Four Lessons for Avoiding “You Lost Me at Hello”

November 25, 2011 No comments yet

Back in July, I read an article about an ad agency who wrote a blog post criticizing Zappos over their review process for proposals after theirs didn’t make the final cut. At first blush, this sounds like a story of sour grapes but in reality, it’s much worse. The crux of the argument was that [...]

Reading Is Expensive

November 25, 2011 No comments yet

The human brain uses 20% of the body’s energy while accounting for just 2% of its mass – a whopping 900% premium.  It generates 25 watts of power each day and demands 15% of the heart’s output.  The average reader can comprehend 120 words per minute,  taking nearly fourteen hours to read a typical novel (100k words) at [...]

Print Publishing’s Public Pity Party

November 25, 2011 No comments yet

The publishing industry has embarked on a quixotic journey.  A recent Adweek article announces that “Close to 100 titles are planning to sacrifice prominent placements in their issues for an industry campaign.”  Their tilted windmill is a sense that we have all simply forgotten how wonderful their product is, and that by running ads they can [...]

Five Rules for the Next Generation of Content

November 25, 2011 No comments yet

I was watching a TED video of Clifford Stoll last week, during which he was asked to talk about the future.  He confessed that he didn’t think he was the best person to ask, saying “In fact, I think if you really want to know what the future’s going to be, don’t ask a scientist, a [...]

When Logic Fails, Try Emotion

November 22, 2011 No comments yet

Under the cover darkness on a snowy March evening in 1984, a fleet of moving trucks pulled into the headquarters of the Baltimore Colts and proceeded to load up everything from the tackling dummies to office chairs and move everything to Indianapolis. While rumors had been running rampant for months, there had been no announcement from [...]

If You Don’t Have a Story to Tell, Write One

June 1, 2010 No comments yet

Many non-fiction writers (I’m looking at you, engineers and scientists) ignore the power of storytelling when creating a presentation or writing a white paper.

5 Lessons from “The First Five Pages”

May 17, 2010 2 comments

Twenty pages into “The First Five Pages” by Noah Lukeman, I’ve already rewritten the first paragraph of my book and learned five valuable lessons.


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