Although the world is opening up a bit, many still feel overwhelmed by professional, personal, and societal strife. Yet there is hope. And opportunity.

In my work helping people build the life they want, I encounter terrific stories at the intersection of human behavior, technology, and business​. I'll be sharing some of these inspirational articles with you. I hope you enjoy them.

The Science of Mastering Self-Talk
We all talk to ourselves. Sometimes even out loud. But whether we verbalize it or simply think the chatter - the words we use have a huge impact on our experience. This insightful NPR article based on research out of Penn, Univ of Michigan, and Oxford discusses easily implementable techniques that can help us feel and perform better. While the article is a few years old, the research and its applicability are equally (if not more so) relevant today.

Why Saying Is Believing — The Science Of Self-Talk

Self-help videos tell women to learn to love their bodies by saying nice things to themselves in the mirror. Can shushing your harshest critic actually rewire the brain?

NPRLaura Starecheski

What is a Blockchain, and how does it work?
There is so much hype around Bitcoin, Dogecoin, NFTs, and the world of cryptocurrency. Some of these will stand the test of time, others will flame out. But all of them are built on a clever yet simple framework known as blockchain. Many blockchain articles seem to come straight out of a corporate marketing handbook - lots of buzzwords without much substance. But if you’d like a primer on blockchain, mining, & crypto security here’s a decent intro video:

And if you’re into coding and feeling adventurous, Xavier (who produced the intro video) has an excellent two-part walkthrough for building your own blockchain. Nothing more than basic programming skills are required.

• Create a blockchain in Javascript: Part 1 (15 mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVqczFZr124
• Create a blockchain in Javascript: Part 2 (7 mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HneatE69814

The Universe in a Tangerine
Even in the midst of life’s turbulent travails we can take a moment and find joy in the mundane. Maria Popova, in her wonderful Brain Pickings column, has often written about the legendary Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk and peace activist, Thich That Hanh. In one article she showcases a moving passage of his entitled Tangerine Meditation:

From Thich That Hanh:

One day, I offered a number of children a basket filled with tangerines. The basket was passed around, and each child took one tangerine and put it in his or her palm. We each looked at our tangerine, and the children were invited to meditate on its origins. They saw not only their tangerine, but also its mother, the tangerine tree.

With some guidance, they began to visualize the blossoms in the sunshine and in the rain. They saw petals falling down and the tiny fruit appear. The sunshine and the rain continued, and the tiny tangerine grew. Now someone has picked it, and the tangerine is here.

After seeing this, each child was invited to peel the tangerine slowly, noticing the mist and the fragrance of the tangerine, and then bring it up to his or her mouth and have a mindful bite, in full awareness of the texture and taste of the fruit and the juice coming out. We ate slowly like that.

Each time you look at a tangerine, you can see deeply into it. You can see everything in the universe in one tangerine. When you peel it and smell it, it’s wonderful. You can take your time eating a tangerine and be very happy.

Such a lovely little thought meditation. You can read Maria’s full article here:

Tangerine Meditation: Thich Nhat Hanh’s Simple, Profound Mindfulness Practice to Magnify Your Capacity for Joy

How to see the universe in a small orange orb.

Brain PickingsMaria Popova

Wishing you much success and peace.

-Anthony

The past year has been horrific with so many families affected by tragic loss. And while the grieving continues there seem to be some bright spots on the horizon. As we tentatively venture back into work and social venues, a question arises as to how far things will return to what we once referred to as "normal."

An even deeper question worth considering is this: Do I even want to go back to doing what I was doing pre-Covid?

Changes in the professional and economic landscape over the last few years have created tremendous opportunities for income generation outside the confines of a traditional job. And not just new means for making money but on terms far more preferable for personal fulfillment.

In this article I'll discuss three of these possibilities.

But first, a few caveats.

What I discuss below is not for everyone. If you prefer the relatively stable structure of a traditional job with fixed compensation, covered healthcare benefits, and the consistency of doing similar work each day - then by all means, stick with what works for you!

On the other hand, if you'd like to completely own the output and results of your creativity, time, and effort - then read on.

I believe the best place to work is in the intersection between what you're good at (your skills), what you enjoy doing (your passions), and what people will pay for (market needs). Getting paid to do work you like for which you have unique talent is incredibly rewarding.

And while many roads may lead to that end, I'm partial to those that meet the following criteria:

• Low risk
• Easy and inexpensive to start
• Short time to profitability
• Can be proven on a small-scale while you're still working for someone else

With that as our starting point, let's consider the following three income opportunities that can replace, and substantially outshine, a traditional job.

Coaching / Consulting

This isn't the most glamorous of the three I'll be discussing, nor the most scalable, but it is the most common. Using your skills and experience to help others (individuals, groups, or organizations).

There are thousands of areas ripe for coaching or consulting — everything from leading sprint workshops to boosting self-esteem. While I won't be going into detail here, if you get stuck coming up with a good fit for you, just reach out to me.

You may be thinking: "But how do I get started? I don't have any client history. Who would hire me?"

The key to getting started as a coach or a consultant is by making an offer that can't be refused. Without devaluing yourself.

Find a person (or company) that can greatly benefit from your service. Make it clear you have the skills and experience to deliver. Tell them that while your normal rate is X, you are offering to lead a small project on your nickel to showcase your talents. And at the end of the initial project, once they are truly impressed, then you'll easily nab the large project at your normal rate.

Basically you're making it a no-brainer for them. Then your job is to blow them away.

If your work is good, then at the very least you should be able to get a testimonial from the client - in addition to being able to use the work you did as a case study.

If you like interacting with people and helping others move through hurdles that are no big deal for you, then you may find this line of work to be rewarding on multiple levels.

The downside is twofold. One is the lack of scalability. Because every dollar earned requires your time. The second drawback is that you need to keep feeding your book of business. If you are good at what you do, this isn't much of a problem since referrals will likely drive more business than you can handle.

The upside is large, including income oftentimes 1.5-2x traditional-job salary, nearly all work-related expenses tax deductible, and having immediate impact on people and/or organizations.

But is there a way we can do work just once and then have it scale to the masses?

Absolutely.

Which is what leads to our next two opportunities.

Developing Digital Products

A digital product is something that can be developed and sold online, typically an e-book or a course.

But you don't need to be a JK Rowling, Malcolm Gladwell, or Sal Khan to produce content people will pay for. The key is developing something that can help people in an area they care about, such as making money, improving health, becoming happier, enhancing relationships, learning a critical skill, solving some compelling pain point, and so forth.

Doesn't matter if you produce a substantive product like an e-book or course or something as simple as a PDF document, slide deck, audio track, spreadsheet template, or even short video recordings teaching others how to use an in-demand product you love. All that matters is the impact it can have on people who care.

If enough people care (and there are a lot of people out there) and your content is truly helpful, then you've got something that can be sold over and over and over.

Once you've got the product, the how of selling it is easy. Whether that's on your own website, through Amazon, or any other of a host of options - the ability to collect payment for digital products is very simple. And in many cases the entirety of each sale is yours less a small credit card transaction fee (2.9% plus $0.30).

So if you've got a $29 digital good that helps people in an area they really care about, there are plenty of people who would buy that. You could also consider a second price point - say $59 - in which people get the digital asset as well as the ability to attend a special Zoom session with you to hear your insights on the topic.

The sky's the limit as far as packaging options and pricing are concerned. And don't let my $29/$59 example anchor you in any way. There are plenty of successful "simple" digital products selling for far more than that. Again, what matters most is the impact it has on others who care - nothing else.

While making and selling digital products can be incredibly fun and lucrative - and tons of people bring in six-figure incomes using this strategy - you don't get too much interaction with your customers. Even with an add-on option of Zoom sessions or webinars, your interaction with others is generally one-time transactional.

So if you value the human element and interpersonal dynamics of engaging with others, then consider what I believe to be the most rewarding of all - building a community.

Building a Community

A community is a group of like-minded people who've come together around you and your subject area(s). On some periodic basis (ideally weekly or daily) you produce content (typically an article) on a topic your audience cares about. The more niche your group and tangibly valuable your content - the better.

And just like digital products, the more your content addresses compelling pain points or opportunities for your audience, the better. It makes no difference whether you write about politics, local news, religion / spirituality, habits, productivity, specific hobbies, investing, education, parenting, child care, exercise, meditation, yoga, specific technologies, personal growth / transformation, leadership, etc. All that matters is that (1) your audience deeply cares and (2) it helps them in some tangible way.

There is so much noise (meaning crappy, unhelpful content) out there. So if you can be a  voice that cuts through the noise, you will get noticed.

You need to make it very easy for your content to be shared and subscribed. Which is very simple with your own website. And it takes no more than thirty minutes (with zero coding skills required) to have your own website up and running on free open-source platforms such as Ghost or Wordpress.

The most important aspect of building a community is consistently producing valuable content for your audience. And as noted earlier, weekly is a good cadence. Some people produce daily, but that is very, very hard to deliver consistently. At the other end, if you go longer than once per week, you run the risk of your community forgetting about you.

So, how do you actually make money from a community?

By intentionally and consistently providing value. Here's how it works:

People sign up to your community by subscribing - which means they give you their email address. And each week you reinforce their trust in you by delivering something of value. There is no fixed definition of what that "something of value" looks like. But a good rule of thumb is this: when a community member consumes your weekly outreach they are left with this thought: "Wow, that was really helpful!" And they are likely inspired to take some action.

You do this same thing week after week after week.

And now that you've been delivering this helpful, free content over and over - your audience comes to see you as a leading, trusted voice on these topics. Which is what you are.

So now you have several options. One is to create a digital product (as described in the prior section) and offer that to your community. This digital product can even be a PDF compilation of your best content to date - content your audience has already read! But because you are now this respected voice, and because your community would love to find ways to reciprocate the value you've been providing them - they will be eager to purchase the products you produce.

Another option is to offer a subscription service where members pay you a monthly fee such as $15/mo. Which means that you keep producing free content each week, but these premium subscribers get some additional benefits. That might be other content that no one else gets. It might be private Zoom sessions with you or any other such "special" interactions that the non-premium members do not receive.

While these are just two examples, there are many ways to monetize your community. A really, really rough rule of thumb is this: your community is worth about $1/email/month. In other words, if you have 8,000 people on your email list, then you should be able to generate a regular income of $8,000 per month from that community.

And if you commit to the principle I noted earlier of consistently producing valuable content, then building a community of 8,000 people won't take much time at all.

The other reason I love community development so much is that your human interactions are pretty much daily. People reaching out with questions for which you can help. Comments on ways that your content has helped others. People offering ideas for new content they'd like to see. And so forth.

Each week you are writing on topics for which you are passionate, in a way that can help others. And you are building a business around that model. It's hard not to find that incredibly rewarding and inspiring.

So there you have it - three ways to escape the traditional job model and build more of the life you want.

While these aren't the only options, they are certainly ones worth considering.

Other Income Channels

There are many other income channels that can supplant a traditional job and provide richly rewarding experiences. A few that are near-and-dear to me include building (or working for) a startup, developing physical products, building apps, stock market trading, and startup investing.

But as much as I like these other income channels, they don't meet the criteria we discussed earlier of being low risk, easy & inexpensive to start, short time to profitability, and something you can start on the side.

Wrap-Up

We're in a new world. New norms are being written daily. The nature - and very fabric - of traditional work has changed.

If you are considering something new - an alternative to the traditional job - where instead you own the output of your work, your creativity, your time - then some of these options might appeal to you.

Coaching / Consulting, developing digital products, and building a community are all things you can explore and dip your toe in with low risk. You have unique skills and a unique voice. You can either use those to do what you've always done, or consider leveraging them to have far greater impact.

Wishing you much success on your path.

Mark Twain famously quipped:

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you figure out why.

Having a purpose clearly adds context and sensibility around our daily activities. But it also enables us to turn traditional goal-setting completely on its head to achieve far greater impact.

Let's start with the challenges using traditional goals to lead our lives (both personal and professional):

First, when you set a goal, you are continually failing until you hit the goal. Write book, complete project, ship product, etc. The moment a goal is committed, a part of our psyche considers how far away we are from success. And every time we think of the goal, internal anxiety builds. This is why typical weekly and monthly reviews are so energy-draining.

The other big challenge with goals is how little control we have over them. So many factors involved in bringing about success are beyond our ability to affect. Market conditions, global pandemics, other people's behavior and actions, random circumstances, and so forth - these can all be hindrances toward the achievement of a goal.

Thus goals do very little for inspiration. Other than filling journal books in early January and KPI spreadsheets each quarter.

That's why I suggest scrapping traditional goals altogether.

And instead, enable emergent goals through impact initiatives.

Here's what I mean.

An impact initiative is something undertaken for the primary purpose of having some sort of positive effect. This is contrary to the intention of simply getting something done. It may seem like a subtle shift in perspective, but has profound consequences.

Consider something as mundane, yet important, as "pay rent." Hard to be inspired by that. And imagine a daily (or weekly) to-do list filled with equally dispiriting tasks.

Now consider this impact initiative: Provide shelter and safety for my family.

I'm then paying the rent (or any other related requirement) not because "ugh, it has to be done"; rather, I'm doing it as one way to extend love and compassion for my family. At the end of the day, checking off the "pay rent" task feels a lot different than recognizing "I was able to leverage my resources to help the family for another month."

It turns out that every task can be transformed into a component of an impact initiative. I'll share more on that in another article. But for now, let's bring this back around to goal setting and execution.

By documenting our list of impact initiatives we enable emergent goals to naturally follow.

Let's consider a typical traditional goal: "Complete Project XYZ." And suppose we're a team contributor on this project.

So many factors are involved in making XYZ successful, many of which I have little to no control over. Plus, I'm failing every day that XYZ is not complete.

Now consider this impact initiative instead: Help inspire and motivate my teammates and manager through my words, actions, and contributions to XYZ.

Waking up each morning to "Complete Project XYZ" can be taxing, and sometimes demoralizing. But thinking of ways I can further inspire others and have my work help make a difference? You can't not be stimulated by that!

For one thing, I have complete control over my words, actions, and the work I do. And every time I help or inspire someone else or make a contribution to XYZ, I am succeeding in my impact initiative. Not only can I get a win every day, but often multiple wins in one day. It's incredibly energizing and rewarding. And the completion of the project naturally emerges from the collective impact initiatives.

As I said, every task can be transformed and subsumed into an impact initiative, and every traditional goal into an emergent one as a natural consequence.

To get started, list out your impact initiatives. Good ones often start with positive action verbs such as: Help, Inspire, Serve, etc. Think about what matters most to you. Consider Twain's question: what are you here to do?

You know you've got a fairly complete list when every traditional goal or project that is on your mind falls under one of these impact initiatives. Most people will have somewhere between 3-6 impact initiatives. But the number isn't important. What is important is that each one of these should inspire you. When you read it aloud or bring it to mind it should fire you up and resonate with your core.

Do this, and your daily activities will take on far more meaning and satisfaction. And you will create far more impact in life. After all, that's what you're here for.

I'll be writing more on these topics - including how to leverage impact initiatives and emergent goals to ensure big project objectives are achieved on schedule. In the meantime, if you get stuck starting with these concepts, reach out to me anytime. I'm here to help.

Are you a giver or a taker – and which is better?

This is a provocative question posed by Adam Grant, the exceptional author, organizational psychologist, and Wharton professor in his powerful TED talk.

According to Grant, there are three types of people in an organization: givers, takers, and matchers.

Givers are generous and compassionate. They live by the mantra, “What can I do for you?” We like interacting with givers – they boost productivity and joy within teams.

Takers occupy the other extreme. They are self-centered and operate under the expectation of “what can you do for me?”

And then there are matchers. A matcher is someone in the middle, maintaining a fairly even balance between give and take. It turns out that most of us are matchers. We sometimes give, looking for ways we can serve. And other times we take, refilling our depleted needs.

The interesting question is this: which role is the most effective and productive way to live your life? Both for you personally, and for the benefit of the organization?

Let’s start by looking at the worst performers in companies. It turns out they are givers.

Givers produce the least amount of work, primarily because they spend so much time doing favors for others. The lowest educational scores come from those people who identify with this statement: “I love helping others.” And when it comes to sales, givers care far too much about their customers that they hold back from selling subpar products that would otherwise lead to much higher sales income.

But we need the givers. Organizations that prioritize helping and sharing and mentoring far outperform their competitors in every metric including profit, employee contentment, and customer satisfaction.

How about takers? Do they perform the best?

Actually, no.

According to Grant’s research, in most jobs takers tend to rise quickly but then derail just as rapidly. And they fall at the hands of matchers. Because matchers maintain an even balance, if someone is out of hand a matcher will bring them back in line. And since the majority of people are matchers, most takers within an organization don’t stay very long at the top.

Therefore, it’s best to be a matcher, right?

Actually, no again.

Because the top performers in most organizations, across most industries, also turn out to be givers. Givers produce the most output, earn the best grades and salaries, and are the top sales people.

It’s a radical dynamic occupying these dual polarities. According to Grant, “givers are over-represented at both the bottom and the top of every success metric that I could track.”

So if being a giver can be so rewarding, and beneficial, Grant poses the question, “How do we create a world where more of these givers get to excel?”

The research suggests an organization that focuses on these three components will do very well:

1. Protect givers from burnout
2. Encourage help-seeking
3. Get the right people on the team, and the wrong people off

Protect givers from burnout

Recognize the value that givers provide to an organization, and check-in regularly to ensure they aren’t burning out. Re-balance workloads if necessary in order to keep givers producing at an elite level.

Encourage help-seeking

Make asking for help the norm, not something to be shamed. It turns out that many people love helping others but often aren’t given the clear opportunity. By creating a culture where help-seeking is cultivated, many more givers will rise to the occasion.

Get the right people on the team, and the wrong people off

It’s not that you need to hire a bunch of givers. It is much more critical that you weed out the takers. In fact, even if you have a lot of givers on the team, just one taker can quickly negate all giver benefits. No one likes working with a taker, especially givers.

Done well, a superbly performing team will be comprised of givers and matchers.

Which leads to a final question for consideration: How do we identify takers so they can be removed (or excluded) from the organization?

Unfortunately it turns out that we’re pretty bad at identifying takers, particularly because they are often so … agreeable. They tend to be warm and friendly.

Of course, many people are agreeable, not just takers. And not all givers are agreeable. So how can we spot a taker?

Grant identified one interview question that he believes can very effectively identify takers, and it is this: Can you give me the names of four people whose careers you have fundamentally improved?

The takers will likely be able to provide four names, but here’s the key: the names will be of people who are more influential than they are. Takers love to kiss up and name drop.

Givers, on the other hand, will list people you’ve never heard of. People below them in an organizational or social hierarchy. People without power. People who were helped purely for the joy of serving, not for what was in it for the giver.

So, by eliminating takers from an organization, we create an environment where givers willingly serve others while safely pursuing their own goals. And by taking such steps, we make it far more likely that our company, and all employees, will thrive.

Jennifer Cloer is the CEO & co-founder reTHINKit Media and Executive Producer of The Chasing Grace Project, which is one of the most powerful documentary series showcasing the challenges of women in tech.

Early in her life, Jennifer discovered the power of storytelling to bring struggles to life. She spent the first part of her career working in the agency world supporting many of the world’s top venture-capital backed open source companies, and she also helped Google launch their first Google I/O developer conference. She then joined the Linux Foundation where she led their content and communications initiatives.

But Jennifer had a burning desire to build her own firm to work on projects that mattered deeply to her. And when she learned there were fewer women in tech today than thirty years ago, she was shocked, scared, and angry. As she says, “There’s never been a more important time to have everyone at the table – women and all minorities from every corner of the world – contributing to technology because of trends like AI and ML. We all need to be informing these systems or we risk living in an even less inclusive world.”

In this episode, Jennifer shares how The Chasing Grace Project came together and the challenges women in tech from all over the world are facing. She also discusses how organizations can participate in screenings of this important documentary to help raise awareness and create even greater impact.

This is the story of an amazing person’s drive to make a difference in so many lives.

Originally published on Authority Magazine where I was interviewed by Jason Malki.

Jason: I had the pleasure of interviewing Anthony Gold. Anthony is a social entrepreneur, writer, and director for several commercial and nonprofit organizations.

Jason: Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

Anthony: Sure, it’s a pleasure being here.

I started my career as an engineer designing mainframes. I loved the intellectual stimulation of the work, but I found myself particularly drawn to “business” side of business. Why were we designing computers the way we were? What impact were they having? How were they being used? What could we do differently to create even more impact? Those sorts of questions. I had incredibly supportive mentors and brilliant colleagues, and I was very fortunate to have been given a lot of responsibility to lead teams and grow the company.

One of those opportunities was the creation of a startup business inside the company — an intrapreneurial venture if you will. I had a sense that open source software could be a game changer for many companies, particularly because the model of mass collaboration and meritocracy-based software development could lead to much faster, better, and less expensive code. So I got the opportunity to run this business and it turned out really well. By then, I was totally bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, particularly the desire to help companies with a mission to make a difference in some way.

Can you share your story of Grit and Success? First can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?

In my first startup, the timing couldn’t have been worse. It was right at the start of the recession. We had a business model for a healthcare IT platform that could help make a huge difference in the lives of millions of people suffering from chronic illness. And the market was ripe for innovation — or so I thought. But given the funding challenges at the time, we had to keep the team small. In fact, I wrote the entire first version of the software platform, nearly burning myself out in the process and ruining a few personal relationships along the way. I too slowly came to the realization that it would be better for me to focus my time on the business and not so much in it — and I hired a superstar software developer to make the product much better. Unfortunately we weren’t able to close enough sales to keep the company going. But the lessons learned were numerous, particularly on what not to do. And one of the company’s first investors became a lifelong mentor.

My most recent startup, ROAR for Good, was the brainchild of my friend Yasmine Mustafa. She had the idea for a wearable tech company that could help reduce assaults against women and truly impact society. It wasn’t a hard sell for her to pull me out of semi-retirement to be her co-founder. Very early in our fundraising, we had the opportunity to present to a prominent investor group. The meeting was going very well, the investors clearly liking what they were hearing. Toward the end of the meeting, Yasmine stepped out to use the restroom. At which point the investors, both male, turned to me and said, “We’d invest if you were the CEO.” That was very frustrating and disappointing, and unfortunately an all-too-common experience that many women CEOs face. However, we didn’t let the experience deter us from our mission, and we ended up finding investors much more aligned with our values.

Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

I can’t speak for all entrepreneurs, but I think I speak for many when I say that when you launch something, it isn’t for the riches — it’s to make an impact in some way. There will always be bumps in the road — sometimes even massive ones — but with a strong sense of purpose you plow through.

So, how are things going today? How did Grit lead to your eventual success?

In the case of ROAR, grit got us through many challenges in the early days, enabling us to launch a crowdfunding campaign that blew away all our expectations. In fact, the campaign was so successful that we had to change manufacturing vendors in order to support the volume of units we’d need to make — eventually leading to our initial shipment of over ten thousand safety modules.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

This was many years ago, before I had done any startups — think early MySpace time. I, like tons of other people, had an idea for a social-connectivity platform that could help people better relate to one another. I happened to know someone at Kleiner Perkins. And I just thought I could setup a meeting and pitch them on the idea. I had no clue how the venture capital world worked, and the concept of an MVP was meaningless to me. I was a young naive entrepreneur who thought, “well, it’s a great idea — of course they’ll love it.” They did at least agree to do a call with me. Unfortunately at the time of the meeting, I was stuck in Boston’s Logan Airport due to a cancelled flight. So I decided to do the call from the US Airways lounge, an airline that isn’t even in existence anymore. And just when I’m starting the call with Kleiner Perkins, into the lounge walks Steven Tyler from Aerosmith, along with his whole entourage. Needless to say, the place went a bit crazy, and here I am trying to conduct a serious business pitch while Steven is holding court in the lounge. The whole thing was a giant clusterf***. I don’t even recall what the KP folks said, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t have any proof of concept, I was premature in meeting with investors, and I’m surrounded by a throng of exuberant groupies. The opportunity was over.

Lessons learned: know when it’s time (and not) to speak with investors, create a good environment for important business meetings, and don’t mix Aerosmith and Kleiner Perkins in the same meeting.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

I’ll speak about ROAR for this question. The company stands out for a number of reasons, first and foremost is my co-founder and CEO, Yasmine Mustafa. She is not just a passionate entrepreneur, but also a refugee and first-generation immigrant. Her grit and determination are boundless — coupled with her desire to improve the lives of people less fortunate. The world needs many more such people leading companies. ROAR is also a B-Corporation, which is a certification for companies focused on social and environmental improvement. ROAR’s first product, Athena, is a wearable safety device that can emit an audible alert and send text messages to your emergency contacts. And ROAR’s goal is not just to help reduce assaults but to get to the root causes of violence.

Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?

Don’t try to do it all yourself. Surround yourself with people that complement your skills. Know what you are good at — play to those strengths — and find people to fill in your gaps. Build an advisory board of people you can turn to with any questions — especially challenging ones. And consider a co-founder that you respect and trust so that you don’t feel like you’re carrying the weight of the world alone. You can certainly do it by yourself, but it can be easier — and more fun — with the right co-founder.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

I would never have been a good entrepreneur or business leader if I didn’t have great mentors who helped keep me on the right track. I liken good mentors to bumper guards in a bowling alley. The kind they put up for little kids so they can’t bowl a gutter ball. With bumper guards, you can focus on going for a strike, but if you get too far out of the lane, good mentors will gently bounce you back toward center.

There are too many to list them all, but a few deserve special mention. The folks who recruited me to my first startup (Charles Robins, Walter Buckley, John Ryan, and Chris Conway) were so instrumental in helping me develop as an entrepreneur. John had this incredibly empowering philosophy of creating a vacuum above his mentees’ heads so that they could rise as fast as they were capable. I learned so many life and business lessons from John, Charles, Buck, and Chris. Another was Leo Daiuto, the former President of Systems & Technology at Unisys Corporation. Leo guided me as a very young engineer and helped me understand what great leadership was all about. Mary Massung, my HR business partner for several years at Unisys, helped me understand the importance of emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and inspirational leadership for building superstar teams. Lastly is Sagar Dukle, my operations head for a few businesses. I owe so much of my growth to Sagar’s insights, business acumen, radical candor, and lifelong support.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

In the case of Unisys — I think we helped contribute to the acceptance and flourishing of open source software. As part of that initiative, I had the opportunity to co-found the Open Solutions Alliance, a non-profit industry consortium comprised of many of the world’s top open source companies to help usher in the new era of open source software.

At ROAR, the ability to touch lives and make a difference has been so rewarding. Many people have let us know how ROAR has helped them feel more empowered. ROAR also helped me become more aware of my privilege as a white male and the many situations I benefit as a result of my race and gender. I write and speak quite a bit on that topic, and I developed an allyship workshop to help companies recognize the challenges and how they can take steps toward greater equity.

It’s also an honor contributing to nonprofit organizations like Girl Develop It, TechGirlz, and Coded By Kids — each making a difference in so many lives.

Based on your experience, can you share 5 pieces of advice about how one can develop Grit?

1. Have a north star. There will always be challenges in building your company (not to mention, with life in general). People will disappoint you, and let you down. The market won’t always agree with what you’re convinced they’ll love. Crappy things will happen. And it’s so easy to reach a point where you say, “Why am I doing this? It isn’t worth all this pain!” And then you turn to your north star — whatever that is for you — and you realize, “That’s WHY I’m doing this. I have to do this!
2. Related to #1, if you haven’t identified your WHY, start there. Everyone touts Simon Sinek’s TED talk — and with good reason, it’s really good.
3. The open source software movement had this mantra that I loved: fail early, fail often. Meaning, the quickest way to learn — to really learn — is through doing … and most powerfully, through failing.
4. Related to #3 is that failure lessons only work if you are open to understanding why you failed. Unfortunately many people believe the reason they failed is that market conditions were bad, the competition was better, we didn’t have enough money, or the team was lacking. The best leaders are the ones who can look within and acknowledge, “I screwed up.” When we can look ourselves in the mirror and be open to critical feedback (whether that’s from others, from the market, or even from ourselves), then rapid personal growth will follow.
5. Building on #4, grit doesn’t come from just from being beaten up or beating ourselves up. It can’t stop with “I screwed up.” The next step must be “But I understand what I did wrong, and I am committing myself to learn from this and improve.” A desire to continually grow serves us well in business — and in life.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

One of the hardest things to do is to empathize with another person. And I don’t mean empathy in the sense of caring for of wishing good things for another. I mean it in the sense of truly being able to put yourself in the shoes of another person. I like Abraham Lincoln’s quote when asked to condemn the South. His response: “Don’t criticize them; they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.” Each of us believes we are in the right. And we justify sometimes awful behavior in the way we treat others because of our self-centeredness. So, being able to step outside ourselves — and just trying to imagine walking in another person’s shoes — especially those people we don’t like or don’t agree with — leads to much more fruitful conversations and much greater peace.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

You can find ROAR here: www.roarforgood.com

You can find me at www.anthonysdesk.com, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/anthonysdesk/, on Twitter at @Anthonys_Desk, and on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonygold/.

Originally published in business.com

It started with a disastrous investor meeting.

My co-founder and I were developing a safety wearable that could emit an audible alarm and get help in case of an emergency. At that point, it was little more than an idea and a rough prototype, but we had compelling market research and a solid strategy. We’d been accepted into a prestigious accelerator program called DreamIt, which, among many other benefits, gave us the opportunity to pitch to potential investors.

This particular meeting was one of those where you knew it was flowing. The presentation was tight, the investors were enthusiastically engaged, nodding their heads up-and-down throughout. It felt like great synergy. Until it all fell apart.

My co-founder, Yasmine Mustafa, is the one who had the idea for the company. She’s always had a passion for championing the underserved and coming up with ideas that can make a difference in the world. When she first pitched me on the idea, I thought it was terrific and stepped out of retirement to join her to build the company. We had a very focused mission: help save lives and empower women.

Toward the end of what seemed like this shoo-in investor meeting, Yasmine excused herself to use the restroom. At which point the two investors, both male, turned to me (a middle-aged white male) and said, “We’d invest if you were the CEO.”

Mission alignment

The mission of the company meant a lot to us. We wanted to build an organization that could truly impact many people. So there was no way we would align ourselves with partners, suppliers or investors who didn’t share our values. Being a woman-led, women-empowerment company was core to our identity.

While we couldn’t directly control the regrettably all-too-common gender and race inequity in venture investing, we could choose how we would run our company and the basis by which we made decisions. And when we learned about the B-corporation movement and its focus on socially responsible businesses, it seemed to make perfect sense for us.

Although at that point we had a lot to learn about B-corporations.

B-corp misconceptions

My first misconception was that mostly non-profits certified as B-corps. I was completely wrong. In fact, only for-profit companies are eligible to become a B-corp. I also thought that only established companies, not startups, could get certified. Again, wrong. I also wondered if any recognizable companies had chosen to pursue certification. Turns out Ben & Jerry’s, Patagonia, Kickstarter, Etsy, and Warby Parker are all B-corps – companies I know quite well.

Finally, I assumed the certification process would be painful, requiring a lot of time and energy. In fact, the B Labs folks (the people behind the certification process) bend over backward working with companies to help them through the process.

You don’t need a specific social mission or a drive to help the planet. All that matters is that you care about your employees, your customers and you’d like to make an impact in some way.

Certification isn’t a once-and-done sort of thing. The process itself leads companies to identify areas where they are doing well and opportunities for improvement. And it’s ongoing. Like all good business practices, you track how you’re doing and how you can continually get better.

Once you are certified, it’s like a badge of honor. It’s a public pledge that you stand for something bigger than maximizing shareholder return. And that certification attracts positive attention from potential new employees, partners and customers.

What a B-corp is and isn't

There's been some confusion as to what a B-corp is. For starters, it's not a legal structure. Your company can be an S-corporation, LLC, or a traditional C-corporation and obtain B-corp certification. You can also be a benefit corporation and become B-corp certified.

B-corporation is an official certification that your company meets high standards of performance, transparency and accountability for your employees, customers, communities and the environment. It’s like a Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

A lot of people confuse a B-corp (which, again, is a certification) with a benefit corporation (which is a corporate legal structure.) Unlike a traditional C-corp, with its primary concern of maximizing shareholder return, a benefit corporation is a for-profit entity that also focuses on making a positive impact on society, workers, the community and the environment. So, for example, a benefit corporation might make a strategic decision that is good for the environment yet might not be beneficial in the short-term profit interests of the shareholders.

How to certify a startup as a B Corp

One of the requirements for obtaining B Corp certification is that your company must have been in business for at least one year. For new startups that want to pursue certification as a way to signal to potential investors, employees, and customers that they're on track toward certifying as a B-corp, there is what's known as a pending B-corp.

Pending B-corp is a status you can hold for one year as you build your company and develop your infrastructure toward eventual formal B certification. This is the approach we started with. To achieve pending status, there are four steps.

Step 1: Complete the impact assessment

The impact assessment is a series of questions that you answer across areas such as governance, employees, community and environment. An example question is: "Does the company have a formal process to share financial information (except salary info) with its full-time employees?"

For many questions, there are typically a list of potential answers, not just a simple yes or no. The nuance helps identify where across a particular spectrum you might stand. Based on each answer, you get a certain score.

For many startups, you may not know the answer to some questions since you haven’t been in business long enough. You answer them prospectively, as you envision your company to be a year or so from now.

It takes 30  minutes to do an initial quick pass through the impact assessment. If you want to go deep and spend time digging into each question, it will take a couple of hours.  After completing the assessment, your score will show you where you stand toward your goal of achieving B-corp certification.

For the pending B-corp status, there is no minimum score required. However, knowing where you stand will help you develop your company processes and policies as you work toward formal certification.

Step 2: Amend your legal documents (or company structure)

You can either change your company legal structure to a benefit corp, or you can keep your existing structure and simply add some language to your operating agreement that clarifies what considering the best interests of the company means.

Step 3: Sign the term sheet & pay $500 fee

The term sheet specifies the terms under which the pending certification is valid. This includes a limit of 12 months, following which you need to apply for formal certification. And you pay a $500 fee.

Step 4: Sign the Declaration of interdependence

The declaration of interdependence is a document stating your commitment to building a purpose-driven company, which essentially is reaffirming your choice to become B-corp certified. Once you do that, you get to use the certified B-corporation pending logo throughout your communications.

The benefits of a pending B-corp

Was it worth getting the pending certification before going through the full, formal B-corp process? We received the pending status in September 2015. We then launched our crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo one month later.

Our target was $40,000 in sales for a one-month campaign. We ended up surpassing $300,000. And while there's no way to say for certain how much being a pending B-corp contributed, we feel it helped lend credibility to our mission to impact the world.

As we recruited software developers and hardware engineers to join the team, we wanted people who were aligned with our mission. Being a pending B-corporation definitely helped in those efforts. By highlighting our commitment to a particular set of values, we were able to attract people who shared similar beliefs.

Steps for becoming a B-corp

Fast forward one year later.

The formal certification process was pretty much the same. Retake the impact assessment, sign the term sheet and pay the fee, which for us was $1,000 (the annual certification fee is a function of sales.)

As I mentioned above, the assessment gets into all areas of the business including

• Governance: the way the company is managed
• Workers: how employees are treated
• Community impact: job creation, D&I, civic engagement, etc.
• Environmental impact: the ecological sustainability of the company
• Impact business models: serving in-need populations, giving programs, education, etc.

But for formal B Corp certification, the impact assessment score needs to be at least 80 out of 200. For many companies, the first time they take the assessment their score will be less than 80, as was the case for us.

So we had work to do looking at where our scores could be improved and what changes we could make in processes and policies that could get us over the finish line.

Our B-corp certification process

One of the benefits of working with B Labs is their willingness to work closely with companies to help them through the certification process. They won't simply push companies through the process but what they will help you understand in which areas your scores are low and brainstorm ideas for what you can do to improve.

Once we understood our lower-scoring sections, we created a Google doc containing those questions in order to engage our whole team around ideas for improvement. For example, B Labs asked us if we had conducted an employee survey around the Gallup “12 questions” that measure the strength of a workforce, particularly management effectiveness. Those Gallup questions include:

• Do I know what is expected of me at work?
• Do I have the materials and the equipment I need to do my work right?
• At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?

We had never done such a survey of our team, so we created a Google form allowing anonymous input and requested everyone to complete it. We captured the results, which we shared with B Labs, and that not only gave us some good ideas for areas we could improve with regard to employee satisfaction, but it also gave us a higher score in the Workers section of our Impact Assessment. By working with B Labs and focusing on areas we could improve in the company, we were able to get our score over 80 and achieve formal certification.

The impact of a B-corp certification

While there is some work involved in achieving certification, the effort is directed toward systems and processes that positively impact lives.

And when you’re committed to making a difference, people notice. Nearly every press article mentioned our B Corp status which not only put us in a cohort of excellent companies, but it showcased for the world (and reinforced for us) our commitment to building for the long-term.

If you choose to pursue certification, you’ll be in very good company. And I wish you much success on your journey.

Early in his life, Chris Cera knew he wanted to build his own business. But when he completed his undergraduate degree from Drexel University, starting his own company was the farthest thing from his mind. In this episode, Chris shares what it took for him to make the leap out of the corporate world (GlaxoSmithKline, Traffic.com) and into the realm of startups.

Chris talks about the idea of moonlighting as a way to ease the transition into entrepreneurship. And he discusses what it means for him to be an entrepreneur and how he parsed through all the “entreporn” (coined by the supremely talented Amy Hoy, it’s the fetishizing of many things “entrepreneurial”).

Chris also shares the backstory of the founding of one of the most impactful and empowering startup communities – Philly Startup Leaders. Chris openly shares his learnings, including his biggest failure lesson – as well as his desire to create intentional experiences to help move people.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Tracey Welson-Rossman – entrepreneur, executive, and advocate – on my podcast. Tracey has done so much for both the startup scene in Philadelphia as well as inspiring and cultivating young women in tech. Tracey shares her journey and lessons learned along the way.

In my article Death of the To-Do List, I talked about how to dramatically improve productivity by getting the right things done. But one of the biggest challenges that thwarts progress is distraction.

It is so easy to get distracted – both by external forces and internal mind wandering. However, there is a way to keep distractions at bay, and it is this:

For each goal you set, write down WHY it matters. Put this right underneath the goal.

Use any system you’d like for tracking your goals. I use Bear (for Mac) for my goals and project notes, and I track all my actions in Things 3. But the tools matter very little – use whatever works seamlessly for you.

Setting a WHY for every major goal is not only important to help clarify the relative priority of each goal, but, more critically, to provide a solution for when we get distracted from the goal.

It’s not a question of if we’ll get distracted from our goals, but when. And having a plan in place, ahead of time, for how to handle each distraction is the difference between average productivity and exceptional accomplishment.

Some distractions are easy to plan for. For instance, I know that I’ll be tempted to open email and see if there are any important messages in there requiring my attention. So I plan for that by writing down – before I start working on my goal – what I’ll do when that temptation arises. This is what I write on my goal page in a section I call “Likely Distractions”

Distraction: I’ll be tempted to check email

How handle? I will keep my Gmail tab closed until 4 pm. That’s my timeblock for checking email. There is no need for me to check before then. And if, on the extremely rare occasion there’s something so urgent requiring my immediate attention, then someone will call or text me or show up at my desk with a flare gun. Otherwise, I don’t need to concern myself with email until then.

But other distractions don’t have such an obvious solution. For instance, what will I do if I get bored? Or if I’m tempted to check social media feeds. Or if my mind is restlessly wandering. For those potential distractions, I revert to my WHY – as in “Why is this goal important for me in my life?”

Since I already have that written down at the top of my page – right under my goal – it is easy for me to look there and remind myself why I am committed to making this happen.

Having that mental model of using my WHY to counter any distraction works like magic.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Charles M. Schwab was a very smart and shrewd businessman who, in 1904, founded Bethlehem Steel, the world’s largest steel producer, which made him one of the richest people in the world.¹ Schwab’s employees loved him, and his senior team was recognized for their prolific accomplishments. His leadership skills led Dale Carnegie to feature Schwab in the famous book How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Schwab was also a man of questionable character. He lived an ostentatiously extravagant lifestyle, gambled recklessly, and was anything but faithful to his wife of over 50 years. He died penniless, not long after the Great Depression depleted what was left of his vast fortune.

Unfortunately we tend to glamorize the positive aspects of people like Schwab and gloss over the more despicable elements. But there is much we can learn from both, including inspiration for utilizing our respective gifts and talents to positively impact society.

There is one uncanny decision Schwab made that continues to impact the lives of millions of people today, particularly those who seem to accomplish more in a day than most of us can dream of in a month or even a year.

And that curious decision was to hire a self-proclaimed publicity expert to help Schwab’s team improve productivity. The man’s name was Ivy Lee, the person credited as the founder of public relations.

What could a PR person possibly have to teach about productivity?

Actually, as it turns out, quite a lot.

The Deal

It’s unclear how the two men met, but what we do know is that Lee suggested to Schwab that if he had 15 minutes with each member of Schwab’s leadership team, that he’d be able to help them dramatically improve their productivity.

Schwab asked Lee how much this would cost. To which Lee responded, “Nothing. But, if after three months you like the results, pay me whatever you think is fair.”

At the end of three months, Schwab was so pleased with the increased productivity that he wrote Lee a check for nearly a half-million in today’s dollars.

How did Lee achieve such extraordinary results?

The Method

Lee’s process is deceptively simple – which is part of its effectiveness.

He asked each executive to write out the six most important things they needed to get done tomorrow. Lee then had them to prioritize their list from one through six. And his final set of instructions were essentially this:

When you come to work tomorrow, start working on Task Priority #1 and nothing else. Don’t even think about Task Priorities 2-6, or anything else for that matter. When you finish with #1, move on to #2 with the same guidance. And so on down your list. At the end of the day, make your list of six for tomorrow, which will likely include any of the ones you didn’t complete today.

That’s it.

It’s so simple, yet so powerful. Anyone could do it, right?

It turns out to be a lot harder than it seems.

My Failed Experiment

When I first learned of the Ivy Lee method a few years ago from James Clear², I couldn’t wait to try it.

I dove right in, ready to channel my inner Ivy Lee and watch my productivity soar. I got to work the next day, began on my #1 task, and actually started getting into a nice groove.

But then I fell flat on my face.

What happened was that I missed the two most important words from Ivy Lee’s guidance: “nothing else”.

While progressing with my priority #1 task, I had an irresistible urge to check email. Since I get a few hundred messages per day, I wanted to do a quick scan and make sure there was nothing super important in there. But of course, once I opened email, I got totally sidetracked on several things that were important, but in hindsight, nowhere near as important as my #1 task.

I needed to do something different.

Experiment #2

I realized that the only way this could work was if I dedicated myself to working on Task Priority #1 and truly nothing else. No email. No Slack. No Skype. No meetings. No text messaging. No Facebook. No Instagram. No stock ticker. No news. Basically, no distractions.

What happened then was nothing short of remarkable. The Ivy Lee method actually worked. In that second experiment – my “undistracted” work day – I completed Task #1 and Task #2. There was no time left for Task Priorities 3-6, but even so, I still felt an
incredible sense of accomplishment. More so than I had in years.

The one task that mattered most to me that day was completed. In fact, the two most important things for that day were done.

I was hooked.

Death of the To-Do List

The power of the Ivy Lee method is both its simplicity and the focus on what matters most.

But if you create a list of six random tasks that need to be done that really aren’t that important, then this method won’t work. The tasks need to be those things that truly make a difference.

There is a great little book called The One Thing by Gary Keller that articulates why choosing our goals (and subsequent tasks) is such an important determinant of our sense of accomplishment.³ In the book, Keller challenges readers to answer this question:

What’s the ONE thing I can do now, such that by doing it everything else will become easier or unnecessary?

That becomes Task Priority #1.

Keller goes on to say, “Instead of a to-do list, you need a success list – a list that is purposely created around extraordinary results.”

So the real work in the Ivy Lee method is thinking through our most important tasks that can really make everything else “easier or unnecessary”. And once you have that “success list”, you’re ready to go.

There is nothing magical about the number six. Your success list can be any number of tasks that could be reasonably done in one day. What matters most is that if those were completed, you would feel a terrific sense of accomplishment and a feeling that your most important goals were that much closer to reality.

Too often we get sidetracked not just by all the obvious distractions (especially email in my case) – but by an even more insidious hindrance – which is working on other tasks that are not the most important.

Which brings us to another billionaire with some terrific guidance to help curtail that tendency.

A Far More Impactful Billionaire

Unlike Schwab who wasted his fortune and left little impact, Warren Buffett has not only amassed about $80 billion, but he’s donated more than $50 billion of his wealth to help those in need. Besides being a successful investor and the world’s most generous philanthropist, Buffett is a very smart man.

And his advice for accomplishing goals is shared through an often-told conversation between Buffett and his pilot.

Buffett suggested that if his pilot wanted to achieve more in life, then the first step would be to write a list of twenty-five things he wanted to accomplish in the near future.

The pilot made his list and shared it with Buffett, to which he essentially replied, “OK, of these twenty-five, circle the top five that matter the most to you.” The pilot did as told.

“Now that you have the five most important ones to focus on, what will you do with the other twenty?”

To which the pilot replied, “I’ll focus on the top five. But these other twenty are a close second and are also important to me. So when I have some time between working on the top five, I’ll give some attention to these twenty so that I can move them along as well.”

Seemed like a reasonable plan to me. Until I heard Buffett’s response, which stopped me dead in my tracks. “Absolutely not! Anything that is not in your top five just became your Avoid At All Cost list.”

I thought about all the things that I’d like to get done – and there were way more than twenty-five on that list. What makes Buffett’s guidance so powerful is the idea of focusing only on what matters most.

Time we spend outside of our top five (or top six) dramatically increases the likelihood of not achieving any of our most important goals. To be successful, we need to be willing to cut out “everything else”. Bury the to-do list and replace it with a success list!

But how can we develop a game plan for avoiding those oh-so-tempting other projects?

The answer is in creating mental models.

The Transformative Power of Mental Models

Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times investigative reporter Charles Duhigg describes the concept of mental models in his excellent book, Smarter Faster Better. Mental models are stories in our minds of what we expect to see. And people with robust mental models turn out to be exceptionally good at focusing.

Duhigg shares how he practiced building mental models while writing his latest book:⁴

To make sure I stayed focused, I had to envision what I expected to happen when I sat down at my desk each morning. And so, every Sunday night, I got into a habit of taking a few moments with pen and pad to imagine what the next day and week ought to look like. I usually chose three or four things I wanted to make sure happened, and made myself answer a series of questions.

Two of those questions Duhigg posed to himself were: What distractions are likely to occur? How will you handle those distractions?

I put that mental modeling to the test with two of my most formidable distractions: email and thinking about all the other tasks that I’d like to get done.

When I sit down at my desk tomorrow, what distractions are likely to occur? A ton of new email will be waiting for me. And I will feel a strong urge to check on what’s in my Inbox. Also, while I’m working on my most important task, I will likely get sidetracked with thoughts about the other tasks waiting on me.

How will you handle those distractions? I will close my Gmail tab and not even look in my Inbox until 4 pm when my scheduled calendar reminder pops up to remind me that then – and only then – will I process email. And when thoughts pop into my head about all my other tasks, I will say to myself, “It’s ok. I’m working on what is most important right now. I’m charting a path toward success, even if lesser priority tasks don’t get done.”

By envisioning what would likely happen and having a plan to preempt distractions made staying focused so much easier.

These tips for increasing productivity are so powerful – you will be amazed at what you’ll accomplish.

So let’s make that happen.

Making Your Impact

Write down your list of the most important things you want to accomplish tomorrow – aligned with your top goals. You can even start small with a number like one or two. But make sure it’s the most important work you can be doing tomorrow. Then when you get started, avoid everything else “at all cost”.

Use whatever hacks or tools you need to make that happen. For me, closing all non-task-related browser tabs makes a huge difference. I time-block my ONE thing and use a modified version of the Pomodoro method⁵ to work in 35 minute blocks, with breaks for food, bathroom, and replenishing my water and coffee. I typically wear noise-canceling headphones listening to background meditation music. I keep my phone in Do Not Disturb mode during these sessions. I’ve learned to politely say no thank you to meeting requests that are not critical for achieving my goals. And I block out calendar time later in the day for processing email, reading and responding to Slack messages, and returning any phone calls or text messages. I also block out calendar time for stuff I don’t like doing but still needs to be done (e.g. paying bills, filing taxes, etc.).

Create a mental model to combat the distractions that will most likely arise for you, and write down your plan on how you’ll handle each of them.

And at the end of each day (and week), spend a few minutes thinking about your success list for tomorrow (and next week). I also spend time at the end of each month thinking about how the month went, what worked, what could have been better, and how I would like to see next month unfold.

It might be very challenging in the beginning, but it gets easier with practice. And it becomes unstoppable with achievement. Going to bed at night knowing that you accomplished what was most important for the day, and having great clarity on what you’re going to work on first thing tomorrow is incredibly rewarding. And before you know it, you’ll be accomplishing far more than you ever dreamed of – knocking out goal after goal after goal.

Your to-do list is history, having been replaced by a much more focusing and empowering success list.

Armed with the skills to be massively productive, we get to choose what we do with that power. We can squander it away like Schwab and leave behind little of lasting value. Or we can utilize our gifts to help transform lives. The positive – and negative – lessons from others can help shape who we want to be and how we want to be remembered.

Make your impact!

-Anthony

—

[1] Charles M. Schwab, founder of Bethlehem Steel, lived from 1862-1939. He is not related to Charles R. Schwab, the billionaire investor born in 1937.

[2] I highly recommend James Clear’s recently released terrific book called Atomic Habits. It’s already a NYT bestseller, and for good reason.

[3] My copy of The ONE Thing is so worn from reading it over and over. Gary Keller’s insights on productivity and life are superb.

[4] I also recommend Charles Duhigg’s exceptional book, Smarter Faster Better, not just for enhancing productivity, but also learning powerful techniques on how teams can work much better together. Duhigg’s other book, The Power of Habit, is also ridiculously good. Both NYT bestsellers!

[5] The Pomodoro Technique is a remarkably effective time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo for breaking deep work into 25-minute focus chunks. More here: Pomodoro Technique

Originally published in Noteworthy

When I was first promoted into a VP/GM role for a Fortune 50 technology company, I tried promoting my top engineering manager into a director role. I was told that I couldn’t promote this person, partly because she was a woman. I was dumbfounded as to why anything other than engineering talent and the person’s ability to lead people should factor into the decision. I fought that and “won” — and this person become one of the company’s best directors. But my eyes were opened as to how unfair it all was.

While I didn’t start out very enlightened on this topic of allyship, I had many experiences that forced me into deep introspection. As I grew to recognize how my privilege as a white male manifests in so many facets of society — especially in my various worlds of technology, large corporations, entrepreneurship, and startup companies — I realized that if people like me didn’t attempt to make a difference that little traction would be made.

As I started writing and speaking on gender equity, male allyship, and my thoughts on what it means to “be a man”, I was surprised by how many men responded defensively. Faced with the stats of discrimination, harassment, and sexual assaults, a common reply theme centered on, “I would never rape a woman. I’m one of the good guys.”

That’s when I realized that the concept of male allyship is something of a continuum. Good for you that you don’t rape. Similar, perhaps, to many Germans in the 30s and 40s who said, “I don’t hate Jews.” The bar of what it means to be a “good guy” is far too low.

The Privilege of Being a White Male

Unfortunately we have a broad cultural bias that is so skewed toward males — especially white males. We have the highest salaries. We own the top positions in companies. In fact, we have the easiest promotional path to those top positions. We dominate the venture investing world.

This isn’t fair and it’s not equitable. Nor is it good for business or society.

My first step on the allyship path was recognizing that I’m part of the problem. In fact, much more than “part”. I needed to not only realize the unfair advantage that I had, but to say something about it.

If you look at salary distribution across the country, of the thousands and thousands of U.S. cities, there are only sixteen where women earn more money than men. Sixteen.

Of course, that makes sense, right? Women are such a small percentage of the workforce.

Wrong!

The Shockingly Sad Stats of Inequity

Women comprise nearly half of the total U.S. workforce. Yet they only occupy about 21% of senior roles in companies and have average salaries far less than men. And that’s mostly white women. Women of color have it much worse and are so underrepresented in the corporate pipeline — especially at the senior levels where only 3% of such roles across the country are held by women of color.

Are women less qualified than their male counterparts to occupy leadership roles? Certainly not if success is based on traits such as vision, ability to lead and inspire teams, and an understanding of market pains and opportunities with an ability to develop solutions to address them.

Men of color don’t fare much better. They represent only about 10% of leadership roles despite making up nearly 33% of the total workforce.

As I said, it is all skewed toward people who look like me. White male.

This is such a sad state of affairs. But we can do better.

Starting Down the Allyship Continuum

Let’s start with allyship and how we can dramatically improve the current paradigm.

We call things like gender-pay inequity, gender discrimination, harassment, catcalling, sexual assault, and so forth — we call these things “women’s issues”. These aren’t women’s issues — they're societal issues perpetrated mostly by men.

Thus the first step toward allyship is recognizing there’s a problem.

I love this definition of “ally” from Campus Pride:

An ally is someone who recognizes they are on the privilege side of a particular prejudice / oppression divide — and then actively engages in the search and implementation of strategies to dismantle that divide.

A few years ago I was in an investor meeting for a company I co-founded called ROAR for Good. ROAR develops a wearable safety device called Athena that can emit an audible alert and send the wearer’s GPS location to emergency contacts. ROAR also contributes part of all proceeds to organizations that are teaching kids about empathy, respect, and healthy relationships — programs shown to reduce violence in adulthood. ROAR is the brainchild of co-founder and CEO, Yasmine Mustafa.

As Yasmine and I were pitching to potential investors in the early days of ROAR — mostly to people who looked just like me — one meeting in particular stands as a clear testament to these discriminatory challenges. Toward the end of the meeting, Yasmine excused herself to use the restroom. While she was out, the investors turned to me and said, “We’d invest if you were the CEO.” Needless to say, we turned them down and never spoke with them again.

I wish I would have said, “Really?! How do you think we’ll evolve as a society if we not only perpetuate the status-quo, but deny opportunities for greater diversity, innovation, and inclusion?” Instead, I said something along the lines of “no, that’s not something we’re willing to consider.”

Commitment to Self-Awareness and Growth is Required

So, while awareness is the first step in allyship, education of both the self and others is critically important.

My “no thank you” to the investors didn’t leave them challenging their ideals. And that’s where skill development comes in. Part of educating myself is developing and enhancing skills that enable me to better inspire others as well as being more supportive and encouraging of those bearing the brunt of oppression.

Being a male ally is a life-long skill development. I don’t think there’s ever a point at which one can truly say, “OK, now I’m there.” Allyship is not an achievement like summiting Everest. It’s an ongoing commitment to cultivating empathy and working toward solutions that prevent bias and prejudice.

Good Men Making a Difference

I look at people like Dale Thomas Vaughn, Lewis Howes, and Michael Kimmel who not only speak, write, and so powerfully inspire others on these topics — but also live their lives in such alignment with their values. Great male role models help all of us look within and say, “I can do better … I want to be more like him.”

To all the men out there — especially those of us fortunate enough to find ourselves in positions of leadership and influence — we can do better. We must do better.

In the powerful words of Edmund Burke:

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Let’s change the societal view of what it means to “be a man”. Let’s challenge ourselves and one another to raise our game and become better male allies. The world will be far better off. Who’s with me?

How would you like to live a life without distractions? Your day seamlessly flowing from one productive activity to the next. Going to bed at the end of the day feeling an amazing sense of alignment with your goals.

Sounds good, right. Perhaps too good to be true.

I get distracted all the time. When I’m sitting at the computer working on a project, email messages are continually flooding into my inbox. And while I try to stay focused on the project at hand, I have a strong urge to check email for one of two reasons: (1) there might be something urgent that I don’t want to miss, and/or (2) I don’t want my inbox to blow up with messages, so if there’s simple stuff I can process it’ll keep my message count at a reasonable number.

Of course, that sort of “checking email” is distracting me from the primary goal of whatever I was originally working on.

In addition to email messages, there’s also Skype messages, Slack comments, text messages, tweets, Instagram stories, Facebook posts, and so on … all competing for my attention. It’s a never-ending stream of stimuli screaming: Read me. Pay attention to me. Click me.

But avoiding distraction doesn’t mean we never indulge in social media or attend to the needs and desires of ourselves and those people we care most about.

The Opposite of Distraction -> Traction

Rather, the key to minimizing distraction is recognizing that there are two types of action: traction and distraction – and they are completely opposing one another. Traction is the state of focused effort toward a desired goal, whereas distraction is simply what it is: a distraction taking us off the path.

In a powerful talk by Nir Ewal, he describes a concept called indistractable, which is the state of staying in traction while minimizing distraction.

But distraction is very sly and slippery. It tempts us to do things that are against our better judgement.

However, there is a way to tame the distraction beast.

Scheduling the day.

Taking everything that is important or must be done and putting it on the calendar.

At first, I found this concept appalling. I used to measure a “good day” by the amount of free time on my calendar. The more, the better.

But here’s what happened during those “open blocks” of time: I would haphazardly work on various projects that were important, but without any sense of focus or clear prioritization. And I was easily distracted. Very often at the end of the day, I would feel a sense of dissatisfaction at my lack of progress toward what mattered most.

The Remarkable, Unforeseen Benefits of Scheduling

The benefits of scheduling time specific to a particular project are enormous.

Consider this incredibly surprising study: participants were asked to exercise for 20 minutes sometime during the next week. They were split into three groups. Group 1 was given no additional instructions – just exercise for 20 minutes sometime next week. Group 2 was given the same challenge plus some information on the benefits of exercise. And Group 3 was simply asked to open their calendars and schedule a 20 minute exercise for some day next week.

How did the three groups do?

About 30% of Group 1 participants did the 20-minute workout. Group 2 did a little better at 39%.

Group 3, in contrast, had a 91% success rate! Ninety-one percent of them did the workout!!

The people in Group 3 were not more motivated. They didn’t have more willpower. They weren’t given any incentive. The only thing that separated them from the rest was the instruction that they enter into their calendar a day next week that they would exercise.

And they did!

The Best Way to Schedule – Block the Time, Not the Result

If we plan out what we want to and should do, we are far more likely to stay on track. The advantages of scheduling those time blocks each day are remarkable.

The key being scheduling the time, not the result.

I am absolutely terrible at estimating how long a task will take. And I’m usually wrong in the same direction – I think it will take less time than it actually does.

So, if I schedule a block of time to “Complete article”, then invariably a sense of disappointment sets in if the article isn’t complete by the end of that time block.

However, if the calendar item is “Work on article” – that is not only doable, but by the end I feel a sense of accomplishment. If the article isn’t done, I’ll simply add another block of time to continue working on the article.

There’s an old adage that says if you don’t schedule your time, someone or something else will.

Our time will always get filled. The choice of whether it’s with productive action or distracting activities is completely up to us. Scheduling out the day with time-blocks related to what matters most leads to a far more productive and satisfying life.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Originally published in Philadelphia Magazine.

A few months ago, Yasmine Mustafa and Anthony Gold launched one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns that the Philadelphia tech community has ever seen. It generated 3,800 pre-orders in 47 countries, as well as 159 news articles and 18 radio and TV interviews over four weeks. It easily smashed through its goal of $40,000 and raised a whopping $267,000. In this article, they share advice for other startups aiming to crowdfund.

Would people actually purchase our product? That was the $64,000 question that kept haunting our dreams for months. We were developing an awesome product — or so we thought — and everyone we spoke with said the same thing: “It’s a great idea, I’d buy one.”

At ROAR for Good, we create fashionable safety jewelry to help reduce assaults against women. And we are a social-mission B-corp that’s donating a percentage of proceeds to non-profits that teach empathy and respect — programs which have been shown to reduce violence in adulthood. But there’s a world of difference between a person saying they would buy it and actually making a purchase. So we launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to confirm or deny our value hypothesis. The night of go-live, we agonized over pressing the “Launch Campaign” button. This was the moment of truth. The next 30 days would reveal the market’s true feelings about ROAR for Good.

But it didn’t take 30 days. We knew in less than 30 hours.

Our expectations were blown away. We had set a target of $40,000 to raise. We hit it in less than two days, and within a month we surpassed a quarter of a million dollars. We had pre-orders from 47 countries, got a ton of press, and received almost 900,000 views on our YouTube video. Check it out:

Were we brilliant crowdfunding experts who knew exactly how to achieve success? Far from it. This was our first campaign ever, and we made many missteps along the way. We also got incredibly lucky in a few areas.

Here are nine factors that allowed us to achieve such remarkable success:

1. Develop a targeted message. For us, this was the easy part. The only easy part. The key is making your message compelling for your audience. If you try to develop a message that will resonate with everyone, chances are it will have little impact. Our message was primarily focused on women in urban areas — and the people who care about them. So we honed our message around that target market. Even though our product is applicable for men, children and seniors, we kept our messaging focused on our initial target market — women. This made it much easier to resolve the multitude of decisions that arose such as which images we should use in our campaign and how we should promote on Facebook.

2. Study successful campaigns — and failures. Tolstoy famously declared that all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. In the realm of crowdfunding, it’s a bit inverted. Each failure (at least the ones we studied) seemed to have a lot in common, whereas each crowdfunding success story seemed to be unique in its own way. We met with several happy and unhappy crowdfunding “families” and probed deeply into what worked and what didn’t.

3. Establish an engaged community — before you launch. Testing our assumptions, validating our ideas, and obtaining feedback from our target market was important to us from the beginning. As a result, we started building our community from day one. First, we sent a survey to our friends, focused on learning as much as we could about their perception of existing safety tools. We provided those who responded the option to sign up for our newsletter to receive updates on our progress and participate in future sessions. Once we progressed to our design and prototype stages, we lined up meetings at local sororities to collect their feedback. This helped us build our community to about 500 members.

From there, we focused more on evangelizing our existing members to help us build our email list. Spreadsheets from Indiegogo allowed us to estimate the ideal email list size before our launch. We had to grow by 6 times.  That’s when we learned about Harry’s, a men’s grooming brand that had run a successful list-building campaign. (Tim Ferriss’ blog post, “How To Gather 100,000 Emails in One Week” has more.) We set up a pre-launch page specifically focused on social sharing by providing prizes for our community. This helped us triple our list.

Outside of building our social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, we also leveraged events continuously before, during, and after the campaign, collecting email signups at every juncture.

4. Ask for help from the platform experts. We engaged with the team at Indiegogo, and they were incredibly helpful in providing advice every step of the way. They helped us hone our strategy, provided feedback on our page flow, message copy, video formatting, perk selection and email strategy. Some of the most valuable tips were to set an achievable, realistic campaign goal (we chose $40,000 to allow us to build momentum sooner) and to turn our email list into contributions with a sequenced campaign before our launch. For the latter, we sent exclusive updates and included teasers of an early bird campaign to build the demand and get our community to act fast once we launched.

5. Don’t launch until you have 30 percent committed. Why? Because crowdfunding campaigns work best if you can show momentum. When people see traction, they’re more likely to want to contribute. And studies indicate that campaigns achieving 30 percent of their target within the first couple days have a high probability of reaching or exceeding their overall goal.

So we personally called or emailed individual people in our networks who had previously expressed an interest in contributing. Then, once we went live, we sent them a reminder and most of them contributed within the first two days — helping us get off to a fast start.

An important factor for us was to identify many people who wanted to purchase our ROAR device versus just a few people willing to purchase many devices. Why? Because the primary goal of our campaign was to validate our market hypothesis that there was a large and broad interest in our offering. If we lined up a few people willing to contribute a lot of money, we would have done ourselves – and our campaign — a great disservice.

6. Produce a decent video. It doesn’t have to be great, but it needs to be good. The first thing most people do when they visit a crowdfunding campaign is watch the video. So, your video needs to be good: short and compelling. By the time the video is over, the viewer should be left with this one thought: “I like this product and I believe in the team behind it. Let me read on.”

So, why do we say a good but not great video? Because this is one of those cases where great is the enemy of good. And another area where we got lucky. We thought we needed a “Hollywood-like” polished video to showcase our message. We interviewed countless video production houses weighing the pros and cons of each. But then at the last minute, we asked ourselves these fundamental questions: Do we want people to buy our product because our video blew them away? Or, would we be better off simply sharing our compelling message and why we are building this company and our product?

Since we wanted to use the crowdfunding campaign to validate that there was a market interested in purchasing our solution, we decided to go forego the Hollywood script approach and make a simple, genuine video about what we’re doing and why we’re so passionate about it. We also ensured our empowerment message was reinforced by inviting key women influencers to partake in it such as Melissa Alam of Hive Philly, Kiera Smalls of City Fit Girls, and Laurie Satran of The Art of Breaking Bread.

This is what we ended up producing and we’re honored that over 1.5 million people have watched it.

7. Establish clear roles for team members during the campaign. We were told by several people that running a crowdfunding campaign is like a full-time job. At first we didn’t believe it — what could possibly take up so much time after the campaign launched? We were completely wrong.

There were so many questions and comments that came in — not just on the campaign page — but also across social media and email, and we needed responses pretty much 24/7.

We created templates to make responding much faster and consistent. Even though we had an FAQ, many people didn’t read that and kept asking the same questions. And we wanted to continually enhance our page copy and graphics — again based on user feedback. We also had ongoing requests from press for interviews — many of which required a fair bit of back-and-forth scheduling. Having clear roles enabled us to function as smoothly as possible within an incredibly dynamic, frenetic environment.

8. Throw a launch party mid-campaign. During our conversations with others who had run successful and unsuccessful campaigns, we learned that everyone hits a slump midway through. The newness of the project dwindles and less contributions come through. We decided to use this time to throw a launch party to show our appreciation for our local community. It allowed us to thank early backers, keep them excited about what we were doing, and motivate them to keep sharing our campaign and press news.

We had it after dinner to keep it low-cost. We took advantage of peoples’ love of photo booths by inviting our guests to use our #HelpUsROAR hashtag and share who they roared for. Finally, we also offered everyone a special offer if they wanted to pre-order additional devices.

9. Heed the power of the press. No matter how good your product is, nothing drives pre-orders more than press. We were very fortunate that the local Philadelphia press had an interest in our story. Nearly every paper, TV and radio station in Philly talked about ROAR. This is both a testament to our mission of reducing assaults and empowering women — and the passion of Philadelphia media to support its startup community.

We had a few people on our team reaching out to local and national media, and we took every interview that was brought our way. Much of our tactics were derived from another Tim Ferriss article called Hacking Kickstarter which has fantastic tips and templates you can utilize to help. It took so much of our time, but it never gets old talking about something you’re passionate about – especially when that can truly make a difference in the world.

But this is another area where we got lucky. A few people with very large followings started writing about ROAR without any request on our part, including Ashton Kutcher, United Nations Women, UNICEF, famous politicians, best-selling authors, and even one of the stars from The Jersey Shore (Sammi Giancola). And national media began promoting our story such as Mashable (this alone spiraled many others), The Huffington Post, MTV News, Fortune, TechRepublic, Bustle, The New York Times, Fast Company, Inc, Jezebel, Little Things, Brit + Co, and so many others. By starting with a very compelling message and making it easy for our story to be shared, we positioned ourselves for scalability if the opportunity arose. Thankfully it did.

Running a successful crowdfunding campaign is indeed a ton of work and really is like a full-time job. We were very fortunate to have good guidance from others (both those who succeeded, and perhaps even more powerfully, from those that failed) — and we were very lucky to have captured the attention of so many people in the national press. While we are thrilled by the response we’ve received, we are very humbled by the responsibility ahead of us. Our crowdfunding campaign has given us the opportunity to touch many lives, and each one of us at ROAR wakes up every day thinking about how we can make more of a difference. Hopefully these tips will help you as you consider a crowdfunding campaign to launch your business.

Yasmine Mustafa and Anthony Gold are the co-founders of ROAR for Good.

The stats are so awful.

1 in 3 women have been victims of physical violence by an intimate partner¹. And this epidemic directly affects more than 12 million people each year – not to mention countless other family members, including children, challenged to cope with these tragedies². In fact, intimate partner violence accounts for 21% of all violent crimes³!

Men Can is an annual public awareness campaign, hosted by Lutheran Settlement House, focused on engaging men in ending domestic violence.

The event brings together community members and civic organizations empowering and inspiring one another to help rid the nation of the scourge of domestic violence.

Besides eliminating domestic violence, we also need to remove the stigma associated with this being considered a “women’s issue”. This isn’t a “women’s issue” – it’s a societal issue, perpetrated mostly by men, that needs to be properly addressed.

I was honored to be one of the keynote speakers at this event.

Following the short snippet captured in the video – after the powerful quote by Edmund Burke:

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” — Edmund Burke

I don’t want to “do nothing”. I want to challenge myself and all men to recognize it’s on us to make a difference. It’s on us to help create a safe environment where all people are treated fairly and with respect.

I don’t have the answers, but I do know that together we can make a difference.

Let’s be the change that we want to see in the world!

Footnotes

1. National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey
2. UNICEF – The Impact of Domestic Violence on Children
3. US Dept. of Justice Nonfatal Domestic Violence Stats