the very decision to climb, from applying their capabilities and from their determination to succeed where others have not ventured. Entrepreneurs come wired for the climb and understand reward is not a static endpoint.

“The very decision to climb.” I think that is one of my favorite quotes. I could even see that being the title of this blog, actually.

Then later in the book, she suggest that the entrepreneur is “preconditioned to enjoy each stage of (the) climb”. For me this is very insightful. If she had changed this to suggest that the entrepreneur celebrates each stage, I would have disagreed based on my experience. But the words “enjoy” and “stage of the climb” are key here. As an entrepeneur, a very competitive entrepreneur to be exact, I have trouble celebrating the wins because I’m too busy, as she suggests in the book, “already pacing myself for the next big leap.” I have to remember to celebrate the wins as much for myself as for the people working with me. But I do so enjoy every phase of the journey. Win or lose, its the journey that fuels the entrepreneur and with this, she nailed it.

Thanks Moira, for creating such a wonderful book and for sharing your vision with the rest of us. I know Chris would be proud ;)

I’ve talked about the need to focus before on this blog. In fact, its advice I gave the younger me in a post as I reflected on what I’ve learned over the years. The ability for leaders to focus is what allows them to accomplish great things vs. produce a lot of mediocre things.

After reading this blog post by Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment, it seems that Marissa Mayer, who can I just say I’ve been very impressed with ever since she took over Yahoo, is buying Tumblr to allow their CEO to do just that: focus. To focus on nothing else other than making Tumblr even better. She’s not going to micromanage their business, or try to integrate it into the belly of the Yahoo beast, but instead is simply going to allow David to focus on the product and empower him with the backing that only a company like Yahoo could give.

So if you’re a Tumblr fan, I think you should be excited about this. It has all the makings of a “successful” acquisition. Time will tell obviously but for now, things seem pointed in the right direction.

Kingdom Rush remains the best iOS game I’ve ever played. And I still play it, well over a year after I first picked it up. It’s tower defense at its best.

And now, there’s a new one coming out this Summer (the video says Spring but sources are saying Summer). And I can’t friggin’ wait.

Love this passage from the Max Barry book, Company. A great way of describing my feelings on personal offices and why I’ll never have one again.

Like every other department in Zephyr, Training Sales has an open floor plan, which means everyone works in a sprawling cubicle farm except the manager, who has an office with a glass internal wall, across which blinds are permanently drawn. Open-plan seating, it has been explained in company-wide memos, increases teamwork and boosts productivity. 

Except in managers, that is, whose productivity tends to be boosted by – and the memos don’t say this, but the conclusion is inescapable – corner offices with excellent views.

Also, thanks Greg for the suggestion to read Company. Good read.

Studies show that blogs with pictures of happy people or kittens get more views. I just nailed both.

This is a blindpost recommendation from @gumboshowjoe. You can see the original article if you want to compare (which I still haven’t). And I write a lot about being a happier, more positive person, but I don’t think I’ve ever written about the things you should give up in order to do so, which turned out to be a fun challenge.

15 things you should give up to be happy:

1. Give up the idea that money makes you happy. It doesn’t. If you live your life trying as hard as possible to make as much money as you can, you’ll miss out on the things that truly make you happy. Work should not define you. It should enable you.
2. Give up all the excuses not to be happy or be better at whatever you’re doing. Here’s a list to get started.
3. Give up the job that you hate. Figure out what you love doing, and do that as your job. #brokenrecord
4. Give up trying to compare yourself/your body/your money/your livelihood to other people. This is a hard one, perhaps impossible, but you can get better at it. We all can.
5. Give up hanging out with negative people. Wanna be bummed out? Hang out with people who are always bummed out.
6. Do something overly nice for someone. Something out of nowhere, something unexpected.
7. Give up some of your time to a non-profit. Everyone I know who does this, almost universally, walks away feeling like they received more than they gave.
8. Give up the idea that its sappy and just smile more. It’s infectious and it will make you happier. One of the happiest people I know just listed it on her terrific blog as her first “truth”. Check it out.
9. Give up the excuses not to eat a little better and exercise a little more. Even if you don’t do it enough to actually make a big difference, it will always make you feel happier when you’re done.
10. Give up the keyboard and write a letter to someone. Start with your grandmother. The keyword is, “write”. Everyone, but especially Grandmas love hand-written letters and she’s one of your biggest fans, so show her you are thinking about her. It’ll make you both very happy.
11. Give up your own shoes and step into someone’s shoes that is less fortunate than you. If I ever feel like things in my life are crappy, I think about people have so much of a tougher life than I do and yet they remain as happy and positive as anyone. I talk about such a person in the second half of this post.
12. Give up the idea that procrastination is bad, and look deeper at what you do while you procrastinate. Maybe, just maybe, that is what you should doing with your life!
13. Give up inbox zero. Yes, its nice to get to the point where you have no more emails in your inbox, but it will end up doing the opposite of its intent and actually make email more important and more of a distraction than it already is! I’ve learned this the hard way…and yet, I still try to get to inbox zero. I need email counseling!
14. Give up trying to feel “complete” by how busy your calendar is or by how many meetings you have scheduled. Work to have free time in your calendar to do things you enjoy, or go for a walk and just think.
15. Give up some control and learn to trust in others. I find most people are stressed because they feel like they have the weight of the world on their shoulders and its their inability to trust others to help that creates this.

I’m both literally back from a great vacation but I’m also back to the blogging world. Over the last month I slacked a lot and let life fill me with excuses not to blog each day. What I have to constantly remember is why I blog and what I personally get out of it. So I went back and looked at what I’ve written about blogging to inspire myself again.

So I re-read my blogging process.

Then I looked back at my “Consume. Write. Participate.” mantra and realized that the only thing I’ve doing a lot of recently is consuming content. That’s both selfish and not very fulfilling to me personally, so I gotta re-stack the deck. I still need to work on participating, that one is the toughest for me.

Thanks @GumboShowJoe!

Someone commented recently on this blog suggesting that I talk more about marketing. And it made me realize that I really don’t write much about marketing here these days.

I’ve always said this blog would reflect the things I’m interested in talking about at any given period of my life. Sometimes I’ll talk about technology. Sometimes leadership. Sometimes startups. And yes, sometimes marketing.

So the question is, why haven’t I been compelled to write about marketing?

Honestly, I don’t think there is a lot currently going on in marketing that is really exciting me. That’s not to say I don’t love digital marketing. It’s what I do and I’m very passionate about that space. I love the clients we have and the work we do for them.

It’s just, I don’t see a ton of interesting things happening in this space at the moment. I’d currently rather write about my thoughts on leadership as I think that’s ever evolving, or on why I think Apple is starting to lose the mobile war (coming soon).

I’ll get back to marketing in due time. I always do. But for now, I’m kinda waiting to be inspired by something going on in marketing and at the moment, just not seeing it.

It was the second grade. I was the established class clown by then. And I was about to experience my first leadership moment.

I was, in fact, the class clown all the way through school, and the thing I always found ironic was that from grade 1 to grade 8, I was constantly in trouble for my snappy comments during class, often getting N’s in conduct (Not Satisfactory) and one time even getting paddled by the principal. #forrealz

Then from my freshman year to my senior year in high school, I was a big hit by both my classmates and my teachers, and ended up winning a senior superlative award for “Wittiest” my senior year. Go figure.

So I was in the second grade and I was looked to as the kid in class that would happily sacrifice his conduct grade for a good joke when the time was right. Or if the teacher needed to be tricked. I remember it was a Tuesday and we were supposed to take a test on Thursday. And no one wanted to take the test. We were also off school on Friday, which all of us in the class knew well but as we were about to learn our teacher did not.

“I’m trying to decide if we should take the test on Thursday or if you guys need a little more time and we should take it on Friday,” he said. For a few minutes everyone just kind of looked at him as if to say, “Woah, wait…you don’t know we’re off on Friday?”

This is the moment I remember vividly. The teacher had turned to write something on the board and I could see several of my classmates about to correct his error. I was sitting in the front (probably because I had been moved there so the teacher could keep me in check, otherwise I never would have been sitting in the front) and I turned to the class and put my hands up and nodded my head up and down ever so slightly, indicating, “I’ve got this”.

So I start working on convincing the teacher that Thursday is a very bad day for the test. I’m very careful not to say Friday is a good day for the test. That’s very important. I don’t want to lie ;) I talk to him about other things going on at school on Thursday, about how much material we’d have to learn by then, etc. I’m laying it on thick and I think just to shut me up he says, “Ok, ok, we won’t have the test on Thursday, I get it.”

“You’re sure we’re not having it on Thursday? I mean, you promise right because otherwise we’ll have to start studying immediatley and…”

“Yes, Jeff! I promise.”

I thank him and we start working on that day’s lesson. A few minutes later he says, “Ok guys, so we’ll have the test on Friday…”, and about 30 hands immediately go up. He calls on a girl in the back and she say, “But we’re off school on Friday!” And he looks at her for a moment, obviously realizing that we are indeed off on Friday. Then he looks at me, frowns and says, “Now I get it. Well done, ok, so the test will be on Monday.”

And the entire class cheered. They picked me up on their shoulders and marched through the halls of the school, telling everyone they saw about the amazing feet that I had just accomplished and singing, “For he’s a jolly good fellow.” On Friday when we were off school they held a parade on the school field and I gave a big speech about what leadership means and my teacher was there and pinned a ribbon on me.

Ok, so that last part didn’t happen, but they did cheer. And it was at that moment that I felt what it was like to be a leader and I haven’t forgotten it since.