Mission & purpose

When I tell the others about what you do, do I feel smart or stupid? Can you establish the conditions where sharing your core ideas and mission is tempting, generous and affirming for the people you need to have talk about it? If your name or logo get in the way of that, please change it.

Merely having energy and imagination is quite rare. But to solve hard problems you need three more qualities: resilience, good judgement, and a focus on some kind of goal.

Who is this for? What do they believe, what do they wish for and treasure? Ignore the others.

One thing that distinguishes the persistent is their energy. At the risk of putting too much weight on words, they persist rather than merely resisting. They keep trying things. Which means the persistent must also be imaginative. To keep trying things, you have to keep thinking of things to try.

Energy and imagination make a wonderful combination.... See more

Clarity matters: Being specific and consistent and clear in what you do and what you stand for is challenging work, but worth it. It requires less compromise and a willingness to walk away from all the soft edges that the committee might be insisting on.

We know what the Bat Signal means. We know who’s going to show up, what he’s going to be... See more

If your brand isn’t doing everything you hope, it might be because your organization isn’t doing the work that the brand could or should or might promise it does.

As the hero, you get to stand up to those notions and reframe who you are. You get to teach those around you about who you have become. And this last phase—the landing, the integration, the return—cannot be avoided. Because if you refuse to return home, if you refuse to integrate, then your life just gets heavier. You end up with all of this... See more

Resilience means not having one's morale destroyed by setbacks. Setbacks are inevitable once problems reach a certain size, so if you can't bounce back from them, you can only do good work on a small scale. But resilience is not the same as obstinacy. Resilience means setbacks can't change your morale, not that they can't change your mind.