How to run your family like a business:

1a) Vision and values.

- What do we want our family to represent to the world?
- What do we want our lives to be about? What’s the “story” we’re making?
- What are our non-negotiables?
- What values do we want to instill into our kids? 1b) Modeling values

- Read your vision and values weekly.
- Ask yourself how well you modeled those values to your family in the past week. Look for opportunities to improve.
- You’re going to fail, that’s okay. Be gentle with yourself.

Humbly submitted: gift ideas for men they might actually like:

https://twitter.com/svershbow/status/1593332281300733956

A crosshatched mixing glass and spoon. $9. (Via @CrateandBarrel)

How to make friends as an adult:

1) Go outside. Attend networking events. Drop your kids off at school. Join a rec league. Say yes to invites from friends, and actually talk to the other people.

It’s possible to make friends entirely online, but very hard. Get offline. 2) Be vulnerable first.

Most people (out of insecurity) talk about how amazing everything is. Their job is great, family is great, business is great.

Offer up something you’re struggling with. Can be small. But creates space for authenticity, and reciprocation.

The Minimum Viable Management System:

Your business needs a management system. But it doesn’t have to be elaborate. And yet 99% of companies are missing one or more of these pieces.

Here’s what you need to turn your company into a well-run machine: 1) Vision. What are you trying to accomplish? What will your business look like when it’s “done?”

- Why we exist.
- Who we sell to.
- What we sell.
- Why we’re special.
- What it “feels“ like to work with us.
- How big we’ll be, by when. (10 years is often a good number.)

This is the Magic Castle Hotel, considered by many to be the best hotel in Los Angeles.

It looks like an average apartment complex with a small pool.

And yet it has over 3500 glowing reviews on TripAdvisor and is routinely booked months in advance.

How did they do it? 🧵 There's a red phone and a sign on the left side of the pool. That sign says "POPSICLE HOTLINE".

When you call it, a waiter comes out with free popsicles on a a silver tray.

Gave a talk last week to a group of entrepreneurs @KelloggSchool. Highly tactical, for companies where cash is scarce.

This was what I cam up with 🧵: 1) Understand your customer as deeply as possible. Too many founders assume they know their customer but don't.

You have to talk to a LOT of them. Understand their demographics, psychographics, who influences them, who they aspire to be. Go DEEP.

When we decided to homeschool for covid, the ONE THING I wanted to teach my kids was entrepreneurship.

Starting in March, I began working with them on a 🍋 stand.

Today was their first day in business.

In 90 minutes they made $100.

In case you want to try it, my curriculum: Week 1: planning.

We talked at a high level about all the things (okay, many of the things) they need to be thinking about when starting a business. Marketing, branding, product, pricing, etc.

Unicorns do exist. How to become one:

1) Create a list of things you want to become top 1% in the world at. Use a competency model (example below), or just make it up. 2) Focus on one big skill each year. Either by interest, or ask wise friends which is highest impact.

Create a self study curriculum for the first one. Break into sub-skills. Practice one every day for a month.

As much as possible use real projects with feedback loops.

A bulletproof, 100% certain to work process for landing an amazing gig:

1) Don’t worry so much about finding your “passion”. Pursue mastery.

More often than not deep competence creates deep passion.

Ask yourself “what’s A thing (not THE thing) I want to get really good at?” 2) You probably don’t know anything yet about that thing. At least not enough to get paid.

Pick up the 10 best books on the subject. Read them.

Take good notes (my process is below).

https://twitter.com/intentionally/status/1253137544063201280

In my class, SEO is consistently the area that baffles folks. But it's not terribly difficult. This gets you 90% of the way there.

SEO is about 3 things:

1) How your site is structured.
2) What your site says.
3) What other people say about you.

How to approach each (thread): 1) Site structure.

Start at the page level. This is because most organic (non-earned or paid) traffic will come to internal pages, not your home page.

The nice thing is it's all basically HTML. The HTML you use signals to Google what parts of the page matter the most.

How to use note taking to utterly transform your career (a thread):

1) Spend 30 minutes a day reading. Highlight important passages. 2) Add them to a note-taking system (I use Bear). One idea per note. Re-phrase your highlights in your own words. Reference the source so you can track it down later.

1: Lots of follow-up questions from folks, specifically on what to write about, where, and how to start.

My opinions (others surely will disagree):

https://twitter.com/intentionally/status/1218298437235552261

2: What to write about?

If you know where you want your career to go, write about that stuff.

Don’t be afraid to focus narrowly. Often the tighter your niche the faster your influence will grow.

If you don’t know, write about anything. The habit matters. Can focus later.

1) There is a solution to the “hustle porn” debate.

Don’t focus on hours. Pay attention to level of intensity and focus during the hours you do work.

Here’s how: 2) Most of us aren’t very disciplined about how we spend our time. We honestly think we work hard. We’re just wrong.

CrossFit is a good analogy. They don’t work out for hours on end. But the hour they do is intense, focused and measured.