*Typing*

People often think of self-awareness as self-improvement. It’s not.

Self-awareness is simply seeing yourself exactly as you are. It’s seeing the good, the bad and the ugly. It’s what inspires you, what scares you and what pisses you off. Once you’ve seen yourself exactly as you are, you can then decide what you want to change. But, this change can only happen after you’ve fully accepted yourself as you are, today, in this moment.

What I don’t like about traditional self-improvement is that it often stems from a place of shame, inadequacy and disappointment. You will put all this effort into changing who you are only to find that once you have changed you aren’t happy with the person you’ve become. When I was in my early twenties, I was always talking about moving.

Somebody much wiser than me said… “Try to be accept where you live now because otherwise you won’t accept where you live tomorrow.” I took it to heart then. I take it to heart now. Try to figure out a way to be happy where you are in life, in work and in self.

If you want to be a writer, read this. 

Start scrolling. It will take you some time to hit the bottom. Most become bored of scrolling and quit. I’ve found the same to be true for writing. 

I write every day. No. I might not publish every day. But, in some form or fashion, I write every day. 

This daily discipline has amounted to thousands and thousands of blog posts (only a fraction of which exist on the blog as you see it today). I delete more writing in a year than most people create over the course of a lifetime. This might sound like gloating—I suppose it is—but please hear me out. 

Something extraordinary happens when you choose to show up each day and commit to your craft. Over time, forces collect around you that are beyond your understanding. Good things happen. You feel stronger physically, sharper mentally and lighter emotionally. You gain a greater respect for yourself (for respect is something you earn by keeping the promises you’ve made to yourself). You find that luck moistens life’s rails, that your creativity becomes a biosphere teeming with ideas and that your work takes on a life of its own. 

Eventually, your daily writings distill themselves down into greater, deeper works. But, you will only make this connection after the fact. And, once you do, it will not matter because you will have come to realize that your time spent writing each day is as natural and necessary as breathing. 

Please just trust me when I say: Write every day.

I wouldn’t trust marketers who only talk about marketing. Marketing is incredibly nuanced. It can’t be summed up in terms metrics, formulas, hacks and tactics. To be a decent marketer, you must be a decent, empathetic human being.

At the end of the day, you are exchanging a good or service for somebody’s hard-earned money. Which is to say you’re exchanging a good or service for somebody’s time. Time away from their kids. Time away from their spouse.Time away from their loved ones.

Those who don’t take this responsibility seriously, should be sent to bed early with no dinner (and perhaps even a slap on the rump). Your job as a marketer is to find and sell something that provides more value than the money it costs.

I’m sorry, but this requires more “feeling” than “thinking”. Metrics, formulas, hacks and tactics are solid guardrails. But, they won’t get you all the way there. Intuition just may. If you’re considering hiring a marketer or a marketing agency, I would focus less on what they know about marketing and more on what they know about people. They should be well read in fiction, as there is no better look into the human psyche. They should be insatiably curious, as finding the answers require a determination of a truffle pig.

Above all, they should care about helping people. No, they don’t have to be Mother Theresa. But, they can’t be in it strictly to make a fast buck to buy a boat.

I once had this idea for Y-Combinator: The Amazon of church supplies. All those pews, alters and candles aren’t gifts from God. Somebody here on Earth makes them. And they cost a lot of money. Well, I began looking into this church supplies business and I saw the market was enormous. So, I put a pitch deck together and sent it to Paul Graham. This was before he retired to the woods in England to write.

Well, Paul was a busy man. Trying to get an appointment with him was like trying to get ahold of God while he was creating Earth. Just impossible. So, I got clever and started sending him bibles. Every day, I’d send Paul a bible. Each bigger than the day prior. What began as a bible no bigger than a matchbox grew to a behemoth that required a fork lift driven by a ham fisted man named Larry to deliver.

One day, buried up to his ears in bibles, Paul relented. He had his secratary get in touch with me. When I walked into Paul’s office, his frustration was palpable. Hundreds of bibles were stacked in every corner of his office and the elephant of a bible that Larry delivered had been converted into a makeshift coffee table. I immediately dove into my pitch. To my surprise, Paul seemed genuinely interested. He nodded along. Reading the deck with a pair of Eagle eyes. Licking his fingers, from time to time, to turn a page.

In the end, he had just one question… “What are you going to call this thing, Cole?”

I said… “Holy shit.”

Picasso didn’t always sign his paintings Picasso. Early on in his career, he signed them Pablo Ruiz Picasso. Ruiz was his father’s last name. Picasso was his mother’s maiden name. When he dropped Ruiz and began signing his paintings strictly as Picasso, a lot of folks thought it was to spite his father. They had a tumultuous relationship. Picasso surpassed his father’s artistic abilities at a very young age and it’s believed this caused resentment on both sides to form.

However, his choice to drop “Pablo” and “Ruiz” from his signature was just a brilliant branding maneuver. In other words, it was strictly business. It was less of a mouthful. It was far easier to remember. And, it was unique. There were a ton of artists at the time with the last name “Ruiz” but very few with the last name “Picasso”. What we choose to call ourselves and our work possesses a tremendous amount of power. Choose wisely.