Agency

The first and most powerful step in reopening your creative channel isn’t learning a certain skill or uncovering a hidden talent. It’s just identifying—remembering, really—one important thing: YOU ARE CREATIVE.

The stopwatch starts when they decide to find a replacement for you, and it stops when they find one that meets their new standard. Boom. That amount of time is a direct measurement of how compelling your positioning is. If you are positioned well, then they find very few substitutes.

that you are serious about being paid, just as serious as you are about delivering the results

Take out a piece of paper or an index card and jot down everything you would love to find in a client.

there is a huge area of blank space beside my schedule.

Contracts offer confidence to the client.

When I looked deeper into why that was the case, I discovered that they just had a swagger combined with a killer instinct. They had that certain confidence that some other firms lacked, and their success came in spite of their positioning and not because of it. Even more contradictory to my initial thesis is that these poorly positioned firms were

Your only real control is to withhold your expertise. And although withholding expertise is the only leverage real experts have, it can be a powerful one, indeed.