I’ve made some spectacularly bad decisions in business. Strangely, they’re not the ones I regret most. The decisions I made gave me something to work with. A result. A lesson. A chance to do better next time. The decisions I didn’t make left me with only my imagination. That’s the harder kind of regret. There’s no result to evaluate,

10 years ago I met a monk named Dandapani at a conference for entrepreneurs. At first, I wondered what he could possibly teach me about business. It turned out to be quite a lot because his specialty was focusing the mind. He said that in order to focus, you have to know what you want.

I thought I was fearless. Pitch the client, hire the team, build the product. But inside I was afraid. With clients, I was afraid they wouldn’t stay, or that they’d find out we were figuring things out on the fly. With employees, I was afraid they’d take advantage of me, or make a mistake that

For years, I thought I had to choose: work all the time, or have a life I love. Say yes to the client, or lose the contract.  Do it myself, or it won’t be done right. My brain was trying to reduce complexity by narrowing the choices. The problem is, I stopped seeing the other

I used to think if a little was good, more was better.  That was my philosophy for everything: pizza, wine, ice cream. But also customers, services, opportunities, and ideas. The most expensive word in my business was “yes.” If someone wanted to pay us for something, I wanted to say yes. After all, revenue is

For most of my life freedom was the most important thing to me.  But the way I defined it cost me everything else. I was lonely, tired, and frustrated with almost everything in my life. At the time, I didn’t understand why. Hidden Rules So I took a course called the Internal Map of Reality