I Climbed Out of That Canyon at Eight at Night
Breathless at the top of a canyon at eight at night, explaining to a fireman named Kurt what had happened and where my father was.
Category: Behind the Book (Page 8)
Behind the BookI Spent Thirty-Three Years in a Box and Called It a Career
Never went looking for better, never went back to school, never reached past the edge of what I had. Comfortable is the wall people mistake for a career.
Behind the BookEthics Is the Voice That Says Maybe I Should Not Take Credit for This
Ethics at work is not the big dilemma. It is the small voice you can overrule without anybody ever finding out, which is exactly why it matters.
Behind the BookThree Posts a Week and Six Comments a Day. That Is the Whole System.
People expect a system. Three posts a week, six comments a day, keep them short. The difficulty was never the complexity.
Behind the BookMy First Consulting Job Paid $600. I Had No Idea What I Was Doing.
Overconfident, underprepared and completely naive, with my eye on six hundred dollars and no idea I could not do the work until I was in too deep.
SEE » The Authority Gap: 30 Days of Uncomfortable Truths series
Artificial IntelligenceWith SEO There Is Eventually a Big Bang. This Does Not Work That Way.
With SEO there is eventually a kind of big bang. A day arrives when Google decides to rank you. AEO does not work that way.
Behind the BookThe System Crashed on a Friday Night. I Had Nobody to Call.
A complete failure, millions on the line by Monday morning, every vendor number unanswered. Twenty years in the industry and not one person I could call.
Behind the BookWe Imagined a Little Flat Somewhere With a Typewriter
I was going to write the great American novel. What nobody described was the part where writing is a business with invoices in it.
Behind the BookMy Boss Was Incompetent and Untouchable. I Had Eighteen Months Left.
He was not going anywhere and neither was I. Learning to work under somebody like that without absorbing their behavior is a skill, and I learned it because I had to.
Behind the BookI Quit My Job, Moved to Florida, and Sold Twelve Copies
I am not a marketing guru. I am an author who figured out how to market books by doing it badly until I got better at it.
Behind the BookI Became a Manager in 1981. The Hard Part Was People Sitting Ten Feet Away.
In 1981 the difficulty was delegating to a person you could see. The managers who succeed now are not the ones with the best org charts.
Behind the BookI Clicked Publish on My First Book and Sold Nothing for Two Weeks
I had fallen into the classic trap every new author falls into. I thought writing the book was the hard part. Wrong.