The competitive advantages the marketplace demands is someone more human, connected, and mature. Someone with passion and energy, capable of seeing things as they are and negotiating multiple priorities as she makes useful decisions without angst. Flexible in the face of change, resilient in the face of confusion. All of these attributes are choices, not talents, and all of them are available to you.

If you want customers to hear about you, make something worth talking about.

The public square is more public than ever, but minds are rarely changed in 140 character bursts and by selfies.

If you speak up online and your ideas have currency, people are going to show up and want to connect with you. What we need more of are people with the guts and emotional labour to do this. The greatest shortage in today's society is an instinct to produce.

Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your return policy.

I've never once met a successful blogger who questioned the personal value of what she did.

Our job is to make change. Our job is to connect to people, to interact with them in a way that leaves them better than we found them, more able to get where they'd like to go. Every time we waste that opportunity, every page or sentence that doesn't do enough to advance the cause is waste.