It is a small miracle of motivation that you are listening to this episode. When it was time to record, I had just come out of a foggy, groggy week at HHQ: Hooky Headquarters. Hooky Headquarters is where you go when you need a break—and if you don’t take it, you might find yourself in full-on BIADM (Burn It All Down Mode), burned out and no longer working in a sustainable way. Today, I’m sharing five reminders to honor your need for deep rest when HHQ beckons.

Would earning $1 million dollars in revenue this year solve all of your problems? It might, but it could also cause a whole set of new ones, inspiring you to scale back. That’s the story behind the business of today’s guest, Kaneisha Grayson. She shares how she built a seven-figure business, and why she later restructured to one that better honors her energy and goals.

Consistently creating high-quality content can be challenging. To practice what I call ongoing original public thinking, I am often brainstorming how to make the processes involved as smooth, simple, and searchable as possible. This episode originally aired as a Loom video for the private BFF community, where I walked through my Notion podcast production dashboard and content calendar. Here’s what I have learned (and optimized!) in these last seven years of podcasting. You can also watch the video walkthrough of this episode here.

Think of your day-to-day work as fitting into one of four quadrants, as defined by today’s guest Khe Hy in a recent issue of his fantastic RadReads newsletter:

• $10 Work is low-leverage, low-skilled work that you can do when you’re hungover.

• $100 Work is when you leverage the wrong thing – and get overwhelmed by meta-work.

• $10K Work consists of high-leverage skills that exponentially grow your business and bring you closer to your dream life.

As Khe writes, “The quadrant people high-performers really get stuck in is the $1,000/hour quadrant . . . the domain of unique skills that have no leverage.” That’s what we’re discussing in today’s episode so you can learn strategies to stop struggling and do more of your best work.

Nothing makes me more frustrated than poorly run companies that essentially steal time and money from the customers through bureaucracy and botching the basics. If you’re a longtime listener of this show, you might remember episode 83: Breaking Through Buyers Remorse, Never Lose a Customer Again with Joey Coleman. Today, I am sharing a tale of two contrasting customer service stories: one that devolved into disappointed buyer’s remorse, and the other that surprised and delighted my family and I, while creating memories of a lifetime.

Today’s guest is an expert in cultivating creativity — and in remaining consistent over the long arc of content creation. Todd Henry is the author of six books, and today we’re talking about how to stay motivated in the publishing industry, where the market reflects winner-take-all dynamics, and the long tail is verrrry long.

According to The New York Times, Penguin Random House (the largest U.S. publisher) said just 35 percent of books the company publishes are profitable. Among those that make money, just 4 percent account for 60 percent of those profits. Todd shares why many of those numbers are arbitrary, and emphasizes focusing on impact and practices to lead a more satisfying business and creative career.

“If you’re on time you're late.” That’s one of my favortie mantras that I picked up from my dad, second to, “These are the grrrreat times!” (no matter what is going on in his life or the world).

My dad was always early for our meet-ups, something I experienced as a sign of respect and ease. This relationship to punctuality has stayed with me as an adult, and I’m not the only one. I once bumped into a first date who was killing time at the same west village park as me around the corner from the restaurant where we were set to meet fifteen minutes later, since we were both sticklers for showing up early!

If there’s one software question that invokes a near-universal groan among small business owners, it’s “What do you use for a CRM?” Much of the existing software is clunky, expensive, or at worst—both. Today I’m chatting with Notion pro Alex Sherwood, a former Salesforce CRM manager, on how he built his own Customer Relationship Manager tool in Notion, and inspired me to do the same (although because even the acronym CRM gives me shudders, I renamed mine “K.I.T.”, Keep In Touch, in a nod to high school yearbook sign-offs).

How often do you feel blocked when it comes to creating new content? If you want to be more consistent and confident, today I’m sharing the 5 C’s System that I use to create 12 podcast episodes a month, two newsletters, and bonus content for my private BFF community. Ongoing Public Original Thinking is a central part of my business, and this is my ever-evolving system that facilitates it.