Company of One: Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business

The best marketing is never just about selling a product or service, but about taking a stand — showing an audience why they should believe in what you’re marketing enough to want it at any cost, simply because they agree with what you’re doing.

It can be scary to draw that line in the sand — especially when it’s your business and livelihood. Doing so immediately alienates certain people or entire groups. But taking a stand is important because you become a beacon for those individuals who are your people, your tribe, and your audience. When you hoist your viewpoint up like a flag, people

we should create products that make specifically identified groups of people very happy and ignore everyone else.

As a result of her research, Sally has compiled a twenty-eight-question personality test that, instead of explaining how you see yourself, explains how the world sees you.

Researcher John Pencavel from Stanford University says that if you start to define your productivity in physical terms, you can see that your ability to focus drastically diminishes after fifty-five hours a week.

I don’t communicate with others — no meetings, calls, interviews, or social media — on Mondays and Fridays so I can write (words or code); I do most of my calls on Thursdays. In this way, I don’t feel bad if all I do on a Thursday is meetings and interviews, because that’s my singular focus for that day. I also rarely work for more than an hour on

Cal Newport, the best-selling author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, argues that passion is the side effect of mastery. To Newport, following your passion is fundamentally flawed as a career strategy because it fails to describe how most successful people ended up with compelling careers and can lead to chronic job-shifting and angst when your re

To succeed as a company of one, you have to have a real underlying purpose. Your why matters as an unseen but ever-present element that drives your business.

Being able to program to accomplish your tasks creates a relatively tiny ripple (you wouldn’t be hired as an Android developer if you couldn’t code) and grows only as you’re able to influence more, for instance, by having the expertise to make sound decisions around Android for your whole team. Your scope of influence can potentially increase to be