Recently, I had a doctor’s appointment to go to in another city because we live at the edge of the earth.

In preparation for this three-hour round trip, I took my car to the shop.

The mechanic came back with a list of codes so long that he didn’t bother to check all of them. “This car is not safe to drive,” he said. And the implication was that it wasn’t worth fixing.

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Early on in The Marketing Seminar, participants are asked what change they are trying to make and who they are trying to change.

Seth Godin’s definition of marketing is to make a change happen. Therefore, your marketing needs to change somebody. Who? And how?

Faced with these questions, a lot of us go big. “I want everyone to participate in this initiative!” “I’m trying to end loneliness forever!” “I want to change the world!”

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In the journey of entrepreneurship, there are a few leaps to make.

One is to go from working for someone else to working for yourself.

Another is to go from being paid directly for the work that you do — often, by the hour — to being paid out of the proceeds of the business.

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With the number of lobster buoys dotting Penobscot Bay like sprinkles on an ice cream cone, it was inevitable at some point.

This weekend, we ran right over one in our sailboat.

We had guests on board, and we had been looking for dolphins. When we finally spotted some, we “hove to,” which is a way of immediately stopping a sailboat in motion.

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A fellow business coach suggested that only a tiny fraction of people trying to make it in business are “cut out” to be entrepreneurs.

Her reasoning was that people don’t want to do the hard work and they complain too much. (Wasn’t she complaining as she said this?)

I get impatient with this kind of gatekeeping. The thing that I like most about small business is that anybody can do it.

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