Britt Gage

A new business is complicated. It involves weaving together suppliers, partners, customers, processes, technology, leases, employees, logos, capital and more.

Along the way, it’s easy to get distracted, but focusing on the hard parts is a useful way to move forward.

Instead of doing broad but thin market research (e.g., customer surveys), focus on one person (or a small group) and go as deep as you can, learning everything about how your product fits into their broader lives. Or become your customer—spend a day, a month, or even a few years in the role you're trying to sell to before attempting to build a... See more

The critical path method (CPM) is a project management technique that’s used by project managers to create an accurate project schedule. The CPM method, also known as critical path analysis (CPA), consists in using the CPM formula and a network diagram to visually represent the task sequences of a project. Once these task sequences or paths are... See more

you have to have a big reason to care about your life in its totality. Constructing the good life is an individual affair. Personal peace is not delivered via prescription. For me, marriage was this focusing event. For you, it can be anything. What really matters is that you are willing to do the hard work of being more.

“Technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”

To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool.

Emotional labor is the opposite of the industrial economy’s task-based, measured output. Even if we don’t dig ditches, the offer for a certain kind of work was: Process this pile of papers and we don’t care whether you like (or pretend to like) your job. The labor is the easily measured stuff.

But AI and mechanization have turned this sort of task... See more