Colby Baskin

Since joining Welden Logistics, I’ve onboarded more agents in the last nine months than I did the entire time I owned my brokerage. The funny part is, I’m not doing anything differently. As an owner, I never focused heavily on recruiting. My focus was running my book of business, taking care of the company, and letting recruiting happen organically. That’s still exactly how I approach it today. I’m not sure what changed. Maybe it’s the perspective. Maybe it’s the experience. Maybe people just connect differently when you’re no longer sitting in the owner’s chair. Whatever it is, I’ll take it. Sometimes the best growth happens when you’re not chasing it.

Work goals are great, but personal goals are important too. In 2022, my wife and I started our quest to visit all 63 National Parks together. So far, we have visited 10. - Glacier NP - Yellowstone NP - Grand Canyon NP - Zion NP - Bryce Canyon NP - Canyonlands NP - Capitol Reef NP - Arches NP - Hawaii Volcanoes NP - Haleakala NP Every park we visit, we strap on our hiking boots and see as much as we can. Our next trip, we are planning to visit the PacNW to check off Olympic, Rainier, North Cascades and Crater Lake. Starting my agency this year has been a blast and the growth is addicting, but I don't want to ever lose sight of my "why." Work hard, but don't forget to get out from behind the screen and…

I was talking to John 🅰️ Rogers last night about agent recruiting. John is taking a bigger role in recruiting so it’s been fun talking to him about it. Something I mentioned to him was what I love about it is it’s a multi-faceted, and extremely competitive space that comprises elements of the tech, back office, credit, etc. but more importantly elements of trust building and relationships. I have landed 5 star agents over the years without pitching them once because i focused on building relationships instead. It’s almost always the ultimate decision maker. If you are good at listening, and making friends, you’ll be better than 90% of agent recruiters out there. Just make one friend a day in this space…

The first time I coached someone through burnout, I realized I was describing my own life. She listed her symptoms like achievements. Eighty-hour weeks. No days off in months. Pride in being the person everyone called when something broke. I nodded because I recognized all of it. Not from a textbook. From my thirties. I had spent 20 years building at that pace. An eight-figure company by 35. Six presidential campaigns before 40. Teams of 10. Teams of 10,000. I was proud of every mile. And I was falling apart during most of them. When I started coaching, I thought I was giving something away. Time. Knowledge. Hard-earned lessons about building without burning out. But something unexpected kept…

The most talented people aren't always the ones who get the opportunities. They're often the ones still deciding whether they're ready. Meanwhile... Someone else has already applied. Already spoken up. Already pitched the idea. Already asked for the promotion. I've coached brilliant healthcare leaders who could lead entire organisations... yet hesitated to put themselves forward for a role they were more than capable of doing. Not because they lacked ability. Because they believed everyone else knew more than they did. Self-doubt doesn't keep you humble. Sometimes it keeps you hidden. You don't need more qualifications. You don't need another certificate. You don't need permission. Sometimes you simply n…

The sentence I hear most from functional leaders at scaling companies is some version of this: "I made the strongest argument in the room and still lost." Being right and being influential are different skills, and the gap between them widens as a company grows. At 50 people, the best argument usually wins because everyone in the room shares context. At 300, decisions move through people who do not attend your meetings, weigh risks you never see, and answer to pressures you are not copied on. The quality of your analysis stops being the deciding variable somewhere around the point where the CEO stops knowing everyone's name. Cohen and Bradford spent years studying influence without authority, and their core f…

I've had 4,100+ conversations with executives about their health since 2018. The energy complaint comes up on nearly every call. Wired all morning, crashing by 3pm, running on coffee and willpower by 5. It's affecting your family too. You're running on empty by the time you get home, and they get whatever is left. Here's what I'd tell you about your energy if I wasn't worried about offending you. 1️⃣ You Blame Your Age. It's Your Habits. ↳ Feeling wiped by 3pm isn't your age catching up. It's the inputs from the last 24 hours. 2️⃣ Your Lunch Is Why You Crash At 3pm. ↳ A high-carb, low-protein lunch spikes blood sugar, then drops it hard two hours later. 3️⃣ You Run On 6 Hours And Call It Enough. ↳ Under 7…

71.4% of 10,000 resumes fell below the “qualified” screening threshold in a new 2026 analysis. One finding stood out. ➡️ 82% of the below-threshold resumes contained fewer than half of the required keywords from the job they were targeting. That doesn’t automatically mean those candidates lacked the experience. It means the match wasn’t clear enough on the resume. For example: “Worked with leaders across the company” versus “Managed cross-functional stakeholder relationships” The experience may be similar. But the second version gives a screening system much clearer signals about what you actually did. And keywords weren’t the only issue. 34% of the below-threshold resumes had at least one critical…

The moment you think you have finished growing is the moment you start losing the people you lead. I have seen it happen more times than I can count. A leader reaches a certain level. Gets comfortable. Stops being curious. Stops questioning their own assumptions. Stops putting themselves in situations where they do not already know the answer. And slowly, without noticing it, they stop growing. The team notices before the leader does. Always. Because you cannot inspire growth in others while standing still yourself. The best leaders I have worked with in 20 years share one thing that has nothing to do with experience or intelligence. They are genuinely, consistently, almost obsessively curious. Not abou…

Anxiety can make you successful. Until your body collects the debt. I was on the trading floor early. Triple-checking everything. Reviewing every decision. Everyone called it "attention to detail." "Dedication." "High standards." The truth? My fuel was stress chemistry keeping me wired. When you're highly functional and highly anxious, the anxiety becomes your engine. You get rewarded for running on fumes. So you keep going. Until you can't. I work with the ultra-successful, And many are fighting the same, silent battle: Calm on the outside, but racing thoughts on the inside. Appearing unbothered, yet actually exhausted. Praised for high standards, but paralyzed by fear of failure. Anxiety-fueled succes…

Leadership isn't a performance. It's how people experience you. Thanks to Emma J E. for the visual. Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People was published nearly 90 years ago. Yet the principles behind it are just as relevant for leaders today. Many people think charisma comes from confidence, presence, or being the most impressive person in the room. Carnegie believed something different. He argued that charisma is built by making the person in front of you feel important. Here are the seven principles he shared. 1️⃣ Smile Walk in like you're genuinely pleased to be there. Do it for everyone in the room, not just the person you came to see. 2️⃣ Make People Feel Important People remem…

150 applications and still no offer. That is not a verdict. That is a dataset you have not learned to read yet.   One rejection tells you almost nothing.   It is a single data point, and a single data point is noise.   The budget froze the week you applied. Priorities shifted. An internal candidate appeared. Someone's nephew turned in a resume. The role got filled before anyone opened your application.   None of that is a verdict on your value. You will never even see most of it.   A pattern is a different story.   When rejections start stacking up, stop reading them as verdicts and start reading them as logs. The pattern is the signal, and the signal is useful.   Stacked up, rejections can tell you:   whether…

A river bends constantly and still gets to the sea. It goes around the rock. It cuts a new channel when the old one silts up. It splits, floods, narrows, slows. None of that is failure. It's just how water handles whatever is in front of it. The one thing a river never does is change which ocean it's heading for. I think a lot of us have this the wrong way round. We hold the plan tightly and the destination loosely. The five year plan gets defended long after it stopped making sense. Meanwhile the actual outcome we're chasing has quietly drifted three times in eighteen months, and nobody's said it out loud. Changing route is normal. Changing destination without telling anyone is what wears everyone dow…

I've gained a few new followers. So I thought, why not introduce myself to you properly? Hi!! I am Suad.  I'm from Colombia.  I grew up in the tiny and beautiful Caribbean 🏝️ of San Andres (most people would've never guessed) And I absolutely LOVE freedom. So while everyone around me followed a mostly linear career, I just couldn't do it. I was too curious, with too many passions. Instead, I reimagined my career over and over: 💎 Trader 💎 Founder 💎 Investor 💎 Adviser I was very successful at every chapter. I traveled the world.  I won awards.  Sat across the table from the best. BUT there are challenges you cannot predict. Like when I moved to Toronto a few years ago and couldn't land my dream j…

Most people hear "AI". And think it's one thing. There are seven layers. Each one wraps around the last, like Russian nesting dolls. Image by my friend Will Stewart, MBA , give him a follow. 𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗔𝗜 Pure logic. “If this, then that”. Symbolic AI and Expert Systems that follow rigid rules to make decisions. It doesn't learn, it just follows orders. 𝗠𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 We stopped writing rules and started using math. Algorithms analyze data to find patterns. They classify, predict, and optimize based on history, not hard-coded instructions. 𝗡𝗲𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗡𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀 We built systems inspired by the human brain with nodes and connections. This layer enabled computers to be…

Stop rehearsing your interview answers! Seriously. The interviewer can tell. And I don’t mean you shouldn’t prepare. You absolutely should. But there’s a big difference between preparing for an interview and memorizing a script. When you rehearse every answer word-for-word, three things can happen: → You sound robotic. → You panic when they ask the question slightly differently. → You focus so much on saying the “right” thing that you forget to actually have a conversation. Instead, prepare your stories, not your sentences. Know: • The accomplishments you want them to remember • The challenges you’ve overcome • The examples that demonstrate your skills • The mistakes you’ve learned from • The results…

LIE: The best leaders have thick skin. TRUTH: Thick skin is just scar tissue you've rebranded as a strength. Welcome to Truth-Telling Tuesday. On Sunday I told you I tolerated cruel candor on my team because my skin was thick enough to take it. I named what it cost them. I didn't name what it cost me. So let me finish the confession. I spent years in leadership walking into rooms where the temperature dropped the second a decision got hard. Rooms where people said things that would have sent most people home for the day. I didn't flinch. I didn't leave. I sat there and took it, and afterward someone would say, "That's why you're good at this. You can handle anything." And I believed them. I wore tha…

Our AI models aren’t allowed to say the word "NO" Sounds stupid. But if your lead list came from an AI that's allowed to say yes, you're probably emailing people who don't exist. So here's what happens... You ask it for a title it doesn't actually have, and it just makes one up. Writes something believable, drops it in the row, moves on like nothing happened. Does the same thing with emails and company details. Then you ask it to double check its own work. It tells you you're 100% right, we're good to go. They blend in so well that you don't realize they're fake until after you've already hit send. So we took the word away from it. AI wants to make you happy. Ask it yes or no and it leans yes every time…

Sometimes reminders come to us in unexpected ways. My friend Jimmy Lai somehow wrote a book about LinkedIn that reads less like a how-to book and more like an engaging story to enjoy. I took a course last year, on how to be a content creator on LinkedIn and it taught me so much that I still use today. I really enjoy creating content - it has satisfied a sense of creativity that I didn't even know that I had. Admittedly, by vanity metrics standards, my profile does not represent the hard work I put into it and is probably the slowest growing in the entire cohort of that course I was in last year. Jimmy reminds us that it's about the conversations that happen behind the scenes that matter. This is so true…

Your first call shouldn’t rely on luck. Focus on these 5 bullets instead. You did the work. You got the results. But the phone stays quiet. I've read thousands of resumes as a recruiter. The ones that get called first all do the same thing. They prove impact a stranger can see in 5 seconds. Duty words get skimmed. Proof gets remembered. So I rewrote 5 real bullets across 5 careers. Same jobs. Same people. New first impression. Save this for your next resume update. The work already happened. Your bullets just have to catch up. What's the first bullet on your resume right now? 👇 ——— ♻️ Repost for the friend who's qualified but quiet on paper. Follow Jonathan Whipple for recruiting insider framewor…

Quick. Who is the "Father of modern TV"? No using ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini or Perplexity! I bet you have no idea. But it relates to AEO/GEO, surprisingly. Rigby, Idaho. 1921. A 14 year-old walks behind an old horse in a potato field. He has been out there since before the sun rose. Dust in his teeth. Sweat cutting through the grit on his neck. Leather creaking. He stopped noticing the smell of hot horse hours ago. End of the field. Turn around. Start back. Row beside row beside row until the whole field is covered, one line at a time. Somewhere in there he looks down at what he made and thinks: "You could paint a picture that way." Line by line. Fast enough that the eye never catche…

Last week I talked with more W2 reps than I have ever talked to in a week before. I think that says a lot about the direction agency is moving and why I’m so bullish on the agent model. 📈 One of the conversations I had stuck with me, “Levi I don’t have a non compete or non solicit, but I am nervous because my brokerage said they would do everything in their power to come after me if I leave, and trying to force me to sign a non solicit.” I said something to him that’s about as true as anything I have ever told anyone before.. “You are going to piss off a lot of people when you start doing what’s best for you.” Business is always personal. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.

Did a little something yesterday… Bought the baddest pickup truck on the market.. GMC Seirra 2500 AT4X AEV Edition.

Contrary to newsfeed hype. Getting in shape will not make you more money. Believe me, tons of broke fit people. 100 bicep curls will not beat 100 cold emails. If you wanna make more money, spend your time on things that make you more money. - Alex ✊🏽

April 1st to July 1st completed my 90 days as an authorized agent for Trinity Logistics. I had only one wrote down goal. On board customers and be able to move freight as quickly as we could to turn a steady trickle faucet on. If I achieved that goal during that time frame then it would show me two things. 1. Prove to myself I could do this as an agent in some capacity. 2. That I had a solid foundation to build on and to keep moving forward. Mission accomplished. We started on Wednesday. Thursday we had our first customer. Monday we were picking up our first load. By end of 90 days we had 5 customers with a steady trickle. Building carrier networks on those lanes. Building new carrier relationships and ne…

Agent Suydam says: I’m a simple man with simple birthday wishes. I only want two things: → 1,000 mini trash cans from Dollar Tree Stores. The Sales Rebellion and Dale Dupree have created a national shortage. We keep crumpling letters creating curiosity. We keep filling trash cans that creates office buzz. And Dollar Tree Stores cannot restock fast enough for us Rebels. As you can see, my personal inventory is dangerously low, I only have a couple hundred left. → A Dollar Tree Stores sponsorship for TOTALITY, August 18–20, in Knoxville, Tennessee. Come be our guest. See what happens when old-school prospecting, crumpled letters, tiny trash cans, and a bunch of Rebels collide. And Dollar Tree Stores y…

3 weeks ago I celebrated my 1 year anniversary at TQL, and today I get to celebrate my first commission check. It’s exciting to hit this milestone so early on in my career as a broker, but the jobs not done yet. Just like any other sales job, I’ve had my ups and downs, good weeks and bad weeks; but at the end of the day, it’s about continuing to push through adversity. I look forward to continuing this journey and seeing how far I can go with this.

I'm excited to share that I'll be attending the SMU Steel Summit! This event promises to bring together experts and enthusiasts in the steel industry. I can’t wait to learn, connect, and explore new ideas with everyone. Join me for this amazing opportunity to grow and network from August 24 to August 26! Register here https://lnkd.in/gkEKARtb

Today, my mom is 75 years young!! They say behind every great man as an even greater woman, well behind these 3 knuckleheads is the greatest woman of ask time, we call her mom! This is one of my favorite pictures of my mom with my kids. Here’s to many more trips around the sun with you, Lady!

Everyone says "just be authentic on LinkedIn." They're wrong about what that means. Authentic doesn't mean raw. It means honest about the gap between what happened and how you described it. You didn't trust your instincts. You made it up as you went and it worked. That distinction matters more than you think. "Trusted my instincts" is a conclusion. "Made it up as I went" is a story. Stories build audiences. Conclusions get scrolled past. The most followed people on LinkedIn aren't the most polished. They're the most willing to say the quiet part out loud. Your mess is your message. Package it that way. --- Each week I break down what's changing, what's being exaggerated, and what actually matters…

It’s been a minute since I’ve shared some Waffle House, Inc. thoughts. In every economy, there are winners and losers. Some businesses thrive. Others fold. I’ve spent 32 years in sales and lived through multiple market swings—the good ones, bad ones, and the ones that felt like they would never end, like the great freight recession. I don’t waste time complaining about them. I work harder. Good salespeople don’t wait for the economy to get better. They get better. While others are looking for reasons why it’s tough, the best ones are making calls, tightening their process, sharpening their story, and finding the buyers who still need what they sell. I said this to Zyad McGowan yesterday: Master the…

Nobody is going to hand you a certificate that says you are a great leader. The people who know it are the ones around you. And they rarely say it out loud. After 20 years in leadership environments I have learned to recognise the signs that someone is operating at a genuinely high level. Most of them have nothing to do with confidence, authority, or results. They are quieter than that. The first sign is that people come to you before they go to the official authority. Not because of your position. Because your judgment has earned their trust without your title having to demand it. The second sign is that your first instinct after a win is to name the people who made it possible. Not to accept the credit…

4 in 5 meditation app users are gone by day 14. A busy mind isn't why they quit. People assume they stop meditation because they can't clear their minds. But learning meditation is rarely the hardest part. What happens after you learn is. The retreat ends. The workshop finishes. The app can't answer your questions. And you're left wondering: "Am I doing this right?" Last week, I hosted 50 meditators in NYC. Some learned with me nine years ago. Some just finished last week. All still practicing. All still growing. How do I know? When I poll my students at 6 weeks, their average consistency score: 92%. Why would this be? Two reasons: 1/ You have me in your corner - for life. When we work together,  I…

Tomorrow marks the start of our 23rd annual family trip to Ocean City, NJ, but the 3rd without my grandmother. It began in 2003 with my dad’s entire side of the family – aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. It’s 20+ Knapp’s bringing our loud, Italian personalities to the quaint and quiet Shore town. The sounds of classic rock and sports debates can be heard into the early hours of the morning for all 7 days. A constant fixture for that trip was my grandmother, affectionately known as “Mom-Mom”, sitting in her rocking chair on the porch. Whether it was morning, noon, or night - you could find my grandmother enjoying the sounds of the seagulls and the ocean waves. What she was hoping to find on that deck wa…

I love this diagram... Because yes, I have been there. The first is a flat circle. Letting fear stop us.  Round and round, ending up exactly where you started. The second is a spiral.  Doing it scared. Same fear, but every turn lifts you. They are from Timothy Armoo's What's Stopping You? It is fair to say that I have spent time in both states. The circle is the quiet one. It looks like being thorough. Getting your ducks in a row. Waiting for the right moment. Making sure everything is jussssssst right. Nobody sees you standing still, so nobody stops you. You're moving, so you've got this, right? Right?! Tim gives the example of him feeling terrified to present.  Terrified asking for half a millio…

Most people think Agentic AI is just "ChatGPT + tools" They're wrong. This diagram shows the full stack. Five layers. Each one matters. Most breakdowns show up in layers four and five. Not in the models. 𝟭/ 𝗔𝗜 & 𝗠𝗟 (𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻) This is where data turns into decisions. Classic ML lives here. Supervised. Unsupervised. Reinforcement. 𝟮/ 𝗗𝗲𝗲𝗽 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 (𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲) Neural nets. Transformers. The heavy machinery. Learns patterns at scale. 𝟯/ 𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗔𝗜 (𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲) LLMs produce the output. RAG brings the missing context. Multimodal models span text, image, audio, video. This is the generation layer. 𝟰/ 𝗔𝗜 𝗔𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 (𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻)…

Wondering what the hiring team says about you right after the interview ends? Not the polished feedback you get in a rejection email (IF you get one at all)! I'm talking about the REAL conversation. The one that happens inside the hiring debrief, when everyone's guard is down and they're being honest with each other about whether you're THE ONE. I've sat in those rooms. And the same 7 lines come up again and again ~ verdicts that decide who moves forward and who doesn't. Things like: "They kept talking, but I still don't know their actual impact." "They'd be amazing... in the right role." "I like them, but I'm not excited." None of these mean you're unqualified. They mean something specific and fixable…

I turned 52 and something in me just resigned. Not from work. From pretending I have unlimited patience. I used to pride myself on it. Endless grace for people, their quirks, their oopsies, the third wrong coffee order. But somewhere between 51 and now, the reserves dried up. Things I've officially run out of, a Friday list: → Patience for being cc'd on a thread where nobody actually needs me but everybody wants a witness. → Grace for the fifth follow-up on something I already answered. In writing. With a timestamp. → Tolerance for people who say "let's circle back" and never circle back. Follow through or stop volunteering. → Energy for smiling through the meeting where someone repeats your idea loud…

Every operations team has the same five characters. The Firefighter. The Process Purist. The Data Geek. The Fixer. The Builder. You already know which desks they sit at. You might be one of them. Each one has a superpower. Each one has a blind spot that shows up under pressure. The Firefighter thrives in the crisis. Calm when everything is on fire, first to the problem, last to leave. But ask them to build the system that stops the fire from starting, and it never quite gets done. The Process Purist builds workflows you could frame on a wall. Elegant, documented, airtight. Until the market moves, and the process they love becomes the thing they defend past its usefulness. The Data Geek sees what everyone…

Good prompts aren't luck. They're a formula you can steal. Most people type one line into ChatGPT. They get one generic answer back. Nobody taught them how to ask. This formula fixes that: → Pick a role (who ChatGPT acts as) → Pick a task (what it builds) → Picki a format (how it's delivered) Salary Negotiator + Contract Negotiation + Script. That combo alone is worth a coaching session. The sheet below holds 3,000+ more. One for every stage of your job hunt. Save it today. Use it tomorrow morning. ChatGPT rewards people who ask better questions. So does the job market. Which stage of your search gets the formula first? Drop it below. 👇 ——— ♻️ Repost so a job seeker in your feed starts asking bet…

Most people think AI is one thing. It's not. It's seven layers... each one built inside the last, like Russian nesting dolls. Classical AI is at the core. Rule-based logic from the 1950s. Every layer after it...machine learning, neural networks, deep learning, generative AI, agentic AI... wraps around the one before it. Remove any inner layer and everything above it collapses. This matters because most of what you see marketed as "AI" doesn't tell you which layer it's actually using. A rule-based chatbot and Claude are both called "AI." They are not the same thing. Not even close. Here's the stack: 🔴 Classical AI — Hard-coded rules. No learning. 1950s. 🟠 Machine Learning — Learns patterns from dat…

Weekly BROKER BEATS. Every week we bring the team together to celebrate wins, talk through challenges, and ask one simple question: “How can we get better?” We’ve stayed consistent with this meeting for the last 3 years, and it’s become one of the most valuable parts of our culture. Every session is an opportunity to: ➡️ Share best practices. ➡️ Learn from one another. ➡️ Train on a new topic. ➡️ Do a quick health check on the business. The best teams don’t improve by accident. They improve because they create time to communicate, learn, and hold each other accountable. Culture isn’t built at company events. It’s built in the meetings you refuse to cancel.

I used to resent my own calendar. Every Monday felt like a wall I had to climb before I had even finished my coffee. I worked 80-hour weeks for more than 20 years. Built an eight-figure company by 35. And somewhere in all that building, I stopped noticing what I had built. Meetings felt like a burden. Emails felt endless. Client calls felt like they were taking from me instead of connecting me to work I had chosen. Then I audited my time. For one full week, I tracked every hour. I logged 44 hours of work. Only 12 were spent with clients. The rest was clutter I had convinced myself was essential. Meetings I didn't need to attend. Emails I didn't need to answer. Tasks I should have delegated years…

Stress is normal. Burnout is not inevitable. Here's the difference. Have you noticed what happens when you hold stress in for too long? It doesn't just disappear. It usually gets unloaded onto whoever happens to be standing closest, at exactly the wrong moment. Uncomfortable for them. Regrettable for us, once we've had time to notice. And even without an outburst, without anything you'd call an "explosion," people still feel your tone. Your energy. They register it in a way that has very little to do with the words you're actually using. Self-awareness is what gives you the chance to pause before any of that happens. There's a small opening between the stressful moment and your response. Once you star…

You can explain your entire career in one breath. Fifteen years. Several promotions. A team that depends on you. A salary that took a decade to earn. But ask what you actually want next, and the answer disappears. You might say: A bigger role. More autonomy. Something different. You would mean it. Sort of. Because those are not decisions. They are placeholders. I hear this in many of my first conversations with accomplished women. They have not failed. They have succeeded into a corner. When you cannot name what you want, you cannot filter what gets offered to you. So you take the stretch assignment because it seems sensible. You accept the promotion because someone believes you can do it. Y…

Data centres used to be invisible. Now entire nations depend on them. One man saw the future before most saw the opportunity. Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock. $11.5 trillion. He's not a tech founder. But his signature moves pension funds like tectonic plates. He has bet $30B+ on AI infrastructure. In his exact words: "𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙜𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙨𝙩 𝙧𝙞𝙨𝙠 𝙞𝙨 𝙞𝙛 𝙬𝙚 𝙙𝙤𝙣'𝙩 𝙞𝙣𝙫𝙚𝙨𝙩." I've spent 20+ years inside hyperscale infrastructure at Google, Microsoft, Meta and others. I've seen data centres go from forgotten back offices to front-page national strategy. And I believe this shows we're still in the early chapters. 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗻: 𝟮𝟬𝟭𝟲 → Air-cooled server rooms → Megawatts, not gigawatts → Bac…

You're not stuck. You're just standing too close. "Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end." - John Lennon This quote gave me the perspective I needed during one of my darkest moments: Laid off twice in 6 months. Felt like a complete failure. Panicked. The voice in my head saying: "It’s over." Maybe you've felt this way too. When everything narrows. When you can only see the wall. When it feels like everything is crumbling. It can feel like the end. Or it can be the upgrade. The difference between these two outcomes? Perspective. Here's the tricky part: When you're on your knees, perspective doesn't come easy. The weight of the moment makes it hard to see anyth…

The modern workday is fighting our biology. Yet we keep treating our bodies like machines. Thanks to Chris Donnelly for this visual! How often have we put off a 10-minute break for the sake of working more? Even when we're exhausted and have been working for hours on end already. If it were anyone on our teams, we'd encourage them to go for a walk. And yet, we don't allow the same amount of grace for ourselves. If you've ever felt like you can't take a moment to breathe, that's often when you need it the most. The science in this image is fascinating. But honestly, you don't need a brain scan to know that going outside makes you feel better. Most of us just don't let ourselves do it without it being f…

Most people think networking means name tags and forced small talk in a room you can't wait to leave.   It doesn't.   You already network. You just call it something else.   The teammate you helped untangle a brutal bug. The vendor engineer you traded war stories with. The person on another team you ping because they actually know how things work.   That was it. No name tag required.   There is even research on this. Most people find their next role through someone they barely keep up with. Not their closest friends. Someone a little further out. Your inner circle already knows what you know. The good stuff lives one ring past it.   Source: Rajkumar et al., A Causal Test of the Strength of Weak Ties, Science, 2…

The safest place for your business idea? Inside your own head. That's all there is. Nothing breaks in there. Nobody asks the awkward question you cannot answer yet. Nobody goes quiet when you explain the pricing. No sniggers or scoffs or eyerolls. So the idea stays protected. Neat. Untouched. Still impressive, when all locked away. A plan without contact with the real world is a beautifully arranged opinion. A mystical being or perhaps a dream-like state. I have sat with founders deep into endless strategy revisions, only to watch the whole thing wobble the moment real customers arrived with real objections. I have also watched founders release something unfinished and learn more in a few days than the…

In 2014, Lisa Su took over a company everyone from Silicon Valley to Wall Street thought was dead. Yet that same company valuation went from ~$2B to $845 BILLION in only 12 years under her leadership (freaking fantastic!!!!) 💎 All bc early in her engineering career, a mentor told her: “Run towards the hardest problems”. Those challenges will teach you what you’re capable of. And let me tell you, she followed this advice to the T… First, she spent 13 years at IBM (when it was one of the world’s undisputed tech giants). 💎 And then, against everyone’s advice, she joined AMD. First as a Senior VP in 2012. Then 2 years later she became COO. And 4 months after that, CEO (pretty crazy!) But the company…

Most people think AI saves time on a task. It doesn't. My friend Clare Kitching drew this and it has been in my head since. 𝗪𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗔𝗜: think, produce, check. 𝗣𝗼𝗼𝗿 𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗔𝗜: you rush in. You paste the first answer, then ask for rework and verify. Then someone downstream spends a week unpicking it. 𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗔𝗜: you frame the problem. You start with an excellent frame, the model produces, and you refine. It feels similar, but the output is a lot better. The time used just moves. Workday put numbers on this in January. From 3,200 full-time employees, all active AI users. → 85% save one to seven hours a week → 37% of that goes back out to correcting and rewriting → Only…

"Do you have any questions for me?" It's one of the most important moments in an interview. Yet so many job seekers freeze... or ask questions they found with a quick Google search. The truth is, the questions you ask can reveal far more than the answers you give. That's why I created this cheat sheet with 48 questions every job seeker should ask before accepting an offer. These questions can help you uncover: • What success really looks like • The team's biggest challenges • Whether the culture matches what they're selling • If this role will actually help you grow Remember, you're not just interviewing for the job. You're interviewing the company, too. 📄 Download the free high-resolution PDF here…

You can't out-strategize a belief you don't actually hold. I watch brilliant leaders build flawless plans, then sabotage them. Because somewhere underneath, they don't believe they're the person who pulls it off. The plan was never the problem. The belief was. I was listening to Oprah's conversation with Shawn Achor about his new book, The Power of Beliefs. His research says what I say in every coaching space: your behavior is downstream of what you believe is possible. Change the belief and the action takes care of itself. Leave the old belief running and you'll white-knuckle new habits until you're too tired to keep pretending. A lack of discipline isn’t keeping you stuck. You're stuck because part of…

Most info on AI is garbage. There, I said it. But we all know it's true. So what do you do about it? You could get better at spotting garbage.  It doesn't scale, because the volume goes up every week and your attention doesn't. Here's what worked for someone else with the same problem. In 1897, a Japanese inventor named Sakichi Toyoda built the country's first self-powered loom. But weaving wasn’t the innovative idea. He built it so the machine stopped itself the moment a thread broke. Before that, a broken thread meant the loom kept running and kept producing damaged cloth until a human noticed. Sometimes for hours. His loom refused to make garbage. In 1929 the British company Platt Brothers paid £10…

The meeting about the meeting that could have been an email. We don't start off in this loop of pointless productivity theatre. For what felt like really good business reasons,we added a weekly sync. The sync needed a deck. The deck needed a prep call, So, a meeting to get ready for the meeting. Then someone built a template so the decks would be consistent, and now filling in that template is somebody's actual job. It looks like rigor. It feels like discipline. Watch what it actually rewards, though. The best update. The cleanest slide. The most confident delivery. The best story. The skill you are paying for stops being how the business moves forward and starts being how the business gets present…

We don’t even have the cords under the TV cleaned up yet… 😅 But one thing we won’t compromise on is training. Today, Raegan Baskin was leading our team through carrier vetting because protecting our customers starts long before a load is ever booked. The office will come together. The furniture will get arranged. The cords will get hidden. But building a team that puts safety, compliance, and customer protection first—that starts on day one. Thank you, Raegan, for everything you do to keep our customers, carriers, and team protected.

As an agent recruiter, I hear a lot of stories. Some are about people looking for better opportunities. Others are downright hard to believe. I’ve heard of agents having a slow day or week, only to have parts of their technology access shut off to save the company a few dollars. I’ve heard of agents asking management to absorb a short pay to protect a customer relationship, only for management to contact the customer directly and lose the account. I’ve even heard of agents who built successful books of business, became “too expensive,” and were let go while the company took over the book they spent years building. If even a fraction of these stories are true, our industry can do better. Agents deserve pa…

Follow this to get meaningful conversations 44% faster. oR Keep doing what everyone (and their cousins) are doing and keep blasting those emails that do not get a response. This was mailed out Thursday and the prospect sent this back to me letting me know I got their attention. There are only 8 tickets left to #TotalityIII. This IS the way! Sales Rebellion

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (𝐌𝐈𝐓) 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐀𝐈 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐟𝐫𝐞𝐞. Not with another list of AI tools. With 11 actual courses. I went through MIT's free AI resources and organized them by role. 𝐁𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬 1. AI 101 https://lnkd.in/dvdZ_eR7 2. How to AI (Almost) Anything https://lnkd.in/gs4cyk8j 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 & 𝐊𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐥𝐞𝐝𝐠𝐞 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐫𝐬 3. Understanding the World Through Data https://lnkd.in/dTafndq5 4. Generative Artificial Intelligence in K–12 Education https://lnkd.in/dSb4bHmf 𝐁𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬 & 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐬 5. Introduction to Machine Learning https://lnkd.in/gUka5ZVR 6. Artificial Intellige…

Urgency can become a learned response. Not every text needs an immediate reply. Every problem is not a crisis. And treating every request like an emergency is how leaders burn themselves and their teams out. I used to confuse speed with responsibility. If someone messaged, I replied. If something went wrong, I stepped in. If a task appeared, I treated it as mine. It felt productive. Mostly, it kept me in a permanent state of reaction. The leaders who last learn to separate what's urgent from what is simply loud. A few practices help: ✅ Use the Eisenhower Matrix to distinguish urgent work from important work. ✅ Check messages at set points instead of responding all day. ✅ Limit your daily list to t…

I called it. And 24 hours later, IT HAPPENED! 🎯 Yesterday, I said AWS was going to hit $3T off the back of their latest earnings report. Today ... it's official. (But TBH, I wasn't expecting it to happen this quick!) Amazon is now the 5th company in history to hit $3T: → NVIDIA : $5.01T → Alphabet Inc. : $4.56T → Apple : $4.43T → Microsoft : $3.62T → Amazon : $3.06T 4 of the 6 most valuable companies on Earth are hyperscalers. (You can see why I love working with them) Not AI hype. Not a bubble. Just the market pricing in what people on the ground have known for a while: That the capacity crunch is real and it's still growing. To the doomsdayers calling this a "bubble", the numbers just did the…

Nobody becomes a leader by deciding to be one. They become one because of what they consistently do when nobody is keeping score. I have worked alongside people with impressive titles who inspired nothing in the people around them. And I have worked alongside people with no title at all who made everyone in the room better just by being in it. The difference was never authority. It was never seniority. It was never even experience. It was what their presence made possible in others. When you are in the room, do people think bigger or play it safer. Do they bring their real ideas or their approved ones. Do they leave the conversation more capable or just more informed. That is the actual measure of leade…

Right before burnout, there's a feeling. I call it 'crispy.' My husband and I developed this code years ago - our early warning system before hitting the wall. One evening, after a full day of teaching, I caught myself racing through dinner prep. I was struggling to answer a simple question, mind already on tomorrow's to-do list. "I'm getting crispy," I said. He smiled knowingly. We abandoned the big dinner plans. Meditated. Made simple soup. In bed by 9:30. Nothing heroic. Simple adjustments. But I woke up feeling like myself again. We all get these warning signals. We just rarely listen to them. I know I didn't. I used to push through these signals. Until my body started keeping score. Now I c…

We've normalized habits that steal our happiness. Most of us don't even notice it's happening. Andre Heeg, MD - thanks for this image. When we think about what we actually want from life, most of it comes down to one thing: Being happy. We work hard to feel secure, provide for the people we love, and create a good life. And somewhere between our ambitions and achievements, we can lose sight of what we were working toward in the first place. Our careers take center stage. We keep chasing the next milestone. The quieter parts of life slowly get pushed further into the background. Without really noticing, we start choosing what's easiest instead: ❌ Avoid the hard conversation because it can wait. ❌ Skip…

When I was 3 years old I wore work boots around the house. By the time I was 5, I had spent more time on construction sites than most people do in their entire lives. A suit and brief case weren’t in my childhood dreams. My dream was to take over the family business. I didn’t get the chance. My Dad didn’t handle the finances – he was boots on the ground at the job sites. His partner, who managed the books, was underbidding jobs, writing bad checks, and paving a one-way road to a colossal pile of debt. From that time forward, my dad pushed me away from the industry and wanted me to pursue something different. I never got to take over the family business. Instead, I help owners keep that dream alive f…

You are not behind. You are comparing your test environment to everyone else's production. Everyone you admire on this feed? They are not showing you the build. They are showing you the release notes. The forty failed deploys. The 2am revert. The branch that never merged. The sprint where nothing shipped. None of that made the post. You scroll for ten minutes and feel it. Someone got promoted. Someone spoke on stage. Someone is thriving. What you never see is the test environment behind it. Every production you are admiring was a mess before it shipped. Nobody pushes broken builds to prod. They clean it up, tag the version, and post the highlight. Of course you feel behind. You are grading your own…

I have been on one side of the SEIS table around ten times. Reading the deck. Getting the gut check. Deciding whether the team stacked up. Was it worth the punt? Writing the cheque. SEIS = Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme. The government gives investors tax relief for backing companies at their riskiest stage, which makes the investments pretty palatable. Sitting on the other side is going to be a whole new ball game. But according to my friend Steven Bartlett (not actually my friend yet), growth happens when you start doing things you're not qualified to do. I've just finished one of the Female Founders Rise summer school webinars, this one on funding legals and SEIS with Sam Simpson... and it was b…

Every day, we're being sold the dream of living longer. But what’s actually getting money and attention in female longevity? The more I talk with investors and founders in the space, the more I can sense the FRUSTRATION. Many of the shiny solutions for women DON’T take our NEEDS and BODIES into consideration. Look at what is usually the most visible: - GLP-1 gummies - Wearables - Supplements  - Peptides And let's be honest… We can’t tell what actually works or what was built with us truly in mind. 💎 Deep down, we crave FUNDAMENTAL solutions like: → nutrition → community → mental health → sleep → stress reduction → hormonones 💎 FORTUNATELY, women are finally building it: 💮 Joanna Strober created M…

Most AI builders stop at the waterline. Pick a model. Ship the demo. It works in the demo. Then real users show up and it falls apart. Nine layers hold up an agentic system. Most teams ship three. 01 → 𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝘀 Does the reasoning. The only layer anyone argues about. 02 → 𝗜𝗻𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 & 𝗥𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 Runs the weights, picks the provider. Where your latency and your bill get decided. 03 → 𝗢𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Decides what happens next. Routes queries, chains steps, runs agents. 04 → 𝗥𝗲𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘃𝗮𝗹 Embed, rerank, store, fetch. Speed and scale live here. 05 → 𝗧𝗼𝗼𝗹𝘀 & 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Lets the model act on the world. Without tools you have a chatbot. 06 → 𝗜𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶�…

LIE: Knowing yourself is an internal job. TRUTH: You cannot see yourself clearly from inside your own head. Welcome to Truth-Telling Tuesday. A few years ago, a colleague I deeply respected said something I wasn't ready to hear. I'd just finished leading a team through a brutal reorganization. The kind where every decision costs something and nobody walks away feeling like they won. I was exhausted and already cataloging everything I should have done differently. She looked at me and said, "You know what I watched you do in there? You held the line when everyone else wanted to cave. And you're sitting here acting like you failed." I didn't know what to do with that. Because the story I'd been telling…

The question isn't "Will AI change marketing?" It's: "Are you evolving, or just watching?" The 2026 AMA State of Marketing Careers Report just dropped, and the numbers don't panic. They point. Here's what they say: The World Economic Forum expects a net gain. +7% global job growth between 2025 and 2030. But 39% of worker skills are on track to be obsolete in that same window. And marketing sits closer to the blast radius than most. One study clocked 50% productivity gains from AI in marketing output. Read that again. The work isn't disappearing. The people who only do the work might. My take: the future marketer isn't the one who can run the tools. Everyone will run the tools. The winner is the…

I violated one of my most SACRED vows recently. I did not collect money owed to me 6 weeks after it was due. No, I'm serious. It’s sacred, and I broke it. The worst part was my team didn’t know because I took ownership of accounts receivable. It was for a brand deal I'd delivered, posted, and forgotten about. Some clients are good about paying, and others are not. Every owner reading this has one of these sitting somewhere. Last Sunday night, after the twins finally went to sleep, I sat on my couch with eleven tabs open, trying to reconstruct what June owed me. That was my month end. Archaeology. Then it hit me. I hadn’t been paid yet. I am not sure how I missed it but I did and that is what irke…

Amazon just showed why the AI boom is nowhere near over. AWS posted its fastest growth since 2021. Q2 2026 revenue: $42.2bn. Wall Street expected $40.54bn. That's a 36.7% year-on-year growth. Amazon shares jumped 14% overnight. The bubble crowd went very quiet this week. I was at MWC Barcelona earlier this year. Speaking with AWS clients, the self-belief was palpable. These numbers prove that confidence wasn't misplaced. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗡𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘀 → Amazon total revenue: $200.61bn, up 20% → AWS operating income: $16.62bn → 36.8% operating margin → AI division: $25bn+ annual run rate → Chips business: also $25bn+ run rate → Capex revised UP from $200bn to $220bn That last line is worth reading twice. They…

Some of the most reliable people at work are quietly getting stuck. Monday, 9:03 am. You are already in your third meeting of the day. By 9:15, someone will ask you a question they could have answered by reading the notes. You will answer anyway. You are the person who remembers what happened three weeks ago. The person new hires get sent to because you are patient and actually explain things. The person your manager messages first when a project starts wobbling. You solve problems before most people even know they exist. And somehow, you have been in the same role for three years. Meanwhile, people you trained are being promoted around you. So you tell yourself to keep working. Take the extra proje…

You watched Tom Cruise in Top Gun 40 years ago. He's 64 now and still doing his own stunts. The average 64 year old is dealing with weight gain, muscle loss, low energy, and a body that feels a decade older than it is. And despite what you might think, aging is not the problem. Neglect is. The average 64 year old man has: • Decades of muscle loss from no strength training • A VO2 max so low he gets out of breath climbing stairs • Growing visceral fat and rising blood pressure • Stiff joints and mobility he assumes is just age • Low energy, poor sleep, and chronic inflammation Your decline doesn't just happen at 64. It starts at 40, picks up speed at 50, and hits you like a truck at 60. Cruise rode a motorc…

An executive asked about my mind before meditation. I told her what I don't usually share: I told her the truth: "My mind felt hellish. It did not feel like a good place to be." Honestly, it was the first time I was so candid about my own experience. 12 years ago, at the height of my career, I was having so many stressful thoughts that they kept me up all night. It didn't matter if it was a big thing or a small thing, the mind NEVER stopped. And every morning I woke up thinking, "I didn't sleep at all. All the worries are still here." Maybe you've felt the same. Feeling the overwhelm of your own thoughts. Like you need a vacation from your own mind. People don't talk enough about how exhausting it is…

The next promotion may not fix the disconnect. You're allowed to want something more. Most leaders don't talk about this because, from the outside, everything looks fine. We've built impressive careers. We've achieved incredible results. We've proven that we're capable. And yet, something still feels off. That's a difficult feeling to admit because there's nothing obviously wrong. If you've been here, you're not the only one. I've seen plenty of leaders reach this point without knowing how to describe it. The discomfort doesn't make you ungrateful for what you've built. It usually means the things that motivated you before don't carry the same weight anymore. For a long time, chasing the next role, pr…

You heard the number.   You felt the pause.   And then you said, "That sounds great."   Six months of searching. Five rounds of interviews. A take-home project on a Saturday.   All of it closed in three words.   Here's what those three words actually cost you.   Researchers tracked 3,858 tech job seekers through levels.fyi. The ones who countered averaged 12.45% more. That's roughly $27,000 a year. And every raise after that gets calculated off the bigger number. https://lnkd.in/gHq6k3kB   So why does almost nobody counter?   One fear. That asking makes the offer disappear.   Seven studies. 3,338 people. Candidates wildly overestimated the chance that negotiating would blow up the deal. Hiring managers said pul…

I keep seeing 5 patterns in how women are building serious wealth in Latin America right now. Having spent years working with builders and investors in the region, I can tell you that almost no one is tracking how women are creating wealth in LatAm. 💎 So here are 5 archetypes of women driving this change: 1./ The Actress: acting made her famous she took ownership instead of a salary  then she spotted a gap and built a business 2./ The Fashion Designer: creative talent and good taste made her stand out  she built a brand with solid business fundamentals until she grew the business globally 3. Tech Founder: she saw a financial system that kept too many people out so she built the challenger bank, powered by…

Most people open Claude Code and start typing. That's the trap. They ignore the .claude/ folder. They keep it blank. So Claude never improvises and burns tokens. I wasted days on this. Claude kept “fixing” my error handling with console.log. And it steamrolled my project layout. The .claude/ folder is your command center. It tells the model how to operate inside your repo Configure it once. 𝗖𝗟𝗔𝗨𝗗𝗘.𝗺𝗱 Your foundation. Capture build steps, architecture calls, and coding standards. It’s loaded into every session. Keep it sharp. Under 200 lines. 𝘀𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀.𝗷𝘀𝗼𝗻 Access and guardrails. Prevent dangerous shell commands. Shield your .env files. 𝗿𝘂𝗹𝗲𝘀/ When CLAUDE.md starts bloating, spl…

If a hiring manager looked at your LinkedIn profile for 10 seconds, would they know exactly why they should talk to you? For many talented professionals, the answer is harder to find than it should be. In today's job market, your experience alone doesn't tell your full story. The way you position your expertise, communicate your strengths, and showcase your impact can determine whether you get overlooked or invited into the conversation. That's why I'm joining The Master Connector Show live on Wednesday, August 5 at 1:00 PM ET for a conversation about "Stand Out Above the Noise." 🔗 Register here: https://lnkd.in/g7at3tjC We'll be discussing: • How to build a professional brand that makes you memorable.…

She danced on Bourbon Street like nobody in that crowd had an opinion about her. No hesitation. Just her, fully in it, at 9:35 PM on a Sunday. And I thought about how much energy I've spent doing the exact opposite. Editing myself before I even open my mouth. Shrinking before anyone asked me to. Adjusting my volume, my directness, my presence like there was a dial I was supposed to keep low. I've walked into rooms already apologizing for who I am before anyone in that room had a problem with it. And that's the part that got me about that woman on Bourbon Street. Chances are she didn't have it all figured out. She just wasn't editing herself in real time. Not recklessness. Permission. Permission to s…

July has been a consolidation wave. CMA CGM buying FedEx Supply Chain for 1.4 billion, the 1.65 billion Giant Eagle deal, and plenty of mid-market shakeups underneath the headlines. I have spent real time inside the part of a merger everyone talks about in meetings. How fast can we merge the systems? That question gets a countdown, a project plan, and a room full of people watching the date. What I learned is that the systems were never the hard part. The technical integration is visible, so it gets all the attention. The human integration is invisible, so it gets none. People are grieving the company they used to work for, while being asked to deliver in the one that replaced it. Nobody put that on the…

You won't hear "we underpay." You'll hear "salary is competitive." It's not just salary. You won't hear "we'll burn you out." You'll hear "we wear a lot of hats here." Companies don't lie in interviews. But they don't tell the truth either. They speak in code. Polite phrases that sound normal until you accept the offer. I built this for every candidate who walked out of a "great interview" and into a job that fell apart by month three. → Hear what they say. → Decode what they mean. → Ask the question that forces the truth out. 10 phrases. Mapped by round. Plus an escalation rule for when you've heard too many. Save it before your next interview. A red flag at hello is a fire by month three…

ChatGPT does not rank you. It repeats you. 👇 Do these 5 things. It does not judge your work. It has never even seen your work. It repeats what the web already says about you. Right now that is nothing. So fix it: 1️⃣ Get named on sources that are not yours. Your website does not count. You wrote it. Get on podcasts, articles, and directories. Every outside mention is a vote. 2️⃣ Say the same thing everywhere. One name. One category. One description. ChatGPT connects the dots by repetition. Give it seven bios and it connects nothing. 3️⃣ Be the person, not the logo. AI trusts named humans over faceless brands. Your logo is not an expert. You are. 4️⃣ Write in liftable lines. Say clear, quotable th…

If you want to learn AI without wasting time, choose based on how much time you actually have and how deep you want to go. I mapped the best free courses from the major companies and top schools into a simple matrix: 1–2 hours for a fast start. 3–5 hours for a real foundation. 6–10 hours for stronger fluency. 10+ hours for deep study. Beginner 1–2 hrs: Google AI Essentials — https://grow.google/ai 3–5 hrs: AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations — https://lnkd.in/esk4uSK4 6–10 hrs: IBM SkillsBuild: Artificial Intelligence — https://lnkd.in/dKMYH_fk 10+ hrs: AI 101 (MIT) — https://lnkd.in/d2QZ4mJ8 Intermediate 1–2 hrs: Claude 101 — https://lnkd.in/e7Tcv2uN 3–5 hrs: Introduction to Generative AI — https://lnkd.in/…

28 years in the game. $110,000,000 in total career sales. The industry measures success in volume. I measure it in freedom and people. The problem with logistics is the churn. Agents work until they burn out. They have no path to leadership. They have no legacy. At RKC Logistics, we are flipping the script. I am investing my career experience into building sub-agents and leaders. We focus on the core pillars: → No Rotating Reps. → Real-time Visibility. → Zero Tolerance for scams. By investing in people, we ensure our clients get the same dedicated expert every single time. It is not just about moving freight today. It is about building a system that outlasts the individual. We are looking for lead…

They say Saturdays are for the boys… I say Saturdays are for the toys!!! 🏎️ The garage will be a full hot wheels retail space be eod! 👊👊 30k+ units in our collection🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️ If you collect, HMU

Earlier this week a LinkedIn Lurker who is a competitor messaged me sarcastically telling me I better get to sending more crumpled letters. Well….. Here you go. If you know, then you know how I have been going at whatever it takes to get this appointment. Threw in a personal note of thanks to a big decision maker giving us 15 minutes of his time today talking about his LTL. Personal touches are part of our game that raises curiosity. Gets appointments. Builds trust. Closes business.

This is still one my favorite stories in recruiting. No customers. Young family. Wife and kids at home. 300k+ a year job at large w2. Left it all to start as agents almost 2 years ago. This month they are at 222k in profit with tomorrow still left ( healthy margins too). First time they’ve broke that. Not many people are willing to take this bet but definitely paid off here. Can you also believe there are a lot of agent programs that would have passed on this becusse of no book of busines😂. Sellers sell, and pressure can always create the best results.

Last week Colby Baskin had a really cool post about “freight agent programs every freight agent should know”. According to Steve Monson there are over 150 agent programs, so it’s always worth a deep dive into names you maybe never heard of, well beyond this list, if in the market. When I joined Select Transport Partners it was still very young, and something I told Christopher Cobb is my game plan was to help propel the company into the top 3 of every agent program discussion. Doesn’t mean we land everyone, but success will follow if we are at that level. Something else I notice about every single one of these programs here, is they have excellent megaphone voices at each one. Consistent posting, consisten…

You know what gets us fired up? Steel. From tanks like these to coils, pipe, and structural steel, this is our wheelhouse. Day in. Day out.

Unsolocited advice/take, that literally nobody asked for: Life is meant to be lived with a certain amount of ~edge~ The "safe" path is usually the most dangerous, you do not avoid risk.... You simply defer risk. Same safe opinions in the same safe meetings. A year of it. Five years. A whole career, sometimes. You still ~bet~ your one finite life that the world remaining still long enough for you to remain comfortable. Comfort is dangerous- a paradox telling us that all good is actually quite bad. Choose the version of the day that scares you a bit- That doesn't allow you to sleepwalk with your eyes closed. Push the envelope.... Push it real good...... Reaaaaal good

Most interviews aren't won on answers. They're won on three hidden layers. You can know the work cold. Walk in prepared. Land every answer. And still hear nothing back. Here's what's happening on the other side of the table. They've already decided you can do the job. Now they're asking a quieter question. Most candidates never hear it. So they never answer it. Three layers. Three chances to be the obvious hire. Swipe for each one, broken down. Plus the one question that lands all three at once. The picture forms before they decide. Make sure you're in it. When's the last time you walked out feeling like the obvious choice, and still didn't get it? 👇 Tell me below. ——— ♻️ Repost for the friend who…

I posted 350 times in 1 year. One idea changed everything. A year ago I had 11,000 followers and no idea what I wanted to be known for. I posted every day to work out what my work actually was. I kept seeing the same pattern. Smart people. Stuck careers. Advice that wasn't working. Eventually I found the language for it. Career Dysmorphia. One year later. ↳ Thirty thousand followers. ↳ Eleven thousand newsletter subscribers ↳ Ninety-six percent posting consistency. ↳ Six hundred and seventeen people through the Dossier. ↳ A growing body of research. ↳ Workshops and podcasts I never imagined doing. The biggest change is that I finally know what I do. 𝗜 𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗽 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺𝘀𝗲𝗹𝘃…

There are 8 types of AI consultant. Seven add to your plate. One clears it. You hired help to get your time back. Instead you got a prompt pack, a tool list, and a 6-week course. Now you have more tabs open, not fewer hours. Here’s the map. Find the one you’ve been paying. 1️⃣ Prompt Peddler: sells you “hacks.” Worthless the day the model updates. 2️⃣ Tool Tourist: 47 new tools a week. You read them. Nothing changes. 3️⃣ Plumber: wires up automations, then vanishes. Tech nobody uses. 4️⃣ Builder: custom dev at dev prices. You’re paying for labor. 5️⃣ Big-4 Transformer: a gorgeous deck that never ships. 6️⃣ Vertical Specialist: deep in one industry. Useful, if you’re in it. 7️⃣ Guru: massive audience, slick…

Most small entrepreneurs and solopreneurs are mistaking "logistics" for "leadership." We spend 40% of our energy on the manual operations of running a business: procurement, research, vendor coordination. Then we wonder why we're exhausted. The problem isn't a lack of tools but that your tools require you to be the bottleneck. Most AI is a THINKER. It gives you advice. It drafts an email. It creates a to-do list. But it still leaves the execution on your desk. Well guess what? I found something different. Accio Work is a DOER. It's a desktop app built for solopreneurs, powered by Alibaba.com, and it has agency. I've been testing it sourcing promotional items for my business, Fiercely Joyful. I didn't…

Job searching can feel like a rollercoaster of things outside your control ~ the ghosting, the "we went with another candidate," the algorithms deciding whether your resume even gets seen. Here's your reminder: let go of what you can't control. Focus on what you can. You can't control: ❌ How many other applicants you're up against ❌ Whether a recruiter responds ❌ Company hiring freezes or budget cuts You can control: ✅ How polished your resume and LinkedIn profile are ✅ How many meaningful applications you send each week ✅ How well you prepare for the interviews you do land ✅ How you show up and network with intention Progress in a job search isn't always visible day to day, but consistent effort on the t…

Most Americans picture Mexico and think beach resorts or border towns. Meanwhile, Guadalajara has spent nearly six decades quietly becoming one of the most important tech cities in the hemisphere. Motorola broke ground there in 1968. IBM followed in 1975 and never left. What started as electronics assembly is now design, engineering, and R&D. The numbers today: → 600+ tech companies, including Intel's chip design center and Oracle's largest development center outside the US → 40% of Mexico's entire IT industry sits in the state of Jalisco → 10,000+ tech graduates per year from schools like Universidad de Guadalajara and Tec de Monterrey → Google, Apple, and Netflix already hire there Here's the part Americ…

It's Friday You've closed tickets, sat through the meetings, put out the fires that showed up uninvited. Before you open your laptop again this weekend, one thing worth remembering. "Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you." - Anne Lamott You already know this is true for every system you manage. Reboot. Clear the cache. Let it sit for a second. It's just as true for you. What are you actually going to unplug from this weekend? DM me. I read every message myself, and I'll actually reply.

I get jealous when I see brokers who've been freight agents for 5+ years. Would've appreciated an email, a text, or a carrier pigeon letting me know there was a better option than grinding my life away at a W2 and handing over most of my money. Truth is, I had no idea it was even a thing when I started, and I still talk to brokers every week who have no idea what I mean when I bring up being a freight agent. My top 4 agency choices for brokers looking to join the agency side would be Select, HD, Cowtown, and Ally. SPI gets an honorable mention, but I'm biased. If you sling freight and haven't thought about agency ownership, you owe it to yourself to dig in a bit.

I get jealous when I see brokers who've been freight agents for 5+ years. Would've appreciated an email, a text, or a carrier pigeon letting me know there was a better option than grinding my life away at a W2 and handing over most of my money. Truth is, I had no idea it was even a thing when I started, and I still talk to brokers every week who have no idea what I mean when I bring up being a freight agent. My top 4 agency choices for brokers looking to join the agency side would be Select, HD, Cowtown, and Ally. SPI gets an honorable mention, but I'm biased. If you sling freight and haven't thought about agency ownership, you owe it to yourself to dig in a bit.

As useless as my college degree (marketing) ended up being in my career field, I think it was still valuable in many ways. Before I joined Select Transport Partners, I met Tom Milosavljevich in Milwaukee Wisconsin for Coffee. I told him one of my goals would be “To put Select in the top three of every agent program conversation” recruitment would follow. Much of the growth came from marketing tactics I learned over the years, as we still do virtually zero advertising to this day at Select. Full on grass roots. That’s special. Zach Davis aka “Big Sassy” is one of the smartest people I have met in this industry and a proverbial “killer” in sales, so when he makes statements like this I think it draws a lot…

Patience is a virtue. Patience is something I am working on personally and professionally. In a world of everyone wanting it now with one click, sometimes you have to slow down and trust your process. In sales, some deals close quickly. Others have to marinate over time. We’ve been raising curiosity with a prospect for many months. Yesterday, we got our second face to face meeting. A meeting that is going to give us a shot at some business. As we were walking out of our meeting. I could not help but to notice our process. Sitting in a cubicle. And it made me smile. And say, This IS the way. So the next time you have left your fifth unanswered voicemail with a prospect. Try something rebelliou…

I was talking to Levi Van Pay this morning about agency recruiting. I want to take recruiting to a whole new level. We all know the ultimate manual in life is the Bible. But when it comes to freight agent recruiting and development, there isn’t one. At least none that I’ve seen. I’m going to change that. I’m building classes and boot camps that actually prepare people for this career, not just get them signed. Two things that come to mind right off the top of my head: 1. How to handle rejection - I’ve been told “no” more times than most people in a 32-year sales career. I know what constant rejection does to your confidence and your day. I also know how to move through it without letting it stop yo…

The other day one of the leadership of a fellow agent program reached out to me with some questions about Select. (Awesome guy, good friend, will not name a name). Simultaneously I was talking to my boy Michael A. Gibbons on the phone and I asked him how do I respond to the question “why do people like Select Transport Partners?” He said, “It’s you. It’s what you’ve done with your network and online to help build the reputation.” That was one of the nicest things I’ve ever been told before. Shout out Big Gibbs. Granted there are about 50 reasons outside of me on why Select is crushing. As Ryan Nolan AKA “The Iron Fist” once told me, it’s lightning in a bottle. Everything at Select is firing on all cyl…

They asked me to step up. I found a hundred reasons not to. Every one of them sounded sensible. "Too busy. Not ready. Not my thing." Looking back, none of them were reasons. They were hiding places. Today's article is about one of the most common career patterns I see. Plenty of of ability. And resisting being seen. When you've finished, find out what is your career pattern 7-mins, 1 personalised report, and a career changing insight. 👉 https://lnkd.in/dB7hw_MU

There is no blue ribbon for Mom of the Year. So I stopped trying to win one. Class party? I send money for cookies. Another sports practice? I drop off. I don't always stay and watch. Not because I don't care. Because caring and overperforming stopped being the same thing to me a long time ago. For years, I treated motherhood like a competition no one had officially announced. Be present for everything. Remember everything. Volunteer for everything. Never look tired. Never let anyone down. The problem is that imaginary competitions still produce real exhaustion. Eventually, I realized my children didn't need a mother performing perfection. They needed one with enough energy left to actually be…

I thought I'd already done this work. Taking things personally. I spent years on it. Years. Early in my public sector career I recognized it was consuming me. Not just mentally. Physically. A pit sitting right in my belly, heavy, unmovable, staying for days while I worked my way through whatever someone said or thought about me. Eventually I got to the other side of it. I learned to receive feedback and opinions as exactly what they are: data. And data doesn't define me. I'm not the data. It serves to inform me. To elevate me for what's next. That reframe changed everything and I carried it for over two decades. And then guess what showed up a few months ago? The pit. The belly. The taking it pers…

Why do most cover letters end up in the recruiter’s trash folder? Because it doesn't show the true impact! If you want hiring managers to actually pay attention, you need to turn your cover letter into a POWERHOUSE, results-first showcase. Here is the exact visual "Proof-of-Work" layout that gets noticed: 1️⃣ The Strong Hook: "Digital marketing is about connecting people with ideas in ways that matter." Start with your philosophy, not "I am writing to apply for..." 2️⃣ The Impact Table: Map your core skills directly to real, hard metrics: • Digital Marketing Expertise: 4 years of experience leading multi-channel campaigns across 5 client accounts. • Email Performance: Drove a 51% open rate via list seg…

I made five promises out loud on a live AEO webinar last Thursday. By 3pm, every one of them was kept. I never wrote a single one down. Ran my weekly webinar at noon. When you're solo, presenting, running a live demo, and reading the chat at the same time, taking notes is not one of your options. I even said it on air: "I wish I had an assistant." I never got the assistant. Turns out what I actually needed was a notepad that writes itself. Granola transcribed the entire call into clean notes while I performed it. Every promise I made out loud. The outline I told one attendee I'd send her. The slides I promised the room. Even a task I assigned MYSELF mid-show and had completely forgotten by lunch. After…

The question isn't the trap. Your answer is. "So, what have you been doing since your last role?" Most people hear it as an accusation. It isn't. It's an open mic. And the only variable is what you did with the time before the interview. Here's the move we’re not taught in school. Don't wait for the interview to figure out your answer. Write the answer first. Then go live it. Think of it like a changelog. Between releases, the work doesn't stop. You just decide what ends up in the notes. Ask yourself now: Six months from now, in an interview, what do I want to be able to say I did? Build your days backward from that answer. Here are the 7 things that turn a gap into a story you're proud of. 1. A real sc…

You don't need a better resume. You need six small edits. You've been at this for weeks. Maybe months. The experience is real. The work was good. And the inbox still stays quiet. So you start to wonder if you're good enough. But you are. The resume just isn't showing it. Most of what you actually did is buried under what you were assigned to do. The proof is in there. Yet it's hiding behind tasks, dates, and duties nobody reads twice. That's easy to fix. Six small edits that pull your value up to the surface, where someone scanning in seconds can finally see it. I put all six on one sheet. Thirty minutes, start to finish. Save it for the next job you actually want. You were never the underdog.…

Good morning

The freight industry has an identity crisis. Somewhere along the way, "broker" became a dirty word. So we started inventing new ones: Asset-light provider, non-asset carrier, capacity provider, etc. Different names. Same business. I've never understood the need to hide it. A broker isn't valuable because they own trucks. A broker is valuable because they create capacity where it otherwise wouldn't exist. They build carrier relationships. They develop density in key markets. They know which carriers perform, which don't, and how to keep freight moving when the market gets tight. That's not something to apologize for or mask. In fact, the best brokers don't spend time trying to convince shippers they're som…

The worst place your brand can end up is in Vanilla Land. Not hated. Not loved. Just there... In the valley of Yawnsville. Yikes. Steven Bartlett wrote a line about this, and I love it... Make people feel something, either way. Either way is the part that makes us all a little uncomfortable. Because we are trained to smooth the edges off. Soften the opinion. Broaden the appeal. Make everyone love you! Right? Right?! Make sure nobody could possibly object... and what we end up with is a brand nobody objects to, and nobody remembers. We've all seen it before. A founder shares their new messaging and asks what I think. It reads well. It is clear. It is professional. Very... nice. Yet, it could belo…

You can be exceptional at your job and still be a terrible leader. Kindness is what earns your team's trust. Huge thanks to Alvin Huang for this image. Senior leadership has a way of filling every hour with something urgent. When that's the norm, the smaller, human moments tend to get squeezed out. But great team members gravitate toward the leaders who treat them like people rather than cogs. And it starts with everyday kindness. The small actions in between back-to-back meetings or deadlines are often what team members remember most. They're a reminder that we're all humans first. Here are 11 ways to bring more of that back into our workdays: 1️⃣ Compliment a teammate's effort, even when it's not pe…

Age didn’t slow me down. It finally set me free. At 56, I relaunched my business. Not despite my age, but because of it. My path wasn’t linear: ⏰ At 26, earned my Ph.D. ⏰ At 35, became a Fortune 500 Tech Executive. ⏰ At 52, I launched my first business. ⏰ After becoming a F500 tech exec again, I launch the right business. Each chapter broke me open in different ways. And at 56, after decades of achievement, I finally realized I didn’t need to compare myself to anyone. That clarity became my turning point, the moment I chose to follow my own path and build something that felt fully mine. Today at 61, I’m living proof that reinvention works, helping others navigate leadership and career transitions. The…

White-collar hiring has shrunk for 31 months straight. So if you've felt stuck because "there's nowhere to go right now," you're reading the market correctly. That doesn't mean there's no way out. It means the way out probably isn't refreshing job boards. Here's what stuck actually feels like right now: You update the resume again. You apply to twelve jobs on a Tuesday. You hear back from zero. You start wondering if it's you. It's not you. KPMG's analysis of January 2026 JOLTS data showed job openings in professional and business services fell below one million for the first time since April 2020. Finance, professional services, tech, all three sectors are still losing jobs today, not just holding st…

Your culture already has an author. The question is whether it's you. The strongest teams build a high-performing culture the same way they build everything else that matters: Deliberately and purposefully. Here's how you can too 👇 1️⃣ Keeper, Carrier, Creator Every person on your team, including the leaders, falls into one of 3 roles. 👉 Keeper: Uphold the standard, even when no one is watching. 👉 Carrier: Pass the standard to the people around them. 👉 Creator: Shape what the standard becomes next, through the decisions they make under pressure. 2️⃣ The Trust Triangle (h/t Frances Frei, Harvard) Trust is built on 3 things.  Are you genuine? Do your decisions make sense? Do people believe you care…

When all you want is water. Here's how it feels like to interact with AI nowadays. By the fifth clarification, I was no longer placing an order. I was writing a legally binding specification for hydration. This is why prompting sometimes feels less like talking to an assistant and more like negotiating with a very confident genie who has read every word except the important one. I drew this cartoon after realizing that the future of work may involve saying: “𝒀𝒆𝒔, 𝒕𝒆𝒄𝒉𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒚 𝒄𝒐𝒓𝒓𝒆𝒄𝒕, 𝒃𝒖𝒕 𝒂𝒃𝒔𝒐𝒍𝒖𝒕𝒆𝒍𝒚 𝒏𝒐𝒕,” several times before lunch. What is the simplest request AI has managed to turn into a 𝒇𝒖𝒍𝒍 𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒋𝒆𝒄𝒕 for you? #AgenticAI #HumanAgentOrchestrator #AIAssis…

The best leaders don't have all the answers. I learned this the hard way. When I first began leading teams in Emergency Medicine, I made sure I always projected certainty and kept any doubts to myself. It was partly a survival instinct that led to this behavior. But if I'm being honest, the other factor was simply wanting to be respected and to make positive, impactful decisions. And that's what I thought it looked like. My team did respect me, but they didn't trust me enough to bring me their real problems. There was a lack of authenticity in my leadership style that I wasn’t aware of at the time. Looking back, it’s clear to me that I’d become the kind of leader I would never want to work for. If I…

The fat around your organs is slowly killing you. Visceral fat wraps around your heart, liver, and other organs. It's directly linked to heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. These are not 7 “magic foods” that if you consume them will somehow torch fat, but they are backed by real studies on reducing harmful visceral fat: If you reduce visceral fat, you help lose that stubborn tyre around your waist. ↳ Plain Greek yogurt - high protein, proven to cut visceral fat ↳ Blueberries - improve insulin sensitivity (key for fat loss) ↳ Fatty fish (salmon, sardines) - omega-3s directly target organ fat ↳ Whole grains - 12-week trial beat refined wheat for fat loss ↳ Beans and lentils - randomized trials show waist red…

Viktor took 5 minutes to build what used to cost me up to six hours: a full year of highly targeted speaking leads. No bureau. No guesswork. Just six hours of my life back. (If you want your six hours back, try it now: https://lnkd.in/eT-eXgwJ) I've been a compensated keynote speaker for years, without representation, always did it myself. I stopped applying to "we'll cover your registration" gigs a while back. The tradeoff was hours of manual research, hunting down corporate meetings and retreats worth pitching. I almost skipped testing viktor.com on this. Every AI research tool I've tried hands you a list you still have to verify. Thing is... Viktor's not a tool. He's the researcher I never had to hi…

"You're so lucky you get to be your own boss." Nobody calls it lucky when you're the last one awake deciding which bill gets paid first. People say it because a job with a ceiling still feels safer than one with no floor. You don't correct them. You just nod, finish your coffee, and go solve the next thing nobody trained you for.

Most AI voice tools have the same problem. You upload the audio. It leaves. For a podcast? Fine. For customer calls? That's a different conversation. I work in financial services. The Central Bank requires customer and transaction data to stay inside the UAE. That's why I like seeing more open-weight voice models. Fish Audio publishes its weights on Hugging Face, so you can run the model on your own infrastructure instead of relying on a third-party API. No external network calls. No customer audio leaving your infrastructure. The surprising part is that you no longer have to sacrifice quality. Fish Audio S2.1 achieved the lowest word error rate on Seed-TTS Eval. Even outperforming several closed-source…

I'm surprised to see this. But I shouldn't be. Our 2026 midyear placement report came in. Brazil has claimed the top spot as our number one talent destination. For years, the answer to "where do companies hire the most LatAm talent" moved slowly. Argentina held it for a long stretch. Then Colombia became the preference for hiring managers. In the first half of 2026, Brazil passed them both. More than one in five professionals we placed in the first half of 2026 were based in Brazil. Up from roughly one in six the half before. Colombia moved to second, Argentina to third. Two things sit behind it: → Scale. Brazil's labor force is roughly 108 million people. No other country in the region is close. → Time…

I told the owner of a $4M restaurant to “shut up”. Not actually, but I did say “I am going to ask your son a series of questions, and I don’t want you to answer a single one of them”. “Who is the CPA of the business?” “Who is the estate attorney?” “What bank is the line of credit with?” “What is the value of the business?” “What funds the buyout when you take over?” The answer to all 5 questions was the same: “I don’t know”. This was after the father (owner) told me his son is going to take over if anything happens to him. So, yes, I (politely) tell my clients to keep their mouths shut from time-to-time. It's not a huge deal if your successor goes 0 for 5 on these questions today. But th…

Her family couldn't afford a tennis academy. Yet at 15, she still beat Venus Williams in the first round of Wimbledon. Today, Coco Gauff is the HIGHEST-PAID female athlete on the planet. And at 22, she’s a BUSINESSWOMAN and INVESTOR. To me, she’s def not waiting to 'make it ' to start building and owning. 💎 We call this mindset in investment: long-term thinking. BUT before, let me quickly share her backstory... Gauff grew up in Delray Beach, Florida. Her parents gave up their own careers so she could play. They couldn't afford an elite academy, so at 10 she moved to France on a scholarship. By 14, she was the top-ranked junior in the world.  A year later, she defeated her hero, Venus Williams, in…

Every framework survives approval.   Most die at the first exception. That's not a regulatory compliance problem. It's a programme governance problem every financial services firm has somewhere, whether the org chart admits it or not. Picture the intersection everyone approved on paper. Clean lines, working lights, clear right of way.  Now picture the same intersection on a busy Tuesday. Cars ignore the light because everyone else already has. Governance doesn't fail because nobody wrote the policy.   It fails because nobody built in what happens when someone breaks it. An AI tool ships without sign-off. A vendor gets onboarded around the gate. A risk sits in the log, fully documented, going nowhere.…

You don't need Claude Fable 5 for 90% of your work. Here's how to use it for the other 10% without running out of money: Most people switched over to Fable 5 the week it launched and never switched back. That was fine while Anthropic was giving it away…unfortunately, we all need to pay now. Almost nothing you do in a day needs the power of Fable 6. Emails, quick questions, cleaning up a draft, Opus and Sonnet can all of it and you won't notice the difference. The 10% that does need it - the deep reasoning, the complex analysis - is worth setting up properly: 1/ Select the model Open a new chat and pick "Fable 5" from the dropdown. Check your plan first, because some have it built in and everyone else is…

Interview prep shouldn't feel like guesswork. I pulled together the 40 questions that show up again and again in job interviews, organized by category so you can actually prepare instead of just panicking the night before. Inside you'll find questions on: ✅ General background & experience ✅ Skills & competencies ✅ Teamwork & communication ✅ Motivation & goals ✅ Company & role understanding ✅ Situational & behavioral scenarios ✅ Closing questions (yes, "do you have questions for us?" is one you need to prep for too) My advice: don't memorize scripted answers. Use these as a framework to build 2-3 strong stories from your own experience that you can flex across multiple questions. The STAR method (Situat…

The first time a client showed me their five-year plan, it was color-coded. Quarterly milestones. Revenue targets. Team growth projections. A clean diagonal line from where they were to where they wanted to be. Six months later, they called me from their car in a parking lot, convinced they were failing. They weren't failing. They were just on the real path. You've probably seen the graphic. One line is straight: Set a goal. Follow the plan. Achieve it. The other is a tangled mess of loops, setbacks and doubling back. The first is what we expect. The second is what progress usually looks like. I've coached leaders for years, and the pattern is nearly always the same. They start out with a linear…

My wife once asked me what my dream was. I said "$100 million. Like my dad." She didn't even blink. Just said "okay, let's figure it out." Kitti was a nursing student in Canada when I married her at 32. We spent 18 months separated by paperwork and borders. Then once we spent 5 weeks apart just to spend Valentine's Day together. When you find someone who takes your biggest, dumbest dream seriously, you hold on. P.S. We're not at $100 million yet. But she's still not blinking.

8A* and 3As. From a state school. Getting those grades was a huge deal for me. But the truth is, the work I was doing outside of school made the real difference. Looking around, I saw three kinds of children. ↳ The ones forced to study 24/7, no social life, a strict regime. ↳ The naturally gifted ones who never put in the effort, so never got the grades. ↳ The ones who found the balance. Not study, study, study, but a full life alongside it. Guess which group is thriving as adults today? It was the children with the full life. The grades opened the door, the rest of who they were is what carried them through it. That is the whole job for those of us raising the next generation. We are not raising a set o…

I had a situation every business owner hates…  Our ads started charging us 40% more overnight. Same ads but suddenly every new customer was costing us a lot more money The ad budget was already moved before I finished my coffee. Finding out fast that we were bleeding money used to be impossible in my business. I run EmpowerCore Solutions, an AI implementation practice, plus a products business on the side.  Both run paid ads on Meta and LinkedIn. There is a problem that many businesses with lean teams, like mine, face: The ad spend only gets watched when someone looks at it daily.  A campaign that dies on Friday night burns money until someone gets around to the dashboard. Sometimes that's Monday.  Sometim…

There's a very specific kind of tired… 😮‍💨 That comes from staying somewhere you know is not right for you. It's not the kind of tired that goes away. Even after a good night of sleep or a long weekend. It's the kind of tired that sits in your stomach. It wakes up with you. It follows you. And yet, somehow, the most common response to that feeling for most is to just....though it out. 🛡️ Wait it out. ⏳ Hope that something changes on it's own. 🤞 Build up enough emotional armor to get through the day. 🧱 Then go home and accidentally take it out on all the people you love most. 💔 Or maybe sacrifice your health...because after all, the pressure has to go somewhere. ⚠️ Here's the thing about toughing it out…

My kid thinks I am famous. And I have to tell you, it feels AWESOME. This weekend he caught me editing for YouTube and could not believe how cool it was that I was actually on the internet. Instant fan. Best subscriber I have ever gotten, and man did I feel special So in his honor, here is the new episode. I sat down with David Carneal, founder of the Digital Efficiency Consulting Group and a workflow consultant with 25 years in operations. We got into perception, why the same boardroom meeting sends everyone home with a different story, and the three realities every business is actually running at once. The part that stuck with me was a story about a single switch. Early in his career, David noticed one in…

Change isn't the enemy. Resisting it is. During the financial crisis, I watched colleagues pack boxes around me. Each time I thought: "Thank God it's not me." Then it was my turn. And then again. Two layoffs in six months. My brain screamed: "You're done. This is the end." I believed the myth most of us believe: Change is bad. Uncertainty means failure. If you don't know what's next, assume the worst. But here's what I didn't understand back then - Change is only ever moving you forward. Not in a woo-woo, toxic positivity way. In a practical, real-world way. When something stops working, it's not punishment - it's redirection. Growth doesn't move backwards. It only builds forward. Those layoffs?…

"Why should we hire you over the other candidates?" Your stomach drops. Not because you don't have an answer. Because the honest answer feels like bragging. So you say something safe. "I'm a hard worker." "I'm a team player." The interviewer has heard both, twice today already. Here's a different perspective. You're not being asked to brag. You're being asked to present evidence. And evidence is something IT people already know how to do. You don't ship code without logs. You don't close a ticket without a root cause. You don't tell your manager "it's fixed" without proof. Apply the same standard to yourself. Four things to bring into that answer. Multiple outcomes, not one. Have two or three r…

Question for the up and comers… If you’re around 500+ loads per month, how are you handling incoming orders? Is someone always monitoring an email account or are you using a mix of emails and EDI? Freight brokers AND asset carriers are welcome to respond 😃

Everyone wants to own a valuable brand. But let's talk about what it takes. Most founders I work with arrive somewhere in the middle. They have a logo. A website. A decent product and a client list built the hard way. What they do not have is a reason for any of it. So the brand pulls in three directions at once... and every decision comes down to guesswork. Yikes. Six levers move a brand from decoration to commercial asset. They work in order. → Know your why Winning better clients, charging higher fees, and building value that outlasts you are three different goals. Each needs a different strategy. Naming yours first stops the brand pulling three ways. → Own a position Your position is the space you hold…

There's a reason "work-life balance" doesn't work. It's looking at the idea all wrong. Balance implies two opposing forces competing for the same space. Work takes away from life, and life takes away from work. With them at odds, we're left feeling unfulfilled on either side. But for a lot of us, especially in senior leadership, it doesn't work that way. We're passionate about what we do. A 50/50 split rarely reflects reality. And when work absorbs everything, the parts of life that sustain us start to disappear without us noticing. There is a version of leadership where neither side has to lose. The more useful idea is integration. Not a perfect split. Not a rigid schedule with work on one side and…

I used to believe my work should speak for itself. Talking about what I do felt cringe. Networking felt even worse. I am an introvert. The idea of walking into a room and working it - collecting business cards, bouncing from person to person, performing enthusiasm for strangers - That was not me. It was never going to be me. Then my business coach asked me one question: "Imagine your best friend is going through the worst moment of her career. She desperately needs someone who does exactly what you do. But she has no idea you exist. What a massive disservice that is - to her." Staying invisible wasn't humility. It was leaving the people who needed me most without a way to find me. But here's what I also had…

My manager called a meeting.  My sales counterparts had complained about me again. I was going through a divorce. My mind was in a million places and work was not a priority emotionally BUT  I showed up. I attended grand rounds.  I performed the role. In fact, my sales were exceeding quota.   But my heart was exhausted. One thing slipped. I went from visiting our joint accounts every two weeks to once a month. That was it. But to some, that one change was all the ammunition they needed. Instead of them asking, "Are you okay?" They questioned my performance. They reported my shortcomings. They protected themselves. What hurt most was not that they saw me struggling. It was that they chose to use my struggle…

I don’t want my team fake working on a Friday afternoon, just because the calendar says they need to be online. Which is why at The Sole Supplier, if your work is wrapped up by lunch on a Friday, You're not expected to stick around doing Slack theatre or forcing productivity because the clock hasn’t hit 5 yet. Our goal is genuinely brilliant content for our brands and community. So if someone has smashed their work by 2pm, keeping them there until 5 doesn’t make the business better. Let people have their life back a bit. They’ll usually come back better for it.

You do not need to become a technologist to lead the people side of AI transformation. But you do need enough AI fluency to get into the conversation. If you work in HR, L&D, OD, talent, or internal coaching, you already understand: Capability, behavior change, learning, leadership, performance and coaching. What’s different now is knowing the AI context beyond prompts and simple agents & chatbots. To lead people through AI transformation, you need to know: Where should AI change the work? What should people still own? Where does human judgment matter? What will managers and employees need to do differently? Those are people and performance questions. And if you can speak credibly about them, you have…

One good career conversation can do more for your confidence than 20 silent applications. I watched this happen with Maya, someone with fifteen years of experience and a resume that should have been opening doors on its own. She'd been applying for months. Quietly. No one at work knew. She'd hit submit, close the tab, and check her email for two weeks straight. Nothing. Or a rejection landed three weeks later with no reason attached. And slowly, the silence started to feel like an answer. Maybe she'd been out of the market too long. Maybe her experience was too niche. Maybe the company she'd given eight years to was the only place that made sense for someone like her. She never said any of this out lou…

Your biggest leadership strength might be your biggest weakness... Mine nearly cost me my team's trust. For a lot of leaders, their biggest strength is reading a room before anyone says a word. You know who is frustrated.  You notice who has gone quiet before anyone else does. You feel the tension between two people before a word is said. So you manage it. You fill the silence.  You take on the extra work. You carry the weight of the room because you know you can. People call you dependable, the one who can always be counted on. And yes, you probably are. But there is a point where responsibility crosses a line. That is the difference between accountability and over-responsibility, a distinction I first…

Clone yourself in Claude. It can increase your  productivity. When I started thinking about Claude as a mini “me”, I got so much more out of it. Claude can now write in my voice, follow my rules, and run the tasks over and over again. It’s my clone. At this point, my business wouldn’t run well without it. Here's how I did it: 𝐎𝐧𝐞 𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐮𝐚𝐥. ↳ Everything lives here:  Your best posts, your rules, your connected apps and your positioning POV. Claude references all of it the moment you ask for something. You're not starting from zero every time. 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐯𝐨𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐞𝐱𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐬, 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬. ↳  I…

30lbs of stubborn fat lost. Body fat from 30% to 23.7%. Bone density improved after a DEXA scan showed a problem. Jeffrey is 67 and building the strength to enjoy an active retirement. His wake-up call was a DEXA scan. It showed his bone density was below average for his age. For a man who wants to stay active, mobile, and independent into his retirement, this was a bad sign. His biggest struggle before HPH was structure. He knew he could execute when he had a clear plan. Without one, he'd gradually fall off track and struggle to stay consistent. Here's where he is 9 months in: ↳ Down 30lbs, from 195lbs to 165lbs ↳ Body fat down from 30% to 23.7% ↳ Lean muscle mass up from 125lbs to 130lbs ↳ Bone density…

Gratitude isn't about pretending everything is okay. It's about noticing that not everything is wrong. And for women leading in healthcare, that's an important distinction. Some days are relentless. Staffing gaps. Difficult conversations. Competing priorities. Decisions that follow you home. When every day feels like problem-solving, your brain naturally starts looking for the next problem. Gratitude interrupts that cycle. Not by ignoring reality. By helping you notice what is also true. The colleague who stepped in without being asked. The patient who smiled before they left. The team member who grew in confidence. The difficult conversation that went better than expected. Research suggests a regular g…

Wow… There are 35,000+ of us here now! First, thank you. 🙏🏼 It touches me that 35,000 people believe in a more honest way to lead. That says something about where we are and where we're willing to go. I don't take it lightly. This space is for the leaders who are tired of pretending. The ones who want to be honest and still be kind. Who want to hold a high standard without turning cold. Who sense that the way they've been leading has a ceiling and are ready for what's next. If that's you, you're in the right place. And here's where we're going: More truth-telling. More tools you can use immediately. More conversations about leading in a way that's honest, human, and built to last. I start…

Leadership is often treated as an individual act. The highest-stakes decisions rarely should be. The value of the right partner is not more advice. It is better thinking: someone who challenges assumptions, surfaces what the organization is not saying, and helps a leader see the system shaping the decision. Leaders do not need someone to think for them. They need someone who partners with them to think further. Who helps you see what you cannot see alone? Follow Shirley Braun , Ph.D., PCC for insights on leadership, decision-making, and organizational complexity.

Skin-to-skin studies are no longer considered ethical. (Researchers don’t say this lightly.) Scientists are famously cautious. Most papers end with some version of: “More research is needed.” So when the authors of the 2025 Cochrane Review on skin-to-skin contact concluded: “Studies with skin-to-skin contact as the intervention are no longer ethical if compared against a control group that does not receive skin-to-skin contact.” …it should make all of us stop and think. This isn’t the conclusion of one enthusiastic research team. It’s the conclusion of decades of evidence demonstrating that skin-to-skin contact improves outcomes for healthy newborns and their caregivers. And for low birthweight infant…

The cheapest customer service rep on the market is also the one your customers hang up on. That math has finally caught up with people. India and the Philippines: the pricing is genuinely attractive. That part is real. But after years of spam calls out of those regions, American customers pull back from those voices. Maybe unfairly. Doesn't change what happens on the call. Then there's the rest of it. English proficiency varies more than the sales deck admits. Cultural alignment is a real gap. And the time zones are inverted. Picture walking a customer through a billing issue and your agent has to hand off because it's 5AM for them. Or ask what quality of service you're getting from someone working 10PM to…

We all dream about financial freedom. But we NEVER thought it doesn’t start with money, BUT with a decision. Take a look at Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway's latest interview, where they tell us about the early life decision that made them FINANCIALLY INDEPENDENT✨. They refused to live the financial limitations suffered by the women who came before them (like Meryl’s mother).  💎 And to bulletproof their lives financially, they had to learn to be: ↳ Financial literate: deciding how you save, how you invest, what you own.  So you NEVER again FEAR money. Which ultimately gave them: ↳ Independence: never asking permission, for your children's education, the dress, the trip, or to give back. ↳ Freedom: liv…

My client Josh swore he was barely eating and couldn't shift his stubborn belly fat. I asked him to photograph everything he ate for a week. His meals looked great. But his "few handfuls of chips, nuts and a chocolate bar" were beating a Big Mac for calories every single afternoon (over 600). He didn't stop snacking. He just snacked better and dropped 30lbs in 6 months. Here are the 6 fat loss mistakes causing 95% of your problems: 1️⃣ Consuming Hidden Calories ↳ A few handfuls of chips and some chocolate can beat a Big Mac for calories. ↳ Don't stop snacking. Snack better. Beef jerky and fruit, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese and berries. 2️⃣ Making Meals Harder Than They Need To Be ↳ Packed schedule, no pl…

Your marketing stinks. 🦨 I say this with love. Sort of. And no, it's not the algorithm. Most owners treat marketing like flossing. They know they should. They nod when it comes up. Then they go back to "running the store" and wonder why nobody's buying. 3️⃣ Three reasons your marketing stinks. Pick your favorite. 1️⃣ You don't own a spot in anyone's head. Not in their mind? Not in their cart. Somebody got to your category first. They own the beachfront property. You're renting a storage unit two towns over. Good news: you don't have to beat them. You just have to be first at something else. Move left. Move right. Own a corner nobody's claimed instead of losing a war you already lost. 2️⃣…

Groceries, or the electric bill. Not both. That was a recurring choice Mom had to make. So if you'd told that kid she'd end up here, she'd have given you a smirk and some side-eye. But guess what? I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be. And I wouldn't have believed that for most of my life. I wouldn't have believed it at 21, when I was evicted because I couldn't make rent. Or when the biggest treat my boyfriend and I could splurge on was one wine cooler we split between us. Or when I couldn't land a decent paying job because I'd dropped out of college with no degree to show for it. But something in me kept moving. While working two jobs, I enrolled in community college. Transferred to George Mason Univ…

3 first class flights to Charleston with a 4 night stay in a five-star hotel should be costing me $5,800. Instead, I’m paying $0.00 Some people view debt as a negative. Which, can be the case if you’re maxing out your card on a few pairs of Jordan’s, a new watch, and some Ray Ban’s. I view it as leverage - spending someone else’s money and getting more money back in return. Every item that we would be purchasing anyway: gas, groceries, tolls - it all goes on a high point earning credit card. The card gets paid off in full every single month; it’s non-negotiable. I’d be putting the same out of pocket if I was swiping a debit card. Instead, I’m getting paid for money I’d be spending anyway. That ex…

Some environments drain you slower than others. Not because of the work. Two days ago I told you about a leader who was proud he didn't care about the detail. I've thought about why that one story stuck harder than any workload ever has. Workload is one kind of tired. A weekend can fix that. But the leader not caring? Is a different kind of workload. The kind where you stop believing anyone above you would notice if it broke you. I'm curious how common that actually is. Not the workload version. The other one. One word. What was it like? Drop it below. I'll read every one. (and if you're worried about sharing, I get it you can get my 'deprogramming letters' 5-day series by email and reply privat…

I read strangers' AI fortunes live on a webinar yesterday. They typed their names in the chat. I ran each one through my app that combines ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, and Perplexity while they watched. One woman searched her own name and met a clinical psychologist, a city councilwoman in Canada, and an OB-GYN. Four engines. Not one of them was her. Strangers wearing her name. One man had a whole career, and half the machines had never heard of him. One engine found the real him. One returned nothing at all. One handed back a list of other people. Another woman came back STRONG on every engine, and asked the best question of the day: "what did I do right?" Even me. I searched myself with no context a…

Your body is keeping score of every day you stay. The headaches. The 2am wide-awake staring at the ceiling. The short fuse with people you love. The promotion to yourself that never happens because you're too drained to even think about what's next. That's not "just work stress." That's the real cost of staying somewhere that's slowly draining you, and it doesn't show up on a paycheck, but you feel it everywhere else: → Sleep that never actually rests you → Burnout a weekend can't touch → Health problems creeping in quietly → Relationships running on your leftover energy → Anxiety and mood swings becoming "just how you are now" → Milestones and memories you miss because you were "still at work" → Your own…

The real obstacle to growth is identity. Once leaders are known for being good, they start choosing work that protects that reputation rather than work that expands their range. Every meaningful leap requires a temporary loss of status. Can your identity survive being a beginner again?

𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐨𝐥𝐝 45 𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡. Nobody told your brain that. Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to form new neural connections. Here's what the research actually shows. It doesn't stop at 30. Or 40. Or 50. What slows down is the speed of initial acquisition. What doesn't slow down? Depth. Pattern recognition. Judgment. Neuroimaging research found something counterintuitive. When tasks got harder, older adults showed increased brain network integration. Younger adults showed decreased integration under the same conditions. (Source: https://lnkd.in/g4WpCdeJ) Translation: your brain pulls from more resources when the problem gets complex. It's not falling be…

Every job listing feels like a crowded room. But a few have nobody in line yet. You find a job posted three hours ago. Feels fresh. Feels early. So you apply. And you're already the 100th person there. By the time a role shows up in the normal "past 24 hours" search, it's been collecting applications all day. Recruiters open it and the pile is already deep. Early to the crowd isn't early. LinkedIn already built a faster way in. They just never put a button on it. It lives in one number in the job search link. Change it, and see roles posted minutes ago, with nobody else in line. The full swap is in the carousel. Takes about ten seconds. Do it once, save the link, check it with your coffee. Y…

Closed an LTL client doing $500K a month. I want to thank Patrick Brenda, MBA, our LTL Guru, for the data analysis and for being part of the Logistic Dynamics corporate team. Why did they give us the business? Because no one would help them. Why would an LTL carrier teach them how to do it better? They make millions A DAY on LTL assessorials. We will go in and teach them how to ship LTL better to avoid all the assessorial charges LTL carriers charge. Making SOPs and training their staff on how to avoid reweighing and reclassing shipments, to reduce and eventually eliminate those charges. Let me quote the client, “We just want someone to help us and who will pick up the phone.” Guess who always picks…

The biggest Claude mistake is sticking with a workflow that worked six months ago. It slows you down and costs more tokens. 10 of them have simpler replacements now. Here's where to start: 1/ Taking Claude's first draft as final The first output is rarely the best one. Tell it exactly what's off, like "too formal" or "cut this by 30%". The next version gets much closer, and Claude gets smarter on what you want over time. 2/ Prompting without an audience in mind Claude guesses when it doesn't know who will read the output. Spell out who it's for, what format it should be, and what it needs to achieve. 3/ Trusting every answer blindly AI still gets things wrong with total confidence. Ask for sources or ha…

12 clear signs of a high-performing employee. (Learned from 25+ years in ProTennis and BigLaw) Career progression is not tied to your years at a company. Your attitude is worth so much more. In a time when competition is more ruthless than ever. Developing these 12 qualities will make you stand out today: 1. They can lead others and set an example (even without the title) ↳ Clearly behave like a leader even without it being asked of you. 2. They always get things done instead of explaining problems. ↳ When you see a need for solutions, say: Let me take care of it. 3. They are humble and lift others up to model for others. ↳ Be accountable and humble for your wins and losses. 4. They celebrate colleagues…

You've been at the same company for 3 years. Same title. Same salary band. Same "we'll revisit it next review cycle" conversation. Meanwhile, someone with less experience than you just switched companies and got a 30% raise. It's not fair. But it is predictable. Here's what top earners understand that most employees don't: 1. Loyalty doesn't pay; switching does. The biggest salary jumps almost never come from appraisals. They come from strategic job changes. 2. Your resume isn't the problem. Your positioning is. Your resume gets you the interview. Your skills get you the offer. Most people optimize the wrong one. 3. You don't need 100% of the qualifications. If you check 70% of the boxes, you're q…

You've built a team. But you're still doing their jobs. Delegation fails because owners have no system for letting go. Every decision routes through them. Every problem lands on their desk. They hired people to free up time and created more work for themselves. A business where every decision depends on the owner is not an asset. Buyers see it immediately. Valuators price it down. Here are 10 ways to delegate without losing control. 1. Match oversight to experience ↳ Assign new tasks with more involvement, not less. ↳ Oversight shrinks as the person proves themselves. 2. Start with investigation ↳ Hand over the research, not the decision. ↳ They gather information, you make the final call. 3. Require…

Good leaders make decisions. Great leaders make decision-makers. Micromanagement is expensive. It slows decisions, erodes trust, and drives people crazy. The most effective leaders? They don’t hover. They hand over the keys, with intention. Great leaders empower without disappearing. They steer when needed, then get out of the way. Here are 5 habits of leaders who empower, not micromanage: 1️⃣ They coach instead of control • They help people think for themselves. • They resist the urge to fix. • They know coaching is slower now but compounds over time. 2️⃣ They define the what, not the how • Micromanagers obsess over how. • Empowering leaders clarify what and why. • They set the goal and let the team desi…

Last Friday, I died a little inside. Our working group had outgrown the table at our usual breakfast spot. So I did what most people would do. I sent a Zoom link. It took four seconds. Problem solved. That's the danger of convenience. It solves the immediate problem so quickly that you barely notice what it replaced. The breakfast meeting was never really about the agenda. It was the 10 minutes before we started. Someone’s child had a soccer tournament. Someone else was dealing with a difficult client and needed to say it out loud. For some of us, it was the only in-person meeting in our entire week. Those moments created something I didn't have a name for until they disappeared. Trust, maybe. Or…

A tale of two companies. Klarna: Built perfect bots. Lost millions. Ford: Leaned into simulation. Decisions still need people. Most companies trust the model completely. The expensive lesson is discovering when the model is perfect. Klarna launched an AI customer service agent in 2026. They wrote specific rules, what AI can and cannot do. AI did exactly as asked. The problem? Customers don't behave. They figured out the prompts to trigger refunds. The bots gave back $2.3 million. ‼️ Klarna changed its job. Same technology. Different outcome at Ford. Ford automated inspection. Experienced engineers were cut. The process looked clean. The metrics looked fine. Then defects started slipping in. Not the obvio…

My good friend Luís Rodrigues is hosting an upcoming workshop with Gabriela de Queiroz: "Build Production-Grade Web Apps with CLAUDE, MCP & AI Orchestration," presented by Packt Publishing. Over the past year of knowing Luís, I’ve seen firsthand how sharp he is…not just as an exceptional engineer and business leader, but as a genuinely great person. He and Gabriela have combined deep hands-on expertise in software development, Claude, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and AI orchestration to put together an incredibly practical, high-value workshop. What the session covers: 1️⃣ Hands-on Implementation: Exercises with ready-to-use implementation templates. 2️⃣ Production Workflows: Practical strategies for real-…

Losing makes most people turn inward. Karolína Muchová did the opposite at Wimbledon. She had just lost in three sets. The winner was her Olympic doubles partner. Her opening line called Nosková her ex-friend. She said it was a joke, kind of. The disappointment was never hidden. Then she started thanking people. She named the ball kids and security. She thanked the staff in the locker room. She thanked the crowd for two weeks. Her voice broke describing her family. She apologised and carried on. Losing usually narrows what people notice. Attention shrinks to the thing lost. She widened instead. Most of us do the opposite. We congratulate the winner and leave. The thank-yous get shorter every time. The sa…

Not so friendly reminder:   It’s time to get more aggressive about the life you want.   You’re not stuck, you’re waiting for permission.   Life doesn’t reward people who stay small. It rewards people who finally choose themselves.   And once you do, you’ll realize the life you dreamed of was just waiting for your yes.

Meeting your parents at the mall... Before cell phones existed... ...going to the mall with your family was a mission. 🛍️ A real one. You couldn't just text, "Where are you?" 📱 You made a PLAN. "Meet back at the food court. 3pm. Don't be late." 🍕🕒 And if something went wrong? There was always a backup spot. "If we miss each other, go to the entrance by Sears." 📍 Simple. Clear. Everyone knew the deal before anything went sideways. ✅ Nobody wandered around hoping they'd bump into each other. Because that would've been chaos. 😵‍💫 Here's where this gets interesting for you. 👀 Most job seekers treat recruiters like a text message they sent and just...wait. ⏳ No plan. No backup. Just hope. 🤞 A recrui…

How did we decide what this price is? Ask it in your next leadership meeting and watch what happens. Sales shifts in their seat. Finance has a different answer. Operations chimes in with a third. Everyone has a stake in pricing. Almost nobody owns it. So it happens by reflex instead. Deal by deal, quote by quote, whoever's closest to the customer makes the call in the moment. Not because anyone's dropping the ball, everyone's holding their own piece and doing right by it. But "it depends" is a risky answer for one of the most consequential numbers in your business. We should be thinking about pricing as a program, not a function. Discounts, volume, shifting COGS, tariffs, differentiation on the shelf a…

Anxiety doesn't disappear. It waits until you're alone. The meetings end. The kids are settled. The inbox goes quiet. And there you are at night, alone with a mind that won't slow down. After years of taking trazodone nightly, a new client stopped me on his way out of day two: "I didn't take trazodone last night. I fell asleep on my own - didn't even think about reaching for it." Two days in. He thought it was magic. I thought so too when I first started. Seven years of my own insomnia disappeared in my first three nights of practice. But there's nothing magical about it - It's science. Anxiety gets worse at night for real, physical reasons. The fatigue that lowers your defenses. The thoughts that get…

Your brain doesn't know the difference between a Slack ping and a 2am outage. That's the real problem nobody talks about. It's your week to be on-call. The NOC has your number. You signed up for the interruptions. Just not on-call for everything. But nobody told you about the other ones. You left the office at 5. Closed the laptop. Told yourself you were off. Then one notification lit up your phone. Just a quick question. Ninety seconds. No big deal. Except your brain didn't get the memo. It stayed half-awake all night. Waiting for the next ping. I know that feeling all too well. Phone on the nightstand. That little flinch every time it buzzed. Even when it was nothing. Here's what nobody te…

We judge leaders on how they show up in the room. But the success was decided before anyone walked in. The calm leader in a crisis. The team that moves without being chased. The meeting where everyone already knows their part. None of that happens in the moment. It was set up earlier, in the quiet, when nothing was on fire. When things get busy, the prep is the first thing to go. The one-to-one gets moved. The briefing gets rushed. The why behind the work gets skipped, because surely everyone knows it by now. Right? Right? And it all feels fine. Right up until the pressure arrives. Then the team hesitates, because the direction was never clear. People wait to be told, because they never got the co…

You're allowed to redefine what success looks like. Most leaders never give themselves permission. Thanks to Felix Bertram for this insight. Many senior leaders reach their 40s or 50s and start asking bigger questions. Questions that have nothing to do with performance or the next promotion. They're about the second half of our careers and whether they still align with our idea of success. We reach this part of life thinking everything should be figured out. But nothing stays fixed. What we wanted in our 20s and 30s isn't always what we want now. Each decade asks something different of us: Your 20s: Explore and Learn ↳ Do things that feel uncomfortable and help you grow. ↳ Choose work that builds real…

What if your problem isn't performance? You hit every deadline. Your work ships. Your reviews say "exceeds expectations." You're the one they call when something's on fire. The one who stays late to get it right. The one whose name is on the work everyone depends on. And yet. The promotion goes to someone else. Someone who, if you're honest, doesn't work as hard as you do. The stretch project lands on another desk. The one you were perfect for. Your name doesn't come up in rooms you've earned the right to be in. And you only find out those rooms existed after the decisions were made. So you do what high performers do. You double down. Another certification. Another project. Another late night. You tell y…

Content is essentially a vehicle for trust, And the people who genuinely care about what they’re creating are the ones who influence the conversation. The Sole Supplier’s marketing team is full of creators who live and breathe this culture, and that shows in the content we put out. The audience feels it, and the brands we work with do too.

Coaches: don’t let AI do the thinking for your client. AI can help a client prepare, reflect, organize ideas, and see options faster. That's useful. But if the client asks AI what to think before they have done any thinking themselves, the tool can easily become a substitute for judgment. Here's a better rule: Human first. AI second. Lead the conversation with: _What do you think is happening? _What would you do? _What are you assuming? _What matters most here? Then bring in AI to challenge the thinking, surface gaps, or test alternatives. That keeps the human in the driver’s seat. For coaches, that may become one of the most important skills in AI-enabled coaching: Knowing when AI helps the client think…

Waiting on AI feels free. That's exactly what makes it the an expensive decision. Every quarter you wait on AI, there’s a price. It's not in your FY27 budget, but you'll pay it anyway. BCG estimates £400bn in gains available with today's AI, for the UK alone. Another £500-£600bn from deeper adoption. A day a week in time savings most businesses never convert. Twice the revenue uplift and 40% greater cost reductions, ceded to whoever started first. Total due: a value gap that widens while you wait. I'm not saying you need to go straight to betting big. But I'm encouraging you to make the choice and start your engines. One use case. The tools you already pay for. A clear measure of value in 6 to 12 wee…

You were promoted because you executed. But nobody tells you how the job changes when you go from a manager to an executive. The skills that got you promoted aren't the skills that make you effective in the new role. And most leaders find that out the hard way, in a meeting where execution wasn't enough. Here's what changes 👇 Managers communicate to inform. Executives communicate to align, decide, and set direction. The role shift comes down to presence, intention, and the ability to lead a conversation instead of just contributing to one. Because at the senior level, communication stops being a skill you improve. Instead, it becomes a system you install. Here are 6 frameworks that build that system, s…

My best month in LinkedIn brand partnerships: $15,000. My worst: $3,500. The wild part is that brands showed up on LinkedIn before I felt ready. At 8,900 followers, I had a brand deal sitting in my DMs. I didn't answer then… I just didn't know what it was. I thought to myself: What do they want exactly? Then i forgot about it. I thought I needed 450,000 followers to be paid for a post like the big creators who can get paid $5K per post.... so I left real money on the table while I waited to feel legitimate. Then a client of mine with 2,000 followers... was offered $900 per sponsored post. Two thousand followers. Nine hundred dollars.... Per post! I then got paid $5,500 for a post. And I don't have…

Fitting in and belonging feel like the same thing. They're actually opposites. But most of us never stop to ask whether fitting in is really what we need. We just keep doing it. It happens in the boardroom, at home, and in every space where we're not quite sure we're welcome. It looks like this: → Ticking everyone else's boxes. → Wondering why it never feels enough.  → Constructing a version of ourselves that feels acceptable. Sound familiar? My new article will help you understand the difference between fitting in and belonging. Grab a coffee and read it now.

Most executives get fat loss wrong. That's why you still have a gut you can't get rid of. The ones who lose stubborn belly fat and keep it off have 4 things figured out: 1/ Their nutrition 2/ Their training 3/ Their daily non-negotiables 4/ A system that survives real life Nail these and 20lbs in 90 days is realistic. Here's the exact plan: 1/ Set your nutrition ↳ Set calories at 12x your bodyweight in lbs. At 200lbs that's 2,400. ↳ Hit 1g protein per lb of ideal bodyweight, eaten first at every meal. ↳ Build every plate: 1 palm protein, 2 fists veg, 1 fist carbs, 1 thumb fats. ↳ Snacks are protein and fibre only. No naked carbs. ↳ Stall for 2 weeks? Drop 200 calories from carbs or fats. Never protein. Get…

I’ve never met a leader who said they don't value accountability. I've met plenty who couldn't tell me what it actually looks like in their organization. Checking in on deadlines. Following up when something slips. Asking "where are we on this?" in a Monday meeting and calling that rigor. All of that tells you what happened after the fact, and none of it changes what happens next. Most orgs treat accountability like a follow-up issue when it's actually a structural one. A project gets assigned to a team. Three people are "co-owners." Leadership calls it collaboration. Then the project stalls. And suddenly no one is responsible because everyone was. I watched this for years inside government. A delive…

You can learn more about an organization by studying its exceptions than by reading its operating model. - Who gets to bypass the process when speed matters? - Which leader can reopen a decision after the meeting ends? - Whose concerns trigger immediate escalation, and whose concerns remain in the queue? - What happens when two executives believe they own the same call? Formal structures describe how the organization is expected to operate. Exceptions reveal where authority, trust, and influence actually sit. That does not mean exceptions are inherently problematic. Every organization needs judgment, discretion, and the ability to respond to unusual circumstances. The issue is whether exceptions are consciou…

The average NICU stay now costs nearly $100,000. What if we could shorten it? Every extra day in the NICU comes with a price. and not just for hospitals. For babies. For families. For healthcare workers trying to stretch already limited resources. Every additional day can mean another night sleeping in a hospital chair. Another missed paycheck. Another sibling cared for by someone else. Another day parents go home with empty arms. For babies, prolonged hospitalization also means more painful procedures, more separation from caregivers, greater exposure to hospital-acquired infections, and more stress during one of the most sensitive periods of brain development. And for health systems, every occupied NICU…

A follow-up deck used to take me two hours. Now I barely touch it. I used to think a good follow-up deck was about how it looked. I had it backward. I've been using Claap to manage thoughtled. ai sales calls. And here's the new flow: Here's the whole thing, nine steps: 1. Don't start with a blank deck. The call's already in Claap. Objections and pain points, labeled. 2. Connect Claap and Gamma to Claude. Add the MCP endpoint as a custom connector. The tools register themselves. 3. Hand it the contract, not just the ask. Two skills: one for your brand, one for the structure. 4. Point it at the deal. One line: "Build a sales deck for [Company]." It reads every call with them, not just the last. 5. Rea…

Fix your LinkedIn profile in 10 minutes with Claude. 10x your results all year. Most people skip this part: They’ll use Claude to write posts, summarize documents, and think through ideas. But every profile gets judged in under 5 seconds. If a stranger can't tell what you do that fast, they bounce, and you don't get a second look. The good news is Claude can audit your entire profile for you. Here's exactly how: Step 1: Download Your Profile PDF On your LinkedIn profile, hit the three dots under your photo and choose Save to PDF. Now Claude has your entire profile in a single file. Step 2: Upload The PDF To Claude Tell Claude your goal first, like more leads, followers, or job offers. Then ask it to g…

At 30 I finally understood the rules of the game. At 40 I understood what playing it costs you. These are the 10 lessons I wish someone had handed me a decade and a half ago. 1️⃣ Your title is borrowed, never owned. The institution can take it back in an afternoon, and one day it will. Build an identity that survives the day the letterhead disappears. 2️⃣ Difficult people don't leave The people who protect their position at your expense do not leave at 40. What changes is you. You stop taking it personally and start deciding how much of your energy they are allowed to have. 3️⃣ Perception of what winning is changes over time You can climb for ten years before you notice you stopped asking whether you want…

Once my clients get an offer, they always ask me how to best start their first 90 days at a new job. Landing the job is only half the battle. Your first 90 days can shape your reputation, accelerate your growth, and set the foundation for future promotions, raises, and opportunities. I actually agree with Ford Coleman here. A few points especially stand out: ✅ Listen more than you talk. Learn how things really get done before trying to change everything. ✅ Build relationships early. Your success will depend just as much on your network inside the company as your technical skills. ✅ Look for quick wins. Solving a small problem that nobody asked you to fix shows initiative and builds trust. ✅ Ask for feedb…

Listening looks simple, Doing it well is rare. There’s a difference between listening to understand and listening to respond. Listening to respond means your brain is already building an answer before the other person finishes. You're nodding, but you're composing. Present, but already ahead of them. Many leaders do this without realizing it. It builds over years of being "the person with the answer." Teams pick up on poor listening more than you might realize. That’s when they start editing. They bring the shorter version or the question designed for a quick response. Over time, you stop getting their full thinking. When your team filters what they share, you're making calls with less context. Beca…

I was standing in an overgrown garden with a rusty pair of shears, wondering why I still owned an Airbnb I no longer wanted. The Iowa humidity was relentless. My shoulders were aching. The bushes seemed determined to win. And somewhere between hacking away at another branch and questioning my life choices, I realized I wasn't actually fighting the garden. I was fighting my past decisions. I'd poured money into the property. Time. Weekends that could have been spent with my kids. Furniture I'd carefully staged. Photos I'd styled myself. Every time I thought about selling, my brain replayed everything I'd already invested. As though yesterday's effort somehow changed today's reality. It doesn't. Tha…

In five years, companies will be desperate for experienced AI talent. The problem? They stopped hiring them. 62% of GenZ is teaching their managers how to AI. (Mortar Research) One out of ten companies cut entry-level jobs because of it. The smart companies are playing the long game. IBM is tripling US entry-level hiring in 2026. Amazon and AWS are bringing on 11,000 interns and junior employees this year. AWS CEO Matt Garman called replacing junior employees with AI "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard." He also said never hiring junior people is "a non-starter for anyone trying to build a long-term company." Dropbox's CPO described Gen Z AI fluency this way: "It's like they're biking in the Tou…

55,000 followers on LinkedIn. I still can’t believe this. In real life, I rehearse "nice to meet you" in my head before I say it. I wrote a book called "Quietly Influential." When I attend a networking event, I only start talking to people after eating the food in my corner and people watching. I run a law firm with 23 employees. Most of them are louder than me. My wife Kitti once joked, "You talk more to LinkedIn than you do with friends in real life." (Oops) She wasn't wrong. I post at 3am because the house is quiet and nobody is going to walk up and start a conversation with me. That's my version of networking. Alone. In the dark. Typing into a phone while Kitti sleeps. And somehow 55,000 peopl…

ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini and Perplexity are telling your future clients all about you every day. Well. It’s not you exactly. Just your dancing shadow on the wall. The machine has never met you. Never heard your voice, never watched you work. Everything it knows it pulled from the flat shapes you left online: → posts → transcripts → reviews from 2021. And it has an audience. Your next client is in that cave. They point at your shadow and ask one question: “Who is this? Are they any good?” The machine answers. Instantly. Confidently. From shadows. Stand close to a big enough name and you throw a giant shadow, earned or not. Do your best work in rooms the fire never reached, and you cast noth…

Your culture isn't tested in the hello. It's revealed in the goodbye. Exit stories spread faster than any PR. They reach friends, family, next hires. The narrative sticks. Most leaders focus on first impressions. Smart ones know last ones matter more. Because everyone watches the goodbye. Not just the person leaving. The team that stays behind. They're taking notes. How you handle departures reveals all. Your real values show up here. Under pressure, when it counts. I've seen companies lose top talent. Not from the original departure. From how badly they handled it. The ripple effect is real. And it compounds. 💡 Five things leaders get wrong: ↳ Making departures about betrayal ↳ Cutting access before f…

I’m 28. Here are 6 money habits I wish I’d started sooner 👇   1️⃣ Build a F* You Fund Save enough to leave, pause, or confidently say no. A bad job feels different when staying becomes optional.   2️⃣ Invest when your income arrives Automate it before you get the chance to spend it. Decide what gets invested first.   3️⃣ Start early. Because EVERYTHING compounds Small amounts become big results over time.   4️⃣ Use AI to calculate your investment number Build a budget tracker around your real spending. Clear numbers create better decisions.   5️⃣ Invest more whenever your income grows Not every increase needs to upgrade your lifestyle. Let your wealth grow before your expenses do.   6️⃣ Wait 48 hours before n…

You may be aiming too low to get hired. Because being overqualified works against you. 🎯 Imagine two candidates: Just barely qualified. Massively overqualified. Given the choice, employers often prefer the person who is just barely qualified. Why? They have room to grow. 🌱 They’re more likely to stick around. They won’t cost as much to hire. They see the position as a step forward. They’re open to learning how this employer does things. The massively overqualified candidate creates a different set of concerns: Will they leave when something better appears? Will they expect more money? 💰 Will they get bored doing the actual job? Will they resist doing things our way? None of those concerns may be fair…

I lost a promotion to office politics. That wasn't the hardest part. I'd earned it. I'd made my case. I'd watched my colleague smile to my face while working against me behind closed doors. And when it went to someone who played politics better than they did the job, I was gutted. For weeks, I replayed every moment. Every meeting where I was undermined. The things he said about me when I wasn’t around. It caught me even in my dreams - I couldn't stop staring at that closed door. The feeling of unfairness was eating me alive. But here's what I almost missed: While I was fixated on the one door that wouldn't open, I was ignoring every other door that was wide open. So one day, after meditation, I made…

You wouldn't promote a new feature to production without integration testing. So why accept an offer without doing the same on the culture? Think about the best team you ever worked on. Debate made the work better, not worse. Promotions came from inside, not another external hire over your head. Priorities were clear enough that "urgent" actually meant something. When you worked late, it was because something real was on the line. You were proud to say where you worked. Now think about the worst one. Every disagreement felt like a risk, so nobody raised one. The org chart never moved. Same faces, same ceiling, year after year. Everything was priority one, which meant nothing was. You worked the weekend fix…

Sinners judge other sinners for sinning differently. You’ve seen it in sales: the guy who mocks your hustle is usually the one making excuses while watching your pipeline grow. The same in life. The loudest voices on authenticity are often wearing the biggest masks. But what they really hate is the mirror you hold up; what they’re missing in themselves. None of us are perfect. We all fall short. But legacy isn’t built by hiding behind a mask; it’s built by men who own their mess and do the hard work. Keep building. Keep showing up. The right people will eventually come around and take notice.

Power only? Yes please. 😎 Some loads don’t fit in a dry van. Some don’t fit on a standard flatbed. And some… make people stop and stare. Whether it’s a 52’ roadster, oversized equipment, tanks, containers, or the freight nobody else wants to figure out, we’ll find the right trailer and get it moving. The bigger the challenge, the more we enjoy it. Need power-only? Give us the trailer. We’ll bring the truck.

No, we didn’t coordinate the outfits. No, nobody planned the Buffalo Bills flag either. 😂 But this is what Cowtown looks like. Different personalities. Different stories. Same commitment to serving our customers and having a little fun while we do it. The freight market changes every day. Our culture doesn’t.

While I typically love most things about LinkedIn I have to call out a terrible experience with their customer service team. I put in what I thought was a simple request to have my monthly auto credit card processed on a different date. We spend $3,700 a month with LinkedIn on a multi year deal formoue Recruiter licesnes. The response I got was wild with a warning to pay my bill on time or have service suspended. If I’m asking about changing and autopay this customer service rep has to know or had the ability to check my account was paid 9 days prior to my email. How was I not willing to pay and invoice that was ALREADY PAID!? This was a 0/10 experience from the LinkedIn customer service team and I would r…

There was a lot of love up in here this weekend. I had the absolute pleasure of leading a team of 45 brand ambassadors to bring The North Face brand to life at the 2026 Climb Festival. Two days. Nearly 7,000 visitors a day. With an atmosphere you could feel from outside the gates. We hosted a full athletes' village, complete with ice plunges and recovery zones. There were climbing comps that had crowds holding their breath. I couldn't even watch... The climbers were mind blowing. Live music and DJs kept the energy up between rounds. World class workshops and talks, alongside interactive activities that gave every single visitor a reason to stay, play and explore. The place was BUZZING from start to finis…

Most of us are working toward a deadline we never agreed to. And the finish line keeps moving anyway. A lot of leaders have a version of this timeline laid ahead of us: "I'm going to be promoted at 30." "I'll make partner by 35." "By my 40s, everything will be figured out." We race to complete it without thinking if it's right for us. And if we miss one checkpoint, it feels like a sign that we're not capable enough. I've explored a version of this in a recent newsletter. You can catch up here: https://lnkd.in/gTwkfCTf This invisible race costs us more than we realize. The stress piles up, and we can sacrifice key parts of ourselves along the way: Relationships, rest, and the chance to change course if w…

Every interviewer will ask you some version of this question. "Why did you leave your last role?" Experienced interviewers use it to assess three things quickly: - Are you running toward something or away from something? - How will you speak about them one day? - Does this role actually solve your problem? It is about whether you know where you are going. I have worked with hundreds of professionals navigating this exact moment. This week's newsletter gives you the exact language. Three scenarios: 1. What to say if you were retrenched. 2. If you left for growth. 3. If the environment was difficult. Always Be Career-ing.

Most career problems aren't really career problems. They look like career problems. You're overlooked. You don't speak up. You stay in the role too long. You keep applying for jobs that look different but somehow feel the same. So you look for a career solution. A new role. A new qualification. A better manager. Sometimes those things help. Often they don't. Because the problem was never your CV. It was the position you'd learned to hold yourself in. I've watched it happen again and again. One client spent years waiting to be noticed. Another kept trying to improve the things she wasn't naturally good at. Another looked successful on paper but stayed silent in rooms she'd already earned the right to be…

"Why do you keep doing this to yourself?!?" That's what I kept asking myself as I slid into the back of the room. This was my second speaking conference this year. And, every good speaker knows, they need to understand who is in their audience.   (And I'm not putting myself in the 'good' category... yet!) 😁 I wanted to listen. To understand the discussions. To learn what this group truly cared about. It was an intimate event of about 50 people - and one of the most specialized conferences in the country focused on Expanded Access Programs. Everyone seemed like an expert. And honestly? I was intimidated. At one point, I could feel myself beginning to hyperventilate. But as I spent hours listening, somet…

I once traveled to a library for research. Now world-class AI training is free online. When I was doing R&D in laser communications at the Pentagon, I would travel into Washington, D.C., to use the Library of Congress. I needed access to specialized materials for my research. There was no instant search. No online course library. No AI assistant helping me find, organize, and understand the information. Today, the level of knowledge available online is incredible. Anthropic Academy's free training is extensive. Here are 12 free courses worth saving: CLAUDE FOUNDATIONS 1. Claude 101 Start here to learn the basics of using Claude for everyday work tasks. ↗ https://lnkd.in/eDuwRTAY 2. AI Capabilities…

The more experience you gain, the harder it can become to explain what you actually do. You have more roles. More results. More industries. More decisions that made sense at the time. And far more evidence than you can fit into one conversation. So when someone says: “Tell me about yourself.” You start at the beginning. You explain the first role. Then the move after that. Then why you changed industries. Then how one opportunity led to another. By the time you reach the present, they know where you worked. But they may still be wondering: What is this person actually known for? That is the difference between your career history and your career story. Your history explains what happened. Your…

Kindness in leadership isn't weakness. It's a skill nobody teaches. We train leaders on strategy, execution, results. But we skip the one thing that holds a leader together: True kindness. Not the kind that folds under pressure. The kind that stays steady when everything else is shaking. I know, because I've received this type of kindness. From a leader who wasn't even my leader at the time. In 2018, I lost my job. That same week, I sat down with an old friend from my Capitol Hill days to figure out what came next. I told him what happened, and he asked me one question: "Have you ever taken a break in your career?" I said no, I don't take breaks. I end a job on Friday and start a new one on Monday. H…

I asked a room of executives one question: "If your role vanished Friday, who calls you Monday?" The room became silent. Every end of July, I watch two groups of executives split. By December, only one has new options on the table. The difference is definitely not the quality of their work. One group doubles down on execution, and trusts the results to speak. The other makes sure the right rooms hear about the results. After 20 years leading revenue at Google and LinkedIn, and 15,000 professionals later, the pattern holds every single time. The second group ends the year with offers, contracts, paid speaking engagements, and new inbound leads. Here are 10 moves for an unstoppable second half of the ye…

There's a story that's quietly running your leadership. You probably don't even realise it's there. It sounds like this: "Don't let people down." So you say yes. Take on one more project. Answer the email at 9 pm. Solve the problem yourself. Carry the extra responsibility. Not because you have to. Because saying no feels uncomfortable. For years, I thought I couldn't say no because I didn't want to let people down. My team. My colleagues. My organisation. The people counting on me. But that wasn't the real story. The real story sounded more like this: "If I say no, they'll think I'm not committed." "If I ask for help, they'll think I can't cope." "If I disappoint someone, they'll lose confidence in me."…

Liam Neeson is 73 and still leading physically demanding action films. The average 73 year old is dealing with frailty, low energy, and declining mobility. 25 years ago a motorcycle crash nearly killed him. Doctors told his wife he wouldn't survive the night. He credits being fit and strong for pulling him through. The average 73 year old man has: • Multiple medications for preventable conditions • Decades of muscle loss from no strength training • A VO2 max so low they get out of breath climbing stairs • High fall risk and declining mobility • Low energy, poor sleep, and chronic inflammation And despite what you might think, aging is not the problem. Neglect is. Your decline doesn't just happen at 73. It…

You're leading with someone else's playbook and you don't even know it. Most leaders never choose how they lead. They inherited their style from the boss who promoted them, the culture that rewarded certain behaviors, and the version of "professional" they learned to perform before they had the language to question it. Now they're running teams and shaping careers using a leadership style they never actually picked. I've seen this happen for over 20 years. An executive leads through control because that's how they were led. A VP avoids hard conversations because the leaders above them always did. A director confuses consensus with courage because keeping the peace got rewarded more than telling the truth…

Every organizational structure is a choice about which friction you are willing to tolerate. Centralize a function and you gain consistency, but decisions may move further from the customer. Embed specialists inside business units and you gain proximity, but expertise may become fragmented. Add another management layer and you may improve coordination, while making information travel more slowly. There is no frictionless organization. Yet many restructuring conversations proceed as though the right chart will eliminate tension altogether. It will not. The real work is deciding which tensions the strategy can afford and which ones it cannot. A company competing through operational reliability may accept sl…

A company I worked for fired their best salesperson. That guy was me. Then the CEO flew in from Australia to fix it. I closed more deals than anyone else in the building. And was getting $130K base salary + uncapped commission on top. But I also took plenty of days off. Apparently those days crossed some invisible line so they let me go without much discussion. The owner caught wind of the situation later and did not mess around. He literally jumped on a plane, flew across the planet, and switched the entire company to unlimited PTO on the spot. All of that effort just to solve something one honest conversation could have fixed earlier. They pulled me into a room after the change. The owner sat t…

Across cultures, children don’t spend their early years preparing for “real life.” They spend them doing real life. They carry babies. Help prepare meals. Comfort younger children. Care for animals. Sweep floors. Fetch water. Not because they’re being trained for adulthood. Because they’re included in the everyday life of their community. Play is often practice. And practice shapes culture. It makes me wonder how different our expectations of childhood might be if we saw children less as people we need to entertain, and more as people who genuinely want to belong… P.S. He won’t remember this. But he’s already learning one of the oldest human lessons: how to care for one another. 🔁 Repost to help…

I'm the worst attorney at my law firm. And I'm the one who built it. That used to keep me up at night. Now it's the whole point. Steve Jobs couldn't code. Sara Blakely had zero fashion experience. Phil Knight wasn't a shoe designer. They were visionaries who put the right people in position and got out of the way. I failed the bar 3 times. I'm from Taiwan on an E-2 visa, running a firm in Oklahoma City. My job isn't to be the smartest person in the room. My job is to make sure the smartest people in the room have everything they need to win. The resources, the opportunities, and a boss who actually cares about their life outside of work. I came to this country chasing the American Dream. Turns out the…

"You're right. We need to fix this." Then they decided to do nothing. 🤯 Not in those words. What they actually said was, "we'll have a go at it ourselves for now." But that's the same outcome, the problem stays exactly where it is, and you're not the one being paid to fix it. You'd had a good call. Maybe even sent the proposal. They agreed with the problem, agreed it was costing them, agreed it needed sorting. So you booked them as a live one, someone who gets it, just needs a nudge. Another case study. A tighter proposal. One more follow-up. But here's the bit that gets missed. Admitting a problem isn't the same as being ready to pay to solve it. Those are two different things, and most of us treat them…

People who actually use AI know where it breaks. It's Monday, and to kick off the week, I sat through one of 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 meetings. "AI can definitely do that for less." Ah... starting the week with fireworks. The folks in the trenches with AI Say something very different from the keynote deck. "Nice draft, but I still have to rewrite half" "This keeps making stuff up" "It can't cover the whole thing" That's not whining. That's judgment. Anyone can drop a prompt and get text back. The difference is knowing when that text is correct, incorrect, or convincingly wrong. Here's what gets under my skin: Some companies are now scoring AI usage like it’s performance. Who’s racking up the most tokens? Who’s in…

Argentinians earn more in the US than immigrants from any other Latin American country. Let me explain: Argentina is far away, and getting to the US from there is a big move. So the people who make it tend to be the ones already set up to succeed: educated, established, often with business ties or a network waiting for them. There's a huge Argentinian community in Miami, and a lot of them arrive with a runway most immigrants don't have. Now compare that to closer countries. When the US is right next door, a much wider range of people make the move for opportunity. That pulls the average the other way. You see the same pattern with Venezuela and Costa Rica. So "Argentinians earn the most" is mostly a story a…

I keep seeing many ways women are building serious wealth in America right now. And almost none of them look like what we were taught. 💎here are 5 archetypes of women driving this change: 1./ The Artist turned Founder:  talent made her famous  then she used that attention to build something the business now earns more than the music ever did 2./ The Founder Turned Investor: she built a company from zero, now she uses her operational skills as a track record by investing in the companies she believes in 3./ The Founder: no business experience & no obvs right time to launch she created something women actually wanted and owned most of it until it was worth billions 4./ The Athlete: she built a name for…

Here is the uncomfortable truth underneath everything I posted this week. You cannot redesign the organization you are inside of, because you designed it around yourself. The decision rights sit where you trust. The information flows route around your blind spots, or straight into them. The cadence of meetings reflects your tolerance for uncertainty more than the company's need for coordination. None of this is a character flaw. It is simply how organizations form around a leader, and it is the core thesis of my work after a Ph.D. in organizational psychology and two decades as an operator: the leader and the organization co-create each other. Which means the third question from yesterday, which parts of th…

I've had 4,100+ conversations with executives about their health since 2018. Here's what I'd tell you if I wasn't worried about offending you. Most coaches won't say these out loud. They're too worried about losing your business. I'm more worried about your health. Here are 9 harsh truths about why you'll die earlier than you should: 1️⃣ You think you're healthy because you're not sick ↳ No symptoms doesn't mean no problem. Disease builds silently for years. ↳ You haven't had proper bloodwork in years and you're guessing. 2️⃣ You think you're a healthy weight because you're not obese ↳ Being 20lbs overweight is still a problem. ↳ That excess is visceral fat wrapping around your organs, driving inflammation…

A good interview makes you memorable. Good follow-up gets you hired. You prep for weeks. You show up. You nail the questions. Then you go home, and you wait. Most candidates think the work ends when the interview does. But that's exactly when the hiring team starts comparing notes. And going quiet right then is the fastest way to get forgotten. I've seen candidates lose offers they earned in the room. Not because of a bad answer. Because of what happened after. This carousel breaks down the 7 follow-up mistakes that quietly kill offers, and how to fix every one of them fast: → The email almost nobody sends → The 3-line formula busy managers actually read → The cadence that keeps you eager, never needy S…

Our Monday pipeline review used to take an hour, three people, and a stack of guesses. Now it's done before any of us log in. My ops manager used to spend Sunday night flagging which deals went quiet. Our sales lead used to spend Monday morning chasing the reps for updates. Half the meeting was just getting everyone caught up. Now the summary is sitting in Slack before anyone opens their laptop. Every deal read overnight, flagged if something moved, ready for all three of us at the same time. We didn't hire someone to summarize things faster. We stopped needing the Sunday-night flagging shift and the Monday chase entirely. That's an hour back for three people, every single week, and a standup that s…

Fifteen years of experience. A "senior" title. And by 2pm you can't remember what you opened your laptop to do an hour ago. That's not a discipline problem. It's what your brain does to anyone who switches tasks before finishing the last one. There's a name for it. Researcher Sophie Leroy at the University of Washington found that when you move from an unfinished task to a new one, part of your attention stays behind. She called it attention residue. You're technically on the new task. But a slice of your working memory is still running the old one. That residue drags down how well you do the next thing. Source: https://lnkd.in/gXZsG9nG That's why closing the ticket, jumping into standup, then opening the P…

A former LinkedIn employee just confirmed what many suspected. They worked there 3 years. Here’s what they shared: → Easy Apply floods postings with 800+ applications. Recruiters often filter by Premium and stop reading after ~20. → The “Open to Work” banner can actually work against you. Some hiring managers see it as a red flag, not a green light. → Many roles are filled internally before the posting even goes live. Companies post publicly because HR policy requires it, not because the role is open. Their advice? Stop relying on Easy Apply. Start reaching out to actual people ~ recruiters, hiring managers, employees at the company. If you’re job searching right now, this is your reminder: applications g…

This country is not getting enough attention for what it offers. That will be changing soon. It just has to. The value Colombia brings to American business is insane. Last year, Colombian sales teams drove millions in revenue for our US clients. They may be remote and in a different country. But their results are the same compared to US sales teams. Here's what the numbers show: The workforce → 17% of the population is aged 15-24. One of the youngest, fastest-growing labor pools in Latin America. → Millions of college grads entering the market every year. → Talent costs can be up to 70% less than US equivalents. And yet it stays one of the most underpaid and underutilized markets in the hemisphere. Ou…

Three nights of 3 AM wake-ups, a flood-damaged home, and a full client load. I'm taking today off. Full stop. I'm completely exhausted from this week. Moving out of our flood damaged home for a few days. Then back in to concrete floors (not by design) and ripped out drywall. Five executive coaching sessions. One virtual webinar. Two CEO strategy sessions. Four gap analysis interviews. Multiple meetings. Everything else on my list will still be there on Monday. And I've learned the hard way that knowing when to stop is just as important as knowing when to push. At some point you have to make the call that lets you lead another day. Today I'm choosing it. Self-care is required. Find space today…

I watched a CEO get walked out of his own boardroom. Not fired. Not escorted by security. By his own executive team, with the help of an ambulance, who finally said enough. Here's what led to it. He was a founder I worked with. Brilliant. Driven. Completely unable to regulate himself under pressure at that time. Bad news in a meeting? He'd explode. Blindside someone with a public dressing-down. Go cold and punish for days after a missed number. His team didn't leave. That's the part that gets me. They cared enough to stage an intervention. They told him directly: we need you to get help, or we can't keep doing this. He listened. He got support. He came back different. What stuck with me wasn't the ou…

Everybody says "build a personal brand." Nobody tells you where to actually start. Most people do 1 of 2 things. They either post random thoughts and hope something sticks, or they never start at all. Both get you to the same place…nowhere. In reality, the whole thing comes down to 7 steps: Step 1: Fix your profile Your banner, photo, headline, About and Featured sections should tell one story. who you help, what you help them do, and where to go next. If a stranger can't work that out in 5 seconds, they bounce. Step 2: Pick your niche One person, one problem. Fill in this line: "I help [who] do [what] so they can [outcome]." Saywhat started because I was spending too much time on LinkedIn instead of m…

Be honest. You've been looking at job boards on your lunch break at work. You've got three job apps open on your phone right now. You've bookmarked five "maybe" jobs you haven't applied to yet. You've rewritten your resume in your head a hundred times but haven't actually opened the file. Here's the truth nobody tells you: Staying in a job you've mentally checked out of isn't playing it safe. It's just slower burnout with extra steps. You already know you're capable of more. You already know this job stopped stretching you a long time ago. What you don't have is a plan, and that's the only thing standing between "someday" and actually leaving. I help people who are EXACTLY where you are right now…

Top 1% leaders don't build great companies by accident. They follow a few principles consistently. Here are 10 worth keeping: 1. Focus on Progress, Precision, and Profit ↳ Every decision should move the business forward, improve execution, or increase profitability. 2. Eliminate Bureaucracy and Inefficient Meetings ↳ If a meeting doesn't help people make better decisions, it shouldn't happen. 3. Facilitate Free Flow of Communication ↳ Let information reach the right people directly instead of getting stuck in layers of approval. 4. Adopt "Common Sense" Governance ↳ If a rule slows the business down without adding value, change the rule. 5. Make Decisive Moves ↳ Make decisions quickly, align the team, and…

Ever walked out of a 1:1 thinking, ‘That could’ve been an email’? ...Your team has too. That’s the danger of autopilot 1:1s. They check boxes, but they don’t create connection. A leader I coach recently opened a 1:1 with this: “What’s one thing you wish you could tell me, but haven’t?” On the surface, their employee seemed fine. Steady. Professional. No red flags. But that question cracked something open. The truth spilled out: They’d been frustrated for months, feeling stuck. That moment showed the leader what they’d missed: 1:1s aren’t just about updates. They’re about making space for what’s unsaid. Because here’s the reality many leaders miss: ⤷ Agendas cover tasks, not tension ⤷ Silence is not…

I once sat through a 1-hour meeting that required 12 minutes of actual work. The other 48 minutes disappeared remarkably easily. Someone looked for a file. We waited for a late arrival. We recapped last week's discussion. We revisited decisions that had already been made. Nobody questioned it. The meeting was booked for an hour. So it lasted an hour. Later, I did the math. Eight people. Every week. An entire year. Roughly $40,000 in salary spent on decisions that consistently took about 12 minutes. That's when I realized something. Most meetings don't expand because the work is complicated. They expand because the calendar gave them permission. I've seen this pattern in almost every organizatio…