The Ben Franklin School of Persuasion – Benjamin Franklin was a serial entrepreneur, regularly seeing huge success implementing ideas which others thought were impossible or pointless.

Free Information Isn’t Enough Anymore – The next place of growth for service professionals and information marketers is to take all the free information you research and produce for your clients, synthesize it, and give it back to people in a practical, DO-able format.

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Do It Right the First Time & Do It With Class – When you don’t give something the proper effort, often the results are not satisfactory. Then you find yourself in the position that you have to do it again. Not doing a task “right the first time” often creates more work.

Having a strategy doesn’t make you social – How do you avoid a social media backlash and better connect with your customers? If you are proactively monitoring your online reputation, and proactively reaching out to customers that have issues, you’ll all but remove any chance of a backlash.

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Reminding Yourself That You Love What You Do – As creative professionals, it’s easy to get caught up in the business end of things and not actually spending much time doing anything for ourselves. If you are freelancing or working at an agency, it’s important to have something in your pipeline that’s done just for the fun of it.

Why a Six-Figure Income Doesn’t Count – Focusing on making six figures is often a path that leads to financial loss. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Impressive numbers are nice, but there’s only one number in the business world that counts: It’s not about what you make. It’s about what you keep in your pocket.

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Why Entrepreneurs Need Community- Glen Stansberry shares some killer wisdom on the importance of community. This is a fantastic example of how community is pivotal to the success of an entrepreneur.

Why Are You Scared To Be Outspoken? – The question isn’t why we’re so outspoken and willing to expose ourselves, it’s why you aren’t? When you have a chance to tell customers your story and shape their experiences, why would you ever run from that? Exposing your brand via social media is only scary when you’re trying to hide your flaws. Fix them and then tell the world about it.

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Too Smart For Your Business? – When we make every decision from our intellect, we tend to over-complicate. We see all the options, have a million big ideas, and either want to improve upon everything or convince ourselves of what won’t work.

The Myth of the Personal Brand – By all appearances, the discussion of personal branding – and the hoards of people who claim to help us do it – is fueled by the social web. Before everyone had a voice, branding was largely the domain of ad people. Aaron hits the nail on the head here defining who exactly does the branding.

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Four Inspirational Moments in Film – Movies are a great source of inspiration. You can learn valuable lessons from watching how others deal with failure and overcome obstacles, as well as taking note of the perspective they take toward life. Listed are some great inspirational moments in film.

The World’s Best Frozen Margarita Recipe – Movies are a great source of inspiration. You can learn valuable lessons from watching how others deal with failure and overcome obstacles, as well as taking note of the perspective they take toward life. Listed are some great inspirational moments in film.

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Before Gary Vaynerchuk (the video/social media guru and all-star author), there was Gary Varynerchuk (the wine guy). Before Chris Brogan (the social media guru), there was Chris Brogan (the aspiring author). Before Biz Stone (co-creator of Twitter), there was Biz Stone (the guy with the weird name). Before Seth Godin (the “he’s-never-wrong” author and marketer), there was just some guy no one had ever heard of.

Yes, entrepreneurs look to these risen stars and aspire to be like them (or like someone like them!), and we forget that everyone started “at zero” with an idea and a willingness to work hard to get there. Sure, we’re willing to work hard but there seems like a huge chasm we have to cross in order to get to THEIR level. Frustrated, we work our butts off at our “mediocre” level (at least that’s how it might feel to us) and wonder what the X factor is that helped Gary, Chris, Seth, Biz (and many others) to cross over to stardom.

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