Do you remember how bold your imagination was a child? If you were anything like me, you could spend hours dreaming up a game to play with your friends or imagining what the world was like beyond what you’d seen with your tiny little eyes. 

A child’s imagination is completely untethered from doubt and limitation because children haven’t learned yet to be skeptics. The universe is literally a child’s mental playground. 

Do you remember what you dreamed of as a child? Do you recall how you pictured what life would be like as an adult? Is it as you imagined it? Is your career what you dreamed it would be? Your answer to that last question is probably no, but why is that?

You may have changed your mind about what you wanted to do as you got older. Maybe something happened in your life that caused you to take a different route. It’s possible that, as you got older, you settled for things in your life that were less than what you dreamed...

In celebration of the weekend, I’m going to say something that I probably don’t say enough. Stop working. No, really stop working. You need to relax, take time off, and do something fun that’s unrelated to your business. It’s essential to your success.

As entrepreneurs, we work longer hours, stress more, and regularly push ourselves outside of the comfort zones everyone else is afraid to leave. Running a business is physically taxing and basically akin to mental gymnastics. 

We are driven to be better than average, to provide better for our families, and to live up to the high expectations we’ve placed on ourselves. As a result, our quest for success can easily make us forget to take time off to do—brace yourself—nothing.

Here’s why it’s important to take time off…

To Avoid Burnout

I’ve learned that if there isn’t a healthy balance of work and play, you will find yourself unmotivated and...

Some of you may be asking, “What the hell is a Bandersnatch?!” So in case you missed the cool bus last year, let me explain what I’m referring to. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is an interactive Netflix movie that allows viewers to make decisions for the main character throughout the film. 

As you’re watching the movie, you are presented with opportunities to choose what will happen next. When an opportunity is presented, you have 10 seconds to make a decision, or a decision is made for you—the default scenario plays out. Once that scenario finishes playing, you can go back and choose a different scenario to play. 

At the end of the film, you have the option to choose a different critical choice that allows you to explore other possible endings.

There are several ways the film can end based on the choices you make as you watch, and there are even endings that are harder to reach than others, based on the combination of decisions made....

If you’ve been following my podcast or my writings here on Medium, you may remember that I started a dropshipping business two years ago. The way I learned how to run that business was to set up a website for a general store—meaning I sold any and everything—with no niche, and try to sell everything to everyone. The importance of choosing a niche is a story for another day, but for the purposes of this dropshipping business, this method made sense.

I made my money in that business by finding trendy products, running ads for those products, and seeing what people responded to. If people who saw the ad bought the product, I’d keep selling it. If people who saw the ad didn’t buy the product, I’d stop the ad and move on to another product.

In the dropshipping world, that method is called “testing”, and in ecommerce I learned to test everything. I tested which products I sold, ad copy, ad photos, ad videos, product photos and...

When things are great in life, they’re great! You feel like you’re on top of the world and maintaining positive energy is as easy as pie. When things in life suck, they seem to really suck bad. It’s in those times that positive energy is scarce, making negative thoughts seem impossible to control. 

We all go through those phases in life where it seems like the Universe is kicking us when we’re already down. It’s hard to think positive thoughts when things aren’t quit going exactly as you would want them to go, but that’s when you need to be positive the most. 

What many of us forget is that positivity is a choice—which means, so is negativity. Choosing positivity requires actively making decisions to do so, and it requires intensely training your brain, as if you’re training for a knock down, drag out fight in the Octagon. 

When you’re challenging yourself to accomplish a goal, the struggle to stay...

Most of us have failed at something. Actually, most of us have probably failed at many things. From a young age, we’re taught to try as hard as we can to obtain our goals. We grow up playing sports, competing in science fairs, and learning things like how to ride a bike. Failing at those things was, generally, inconsequential. 

As adults, we set out to accomplish goals like graduating from college, starting a business, or raising a family. Failing at achieving these goals could prove to be much more consequential. As a result, failing can be a devastating experience that causes us to develop all types of negative emotions, leading to fear and anxiety of ever experiencing that devastation again.

But we have the wrong idea about failure. We should look at it in a much more positive light, and we should be proud of each time we’ve tried and failed because the alternative is not trying at all.

To help you restructure the way you think of failure, let’s...