Consider beginning the new year by subscribing to purple.space. It’s a private online discussion group that I started several years ago.
A practice keeps a promise. A community of people who support, respect and encourage each other makes it far more likely we’ll find our way forward.
Purple Space is a worldwide community of creators, leaders and the curious. There’s no hype, no selling, no dark patterns. Instead, a few hundred people come together on a daily basis to share and support their work.
Or perhaps build your own circle of support. Accountability, inspiration and commitment. We each have the tools to find our cohort.
Here’s to possibility. Find some people and build something great.
January 5, 2026
Are entrepreneurs professionals?
In professional fields, like law, medicine or accounting, it’s expected that you’ve done the reading. A professional has seen what has come before, understands the best practices and eagerly duplicates effective methods that have been shown to work.
As our understanding of marketing, management and tech has grown, there’s been a rise in intentionally naive wannabe entrepreneurs who decide that energy and authenticity are far more important than knowledge. That didn’t used to be a choice, now it is.
Sure, someone is going to win the startup lottery, but it probably isn’t going to be you. The good news is that there’s a lot to learn, all from easily accessible sources. It’s way less stressful to do it right than it is to do it over again.
Every year, on the first weekend of the year, it’s probably worth replacing the dried spices in your pantry. The best, freshest spices still taste like the spice that’s on the label, but they taste more like themselves.
That’s what successful brands and freelancers do as well. They relentlessly do the work to act more like themselves.
First, we have to figure out what we are, what we stand for, and what people expect.
Then we get a chance to be more like that.
January 4, 2026
By the time you get around to embracing the fashion of the moment, it’s almost certainly too late.
The leading edge is defined by the fact that most of us aren’t on it.
January 3, 2026
An essential feature of every bottle is the neck. No neck, no bottle.
There are bottlenecks in every process, every project and every method. Something is limited. We can pretend that’s not the case and avoid the discussion. Or we can see it as an opportunity.
Successful organizations are good at embracing and working with their bottlenecks.
January 2, 2026
If you went back 45 years, the built world would be eerily similar–the clothes, the cars, even the haircuts.
Except you’d quickly notice that there were no personal computers and no smart phones. That for seven or ten hours a day, every day, people were interacting in real life, not with their screens. Many of us can’t remember what we did all day.
The same thing probably occurred after the adoption of electricity. We acclimate to the new normal.
What happens a year from now, when most of those ten hours have been transformed by AI? We probably won’t remember what it was like today.
January 1, 2026
