I never thought that Tony Hsieh wanted to make a billion-dollar company. Deep down, I thought he wanted to make a billion people really happy — and he did.

When I was a college business adjunct, I had many discussions with my students about startups and what makes them work.

I also had a penchant for talking ad nauseum about how startups fail since most of them do. I felt people ought to brace themselves for difficult times.

Startups are odd beasts and there is no perfect formula. Of course, value creation is very important. We also love billion-dollar markets…

That's incredibly sad, despite the sluggish growth of a top website. Freelance writers make more money in those pathetic Content Mills that I condemned before reading this. I know an award-winning journalist, a real writer folks!, that is not part of that 6.2%. He's brilliant. Funny what trends and monetizes. Silver Lining: Great UI/UX .

“You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

In a world where everything seems like it’s spinning out of control, we already possess the means to solve most of our problems.

We have our mind and our will to do and be something truly remarkable. That is the Stoic wisdom penned by the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius around 180 AD.

This is the kind of wisdom we need today. Besides death, perhaps the worst thing about COVID-19 and other big crises is that things will never be the…

There are so many skills you need to have to excel at marketing today. However, I can narrow it down to the top three. This is my perspective from being a marketing director. I’ve worked with many global and small clients for ten years that taught me a lot.

The most marketing important skills are: selling, storytelling, and native platform mastery. The first two go together, but deserve their own spot on this list.

These are broad skills of course. It might be more helpful to tell someone to learn SEO and content marketing. However, these three skills should steer…

There was a time when most freelance writers thought that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was a mystery: not anymore.

We all know that SEO is important for getting online traffic. Traffic leads to sales. And it’s big business too. Currently, the SEO industry is valued at over $80 billion, so it isn’t going away anytime soon.

For freelance writers, they can flat-out ignore 80% of SEO!

So why does it matter?

For the most part, companies can get traffic online two ways:

1. PPC Traffic, or Pay-per-click. These are services used on high-traffic platforms like Google or Facebook. …

Is earning $3,000 an article success? How about getting published in every top niche magazine in your field? Is teaching 3,000 students and over 100 clients how to write professionally a success? I’ve done all of this in just a few years.

None of this is writing success to me.

I’m not talking about fame or money here — though that can surely be an achievable byproduct.

The success I’m talking about involves:

• Feeling really good about your writing.
• Healing and expression from your writing.
• The joy of sharing your knowledge or experience through writing.
• Connecting with others on a…

If you dismiss NFTs because of the ridiculous headlines for the sale of a $69M piece of art or some random cat meme, you don’t understand NFTs.

Let me begin with something you do know.

The middle-man is the devil.

You know, the guy that takes 5% of, well, everything. Be they credit cards, payment processors, social media platforms, or so-called strategic partners — they all want a monetary slice of what mostly belongs to you.

In the past, nickel and diming every single transaction made companies like Visa and Chase Bank trillions.

Sure, people should pay for some services…

There is this writer on Kristin Wilson on Medium who just blew my mind with her insights, and that’s not easy. Currently, it has 25,000 claps and 212 comments.

Wilson wrote a great article called The Pandemic Proves That Society Was Wrong About How to Live Life in the popular Illumination publication.

For those new to Medium or who are wondering what to read because trusting Medium’s strange algorithm for your home page leaves you more than skeptical, this is the one.

In it, Wilson basically breaks down the conversations a lot of us have been having in our heads…