The most important life lesson I've learned from the Internet is this: solve your own problems and then share the solution.

If you want to get the kind of attention your work deserves and build an audience around your words, the best strategy is to share your struggles and talk about what you did to overcome them.

Think back to when you were a kid. Did your mom tell you to chase your dreams and the money would follow? Maybe your dad encouraged you to choose a safe, secure career? They were wrong.

I’m often challenged to think differently about a long-held belief. It’s scary, but I experience growth every time I face the fear and rise to the challenge. In this episode of The Portfolio Life, Lewis Schiff challenges our ideas about becoming successful in our chosen careers.

Most of us think that to be a writer, we need to study writing. We imagine (or dread) going back to school to get an advanced degree in creative writing. But Ryan Holiday chose another path.

He realized that he could learn a lot more about writing and marketing books by studying at the feet of the people doing exactly what he wanted to learn.

Content is not king. Content is a fat, dethroned monarch, dis-empowered of his royal ability to influence. And he lost that power a long time ago. In other words, your words are not enough. And where do we see this better than in the life of Ernest Hemingway.

Wherever you look, there are voices telling you to "live a better story" or do something "epic." They make it sound easy. But it's not so simple, is it? The truth is the epic life requires more than just blind courage. Few people understand this better than Chris Guillebeau.

So when I had a chance to sit down with Chris and chat about these ideas, I really wanted to know one thing: How do you live a life full of adventurous experiences and creative endeavors without going broke? That's what we discuss in this interview.

We were all born to do one important thing: to pursue our "life's task" and master it. That's what Robert Greene believes. In fact, he's written a whole book about the subject, and it's called Mastery.

Awhile back, I had a chance to sit down (virtually speaking) with Robert and interview him. We talked about the concept of calling, apprenticeship, and how to master your craft. Greene believes we all have something we intuitively know we were meant to do, and the path to that work — what he calls your "life's task" — is less glamorous than we've been told.

Most of us think we have to be big-time self-promoters for anyone to hear about our work. Thankfully, that’s just not true. There’s another way.

Most of us want to influence others with our ideas. We want our words to spread. Whether you’re writing to inspire or inform or even entertain, you want people to read your words and to share them with their friends.

In this episode of the podcast, Jonah Berger, Associate Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and bestselling author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On, shares with us six principles to craft contagious content and destroys a few myths in the process.

In this episode of the podcast, we tackle four listener Tina Green Drake’s questions about writing and selling articles. And while Tina’s questions were specific to articles, the answers apply to all types of writing.

We all fear being “found out.” Being outed as a fake. So what if we decided to come clean? Be real. Authentic.

In this episode of the podcast, Brad Lomenick, President and Lead Visionary of Catalyst and author of The Catalyst Leader, shares wisdom for the next generation of authentic communicators and leaders.