Be on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is such a treasure cove for building your brand, growing your visibility, and really finding your audience so that you can create new opportunities.

Having a network is important. Having people that you can talk to, having people that you can share your challenges with who aren't gonna judge you who aren't beholding to you in some way so that you get some honest feedback. It's surprising how differently someone else might look under the same set of circumstances that you do and give you the complete insight you might not have thought of. If you're starting a journey and you don't have a network of peers, create that network of peers because you're gonna need the moral support if nothing else and you're gonna need somebody to talk to.

Once you start growing teams and managing people, the power of being intentional with your decision-making as a leader whether you are a leader of one or leader of 100 is incredibly important. When you make intentional decisions, even if you're just holding intentionality to yourself you're doing the right amount of do-diligence, you're exploring why you're making that decision, and also you're weighing out if you have multiple options, what are the pros and cons of each of these options and then when you go and make that decision or you're helping your team understand why that decision was made and helping your customers understand why that decision was made they are able to see that intentionality behind it because of the way you are able to express it.

Just be curious, you have something in you that you want to offer, and being curious and talking to people, being empathetic and listening to their stories, you begin to match what you have in you to what the world needs from you.

Don't quit your day job, not that you won't succeed, don't take it that way but when somebody has an idea that they would like to pursue it does take a lot of time to do it but when start to run out of the money because it not taking off like you wanted it to, it does put a lot of stress.

Make sure you have a single problem that you are focused on at any given point in time and treat it as existential. It is just what is the single thing that is the most critical for your business at this point in time and actually worry about that one thing and then move on to the next thing. It is the behavior that could be the most useful.

Be very clear about where you're headed. What is it that you want to do, what timeline, how much revenue, how big a company, how big a footprint, and what is your market? Be very clear on all these things that will take to satisfy you because in the end getting exactly what you want is what's going to be the ultimate satisfaction in life.

Work with folks who value what you bring to the organization. Whether you are a subcontractor or not, you bring value and should be valued. Folks should respect that and if they don't you can walk away. All money ain't good money.

Never get too high, never get too low. The swings in the startup are insane. One day you'll go from "Wow we just got 500 users on your platform" to "Wow this platform sucks because of the way it's built". Find the silver lining in everything and always try to learn and be better the next day you came in the day before.

What are your goals? Goals are like road maps; they get you from one point to another. Goals provide the direction you need to reach your destination, the motivation to sustain you on your trip, and a way to measure your progress.