Business Genius

Tara McMullin wrote: Becoming an influencer seems fun. Depending on your interests, being a vlogger or influencer might look like luxury travel, great food, or stylish clothes. Maybe it looks like being an athlete, a musician, or a memoirist. But there’s a difference between performing these roles and actually doing the work of those roles.

Are you one of the many employers, workers or business owners who confuses delay with procrastination? Learn how to tell the difference between delay and procrastination. You might believe you're guilty of something you're not even doing! And, if it turns out you are procrastinating, find out what you can do to overcome it.

As a business advisor, I often see smart, creative and well-educated people ignore the essential requirements for building a successful business. Generally, it’s because they’ve allowed themselves to be convinced an online (or digital) business is different. It isn’t. A website is not a business. It’s a marketing tool. If you want to make money with it, you need a solid sustainable business behind it. Build your business first, then build a website that works to market it well.

The anorexic entrepreneur, obsessed with achieving success, pursues it with the passion of a spiritual quest, believing it is a lifestyle choice. Unable to recognize when success has arrived, it remains forever elusive often resulting in financial, emotional and spiritual bankruptcy. Today’s episode includes an exercise to keep this from happening to you.

Every business owner and aspiring thought leader faces three challenges: getting good, getting going and getting known! Lisa O’Neill of Thought Leaders breaks this down beautifully for us so we can become commercially smart.

An email from the Daily Stoic reminded me that given how terrible most of the Roman emperors were, you might think that Marcus Aurelius was universally loved. Of course, this is not true. Plenty of people hated him, plenty of people thought they should be in charge and not him. (In fact, one of his best friends betrayed him in a terrible coup). It’s a given that all successful people attract haters. It’s not a matter of if, but when. That’s why you must prepare now rather than waiting until your first hater comes along …

On Dictionary.com, lexicographer Jane Solomon explains that the word influencer has been used in English since the mid-1600s, though back then it wasn’t a job title. In recent years, the term has become a catch-all for a certain kind of career track that is at the center of a burgeoning but profitable industry.

As influencer continues to expand in English and pull new terms and meanings into its orbit, it is worthy of charting from a lexical perspective.

Most people prematurely cut off idea generation by immediately judging whether an idea belongs in the cabinet in the first place—by evaluating what’s reasonable, what’s probable, what’s doable. As a business coach, this is one behaviour I must quickly help them unlearn for their own benefit.

In this episode, I share insights from business genius Ozan Varol, author of Think Like a Rocket Scientist which, by the way, is a really great read. Ozan is a master of weaving interesting stories from real life to support better ways of thinking and working. In the example of his writing I’m about to share, he explains why it’s important to shut down your mind to be better at creating.

Herbert Freudenberger defined burnout in 1975 as emotional exhaustion, decreased sense of accomplishment, and depersonalization. Essentially, when we burn out, we’ve been caring too much for too long, seeing a lack of impact from our actions, and burning the empathy candle at both ends.

Achieving a superhuman level of efficiency, so that you never need to disappoint anyone, or make tough choices about how to use your time? Impossible. Satisfying the contradictory demands of maddening bosses (or family members) who can’t decide what they want? Impossible. Bringing a creative project into the world precisely as you envisaged it in advance? Impossible.