Share the progress and the thinking as it develops. Include your audience in the process.

People who say “you shouldn’t trade your time for money” only say that because they’ve never made $5000 in an hour.

For many professionals, our fundamental business strategy is “do good work, get referrals”.

Every single client should receive more in value than they pay in money. Hopefully by a multiple in a range between two-and-ten. (Any higher than that, your price should probably go up).

If you’re going to run a successful business, you’re obviously going to need to make money. This is not a problem. Money is an abundant resource, and when you’ve got something of value to offer, people will buy it.

I doubt there’s an easier or faster path to becoming the person you want to become, than by joining the right tribe, and finding the right five.

It's more valuable to be a node in a network than in the spotlight for an audience.

If you want to treat your business right, you’ve gotta treat yourself right. Your business will never be better off than you in the long term, so you’ve gotta look after yourself.

In times of economic uncertainty, is it safer to get a job than be a solo pro?

When you don’t have enough clients, your first step should be to talk to people. Try to find yourself in direct, synchronous communication with at least one person every day, and I reckon you’ll find more clients on your books within weeks at most.

If you can offer and accept both responsibility and empathy for your actions and their consequences, I think you provide yourself with the best platform for creating lasting positive change; for yourself, and for the world around you.

When you have the courage to be even a little memorable, marketing your business suddenly doesn’t have to be so hard.

I think the goal of productivity should be to take positive action aligned with your long-term goals on a daily basis.

There are plenty of models for thinking about what a human truly is that extend far beyond the rational actor model.

Perfectionism is an example of a mistake we make in lots of different ways: unwittingly optimising for the wrong thing.

There’s probably a pertinent point to make about the value of playing the long game as a solo pro, but I’m too tired to articulate it well because I really need a break, so you’ll need to infer that lesson yourself.

Rather than changing ourselves to fit in with whoever we happen to have been lumped with, a better strategy is to stand out in all the ways that we’re unique, and let the people for whom that resonates gravitate towards us.

I do it this way because—of the strategies I’ve tried—this is by far the fastest way to turn your expertise into a book.