Fox Mentorship Blog Your Practice. Our Experience.

This is one of the great cultural touchstone slogans of our era. A culture where there's so much to eat we need to try to find a food that we can eat even if we're stuffed.

Often, we'll decide that something is full, stuffed, untouchable but then some Jello shows up, and suddenly there's room.

Think about your schedule... is there room for an emergency, an SEC investigation, a server crash? If you took a day off because of the flu, is your business going to go bankrupt? Probably not.

So, if there's time for an emergency (Jello), why isn't there time for brilliance, generosity or learning?

No gifts, no guilt. Universal, even if it's not celebrated on the same day everywhere.

Whenever I sit down at this keyboard, I feel humbled and quite lucky to have the privilege. Every day is Thanksgiving, because without the people we love and depend on, there'd be nothing.

Thanks for being here, for making a difference and for doing work that matters.

Thank you.

It's natural to seek reassurance. Most of us want to believe that the choices we make will work out, that everything will be okay.

Artists and those that launch the untested, the new and the emotional (and I'd put marketers into all of these categories) wrestle with this need all the time. How can we proceed knowing that there's a good chance that our actions will fail, that things might get worse, that everything won't end up okay? In search of solace, we seek reassurance.

So people lie to us. So we lie to ourselves.

No, everything is not going to be okay. It never is. It isn't okay now. Change, by definition, changes things. It makes some things better and some things worse. But everything is never okay.

Finding the bravery to shun faux reassurance is a critical step in producing important change. Once you free yourself from the need for perfect acceptance, it's a lot easier to launch work that matters.

Your sales force and your customers may scream that you need to lower your price.

It's not true.

You need to increase your value. If people don't want to pay, it's because you're not delivering enough value for the money you're charging.

You're not selling a commodity unless you want to.

Hint: you don't buy a future of money.

People who win the lottery are almost always unhappy in the long run, and most of them continue to buy lottery tickets.

It's not the destination, it's the journey. Same thing with first dates, blog posts, opening presents and answering a phone call from a stranger.

The thrill of possibility, the chance for recognition, the chemical high of anticipation. That's what people pay for.