There is a family-owned business in Portland that I love. The service is good. They have the best quality products. I can’t find anything like it in Maine. Not everyone agrees. Someone has a beef with them. And this anonymous person wrote about it in a strange place on the Internet. Not in a blog. […]
Carl Natale
It’s like I’m speaking a different language. I use words common in fields I follow that you don’t understand. You’re not stupid. You just don’t expose yourself to the same content I do. That’s why you read this blog. To find out what I learn. It doesn’t help that I use words I make up […]
I loved writing each day in my former blog The Takeaway. It was a collection of tips and advice I found for small business owners. A takeaway is what I learned from an experience or someone’s message. That’s why you will often find the words “here are my takeaways” in many of my blog posts […]
One of my favorite family games is Apples to Apples. It consists of two decks of cards: Green cards have adjectives on each, and red cards have nouns. Players hold several red cards. The dealer lays out a green card on the table. Each player, except for the dealer, tries to match a noun in […]
Sometimes if you’re not solving the problem, you’re making it worse. The trouble is that we don’t always know how to tell the difference between solutions and complications. Seth Godin noted this very succinctly in an eye-opening post: I was talking to a colleague about all the noise out there in the world, all the […]
Happy Black Friday. It seems like a strange way to work off the Thanksgiving feast calories. But to each his/her own. While much of the media concentrates on finding deals, I want to reach out to the retailers and merchants who are hoping for a strong holiday sales season. So I’m sending links to helpful […]
I have discovered the third rail of blogging. Last week I wrote Get over yourself. Stop being perfect. Write. Which drew an observation from TMIFred, “But I get beat up about my grammer and spelling;}” About six months ago, one of my 9 Ways to Improve Your Writing was “Don’t worry about grammar so much.” […]
I like to talk about filters. But what are they? I see a filter as a process that separates interesting, informative and reliable content from everything else that bombards us daily. Let me show you an example. I have Google Reader organized by folders. The folder I label “Inspiring Commerce” has more than 70 sources […]
I admit to having trouble understanding why gold is so valuable. Yes I know it’s pretty. And it’s kind of hard to find. But why do critics of U.S. monetary policy love to rant about going back to the gold standard? Right now our money is good only because the government promises it will be […]