If you’re a freelancer you know it can be hard to avoid distractions, not just the ones you create for yourself, but the ones that others create for you.
Apart from your own procrastination and frittering away time surfing, playing and having performance panic attacks, the categories and clients that most distractions and demands fall into are:
People Without Boundaries: These are clients, friends, family and people who don’t understand the word, “No,” or who take the word personally. They see your life as an extension of their lives. If they have …

Somewhere over I’m not sure what ocean on a flight from Jerusalem to the United States last night/early this morning a Hasidic Jew named Rabbi Issamar Ginzberg happened to notice a stranger, another passenger on the flight, reading a newspaper called “The Jerusalem Post.” If you look carefully in the photo to the left you’ll see a smudge inside the circle. It’s a picture of the Rabbi next to the column he writes for the Post. The Rabbi is a marketing genius and passionate entrepreneur.
The silhouette is familiar because …

After, “Are you still homeless?” the question I get asked most is, “How can I get invited to speak at TED?” Actually, “How can I get invited to speak at TED?” is usually accompanied by some variation of an assumption I have an inside track or the ear of Chris Carter or the TED organizers.
People believe I can get people I don’t know in front of the committee, or get them invited to speak at TED just on my say so.
I understand from others I know who have spoken …

I was listening to some kids (ages 9-12 I guess) talking at the table next to me in Subway the other night. Their mother was talking about all they needed to do for the upcoming weekend and the oldest said confidently, “Don’t worry mom. It’s only Friday night. We’ve got plenty of time.” I loved the look on the mother’s face. Obviously she knew something they didn’t, but she played along in all seriousness.
“Oh,” she said. “So how long do you think it will take you to clean up your …

I work with a lot of really brilliant and amazing people. Some of them are friends, some are clients, some are both.
There are days I wake up and wonder how I got so lucky. They’re not all “Oprah or Dr. Phil level” famous, but they should be.
They’re just really, really, really wise people. Most of them blog and every once in a while, actually on a regular basis, they post information that rocks my world. Today one of them, Lorraine Esposito, (who I hired as my own coach last year) …