prepayment preserves objectivity, because I won’t hold back just to protect my fee.

Caring too much can hurt you because it can override your logic.

Your mental model must not depend on “accomplishing all the right things” but on “doing most of the right things,” regardless of the result. You will need to be okay with walking away, again and again, from unfinished business as clients make your advice their own, adapting it, bending it, interpreting it.

Second, clients will not pay a premium for ongoing presence, long term. They will only pay a premium for episodic presence.

If you tend to get annoyed at something in particular or regularly dismissive of something else, you have to know that about yourself so that your observations are not skewed.

you’ll never pull this off well without strong powers of observation as well as the courage to describe what you see.

the notion that sales isn’t about convincing or manipulating a prospect, and it assumes that you are offering something valuable and worthy and for which there are few viable substitutes.

Don’t just be an expert in what you deliver to clients, but be an expert in how you talk about what you deliver to clients, too.

The more insight you publish for free, the less you need to invest in the sale.