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...

Here we are at just past 6 weeks since I made the commitment to take one bold action per day for 66 days. If you want to hear previous updates about this commitment, check out my podcast, Master Your Mission, on iTunes, Spotify, or Google Play Music to get caught up.

Just a quick recap to bring you up to speed—on February 21st, I committed to taking one bold action per day for 66 days. I made this commitment to

1. Show other people that taking action toward accomplishing their life goals is not as scary as it looks.
2. Make taking bold actions a habit—or second nature—in my life. (Sidenote: According to studies, it takes 66 days to form a habit.)

I defined a bold action as one that 

• Moves me out of my comfort zone and closer to my goals.
• Defies an irrational fear that I’ve allowed to hold me back in the past.

To make this fun for you and me, I also challenged you to take one bold action per day toward something that you want to accomplish in your...

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...

Have you ever had a broken toilet that only worked if you jiggled the handle the right way? You start out telling yourself that you’ll get around to getting it fixed, but you only remember that it needs to be fixed at the worst possible times. Then before long, you don’t even notice that it’s broken any more. Every time you use it, you automatically jiggle the handle to make it work the right way, because now, that’s what you’re conditioned to do and have grown accustomed to accepting.

You get so used to the toilet being broken that you forget it’s not normal for the toilet to be broken. You forget how abnormal it is to have to take the extra steps that it requires to operate the toilet when you could very easily just flush it, were it fixed. 

Sometimes in life, we get so used to things being broken that we forget what it’s like for things to be normal. We allow ourselves to get conditioned to dysfunctional relationships,...

In my last podcast episode, How Feedback Can Help You Grow in Life & Entrepreneurship, I made the point that feedback and advice from the people we trust in our personal lives can be as valuable as reviews can be in business. That advice can help us find opportunities to make improvements in life that we need to make in order to grow—just like in business.

It takes a very open minded person with a strong desire to grow to accept criticism and advice gracefully, but I don’t think that it is a good idea to just blindly accept all advice and feedback that comes your way. Not all advice is good advice and not all advisers have your best interests in mind. Knowing when to accept advice and when to reject it is just as important as being open to it in the first place.

There are times when you must determine whether or not you should take someone’s advice or incorporate their feedback into your life. Here are some questions you can consider as you make your...

Every now and then, I have to be introspective and check myself when I know I’m being closed minded and stubborn. I had one of those moments last week after I got two pretty solid pieces of advice from two different friends, at separate times, on the same day.

You may remember my story of The Brutal Advice That Changed My Life, and how much I attribute a single piece of harsh advice with helping me make changes for the better in my life. In short, twenty years ago, a friend of mine told me that I was the type of person who allowed things to happen to them instead of making things happen for them. Sometimes I wonder if I would have made the same life choices if that friend hadn’t essentially bitch slapped some sense into me with that brutal comment.

Back to last week though. One friend gave me career advice, and the other friend gave me love advice. Both unsolicited. These friends are trustworthy people whom I admire and value, and neither of them would have any...