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I used to smoke. About a pack a day. For many years. I quit january 1st, 2005, and I haven't looked back.

In fact, I quit twice. I quit in March 2002, shortly after moving from New York to Copenhagen. Then I saw a friend smoke at his wedding, and he looked so cool and my quitting had been so easy that I thought I could take a puff without getting sucked back in. I couldn't. Two and a half more years of smoking went by before I finally quit.

When I quit, it was important for me to make the inne…

I'm so excited about the process of expressing our creativity, We can do it on many levels, of course. Ultimately, our whole lives are creative expressions. But a lot of us get stuck along the way.

I was talking to someone in my building the other day. Chinese American, she wanted to do work that made money, so she became a lawyer, and now she hates going to work every day, and she's yearning to do something else. I told her about me picking up music again, and Phoebe told her about getting int…

Back from a trip to Denmark. My dad turned 80, and I'd written him a song ("Song for my Father") which I performed on the very guitar he got for his 18th birthday. He and many others were very moved. It was a great experience.

Lest week we talked about your zone of genius. Today I promised I'd talk about reality.

We all have the capacity to be dreamy, head in the clouds, envision things that don't yet exist, dream of futures we wish to create. We also have the capacity to delude ourselves, to …

If there are two things I truly believe in, it's finding your zone of genius, and facing reality head-on.

Your zone of genius is that place where you're just flowing, having a great time, creating amazing value for people, and it's easy and doesn't feel like work. You're like "wait, I get paid to do this?". If you haven't found it yet, keep looking.

A lot of us have found our zone of excellence, and we're truly really excellent there. But it's not our zone of genius. It's not what we're mean…

I was watching the Ed Sheeran documentary, Jumpers for Goalposts, the other day. I also read his book.

It's an incredible story. He's an incredible guy. Only 24 years old, he's working with a who's who of the industry, has Elton John on speed dial, and has played the UK's biggest venue, Wembley, three nights in a row, 77,000 people per night, just him, his guitar, and his loop station. Un-f**king-believable.

Two things that really stood out for me from studying him:

He says he's never set a g…

First, I hope everyone's safe. My heart aches for what happened in Paris last week. But like my French friend Orane said, we must go on like normal. We can't let them win.

So on to today's topic: Our server had babies!

Well, not exactly. But where there were previously 3 of them, we now have 7. Or so.

Before, we had mainly one server that ran everything, with two secondary database servers, just so we had instant backups of our primary database, in case a hard drive started to fail. It's serv…

I like to challenge myself and my employees to make at least one major fuck-up per week.

Why? Because if you're not making mistakes, you're playing it too safe. Life and business is about taking risks. Not blind, uncalculated risks. But if you're not risking anything, then you're not pushing the boundaries.

But there's another reason too: Mistakes can be great for your business.

There was one moment in particular during the first online course I ever bought that made a lasting impression on m…

The Edge.

That's the name of U2's guitarist.

It's also a pretty great place to live.

When you're complacent, you just want to stay where you are, stay on the couch, watch sports (world series, anyone?), and not be challenged. That's staying well within your edge. May feel great in the moment. Pretty sure it requires an increasing amount of substances to numb out the voice whispering inside. Not a good long-term strategy. 

Then theres' what I used to do. So full of hate and resentment towards…

Sorry I skipped the newsletter last week. I was spending some quality time in Denmark with my kids who live there with their mom.

Today, I wanted to share a great book/program with you. It's Gay Hendricks' book "The 10-Second Miracle".

I've raved about Gay before, he's a great great human being, but oh boy! I think that book has completely changed my life. It's definitely the most important book I've read this year, maybe even the most important book since I read his other book, Learning to lo…

This year is all about expansion for Simplero. At the end of last year, I was back to being just me, after both Swanand and Kristine left to pursue their paths. It was a good change for all, but it was never intended to stay that way. And it hasn't.

In July, Kareem joined as Chief Operating Officer, and his primary responsibilities are to create a system for customer acquisition, and to build out a team around Simplero. We're hard at work at both of those tasks. 

The first person we brought …