Category: true voice

My first year on Twitter, I generated over $30k in income that I could point directly back to Twitter. Not every year is that great, and each platform is different, but rather than over-committing myself to a zillion social media platforms, I've been pretty strategic about where and how often I post. But what do […]

When I was a kid, I was told that Black Friday was the biggest shopping day of the year, and was so named because it was the day that many retailers finally posted a profit and came out of the red and "into the black". It's not true, of course, since the phrase is only […]

"You can't win if you don't play." Mom used this sentence to justify a lot of behavior when I was a kid: learning to ride a bike, auditioning for plays, joining the cross country team (I took 11th place in the city meet). And yes, mom played the lottery. She had a winning streak where, with […]

[Note: This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Creative Freedom. If you'd like to be part of the advance team and get more sneak peeks of the book, contact me for more info.] There's a quote often attributed to John Lennon: "Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not […]

You may have heard the story about Walter Matthau. An aspiring actor approached him at some function and said that he was looking for that one big break. Matthau, in his caring, yet cynical style, says , "Kid, it's not the one big break, it's the fifty." Overnight success rarely is, and most creatives that […]

Welcome to Day Four of the Creative Freedom Challenge. Here are links to Day One, Day Two, and Day Three so you can stay on track. Today, I'm sharing an example of heart-centered marketing in action using what I call the "show & tell technique" It's a great way to bake the marketing right into […]

On Day One of the Creative Freedom Challenge, we're taking a hard look at the biggest reason you're still stuck in energy-draining work, instead of getting paid well for doing what you love. And it's not what you think. Most people think the reason they're stuck is because they haven't made enough money yet to […]

First and foremost: THANK YOU. Thank you for the attention, the time, the support, and the VOICE you've given to a community that's had no voice for decades. While the "Flint Water Crisis" is just now in the spotlight, it's been going on for a few years now... and the bigger crisis in Flint has been […]

[Editor’s note: This is the next installment in a series of posts. Each year since November, 2010, I've posted an annual re-cap of my happenings and a projection of things to come.  If you're ambitious, curious, or just plain bored, you can find the previous posts here: 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 […]

[Note: this is the condensed version of my annual year in review. A more in-depth piece is coming next week, but since today is a special day, I thought this was timely and appropriate.] I "broke" my first resolution ON New Year's Day. I don't tend to take them too seriously, but since it's a […]