3 steps to writing anything important

Marketing collateral, an investor pitch, your Best Man’s speech, donor thank you notes, a love letter… writing is everywhere and often holds weight of daunting implications. The mere act of putting pen to page can result in temporary paralysis. To alleviate some of this stress, I’ve outlined basic steps to push your writing forward.

Think about WHO will be reading (or hearing) it.

You want your writing to be applicable. This is hard…

Inconvenience yourself.

New Yorkers and scheduling is borderline ridiculous. I spend more time than I care to admit orchestrating calendars, slotting calls, finding common days for in-person meetings. While there are plenty of automated tools to streamline this process, I’ve found that each person’s needs and requests are very different, and the act of scheduling itself can reveal underlying issues. Each day I’m forced to reassess my priorities and make decisions…

I stopped trying.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around this, as it is completely counterintuitive to me.

The moment I stopped trying and quit everything is when things became clear.

I’m not saying I don’t have challenges and that life is always easy, but my day-to-day isn’t filled with as much strife. There’s less struggle as I move about the world.

I think of how difficult momentum seemed in the…

Conversations that matter, organizing, and impresarios: A dinner event in March

Everyone knows bringing people together in meaningful ways has value. But what does that mean? And how do you build environments that get people to be authentic and real?

Questions I hear:

• How do you move beyond “What do you do?” at networking events?
• How important is a guest list, really?
• Does the environment matter?
• Can you prevent people from dishing out business cards like candy on Halloween?
• Is it possible to focus discussion and…
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United by insecurity

No matter where your office is located, the ceiling can fall down. You don’t know when, but one day it will. There is even a possibility a car drives through your living room tonight while you’re sleeping.

We’ve done a great job fooling ourselves into believing we have it all figured out. We’ve worked hard to create predictable outcomes, studying to become masters of our environment. Data is plugged into…