It’s now a little over 3 years since I started my solo business venture of helping bloggers and content creators build their audience online. Has it been easy? No. Has it been interesting? Always!

I have a friend who used to email me very frequently back in the day. Now emails are passé so we keep in touch over WhatsApp. But her email signature used to end with this quote.

It’s a quote by the 100 meters Olympic gold medalist from 1924, Harold Abrahams.

In it, he says:

“I’m forever in pursuit. And I don’t even know what it is…

You’ve probably seen posts/social media updates with these titles:

How I grew my subscriber list to 100,000 people

How to grow your Instagram account to 10K followers

How you can get 200k page views in just 6 months

It’s called social proof — proof that what you’re doing has worked and that you’re now among the cream of the crop. I’d be lying if I didn’t mention that I used to focus on similar metrics. …

Ever wondered why certain companies, brands, coaches and service providers stand head and shoulders above the rest?

You may be assuming that it has something to do with their branding or positioning. Perhaps they have a very large marketing budget so that they improve their visibility in the marketplace. Or maybe it’s their legacy and their long-standing authority in that domain that helps them stand out like a red tulip in a sea of yellow tulips.

But the truth, in my experience, is far simpler.

It all comes down to just one thing — Service

In the last 5 years…

As I come close to completing 7 weeks away from posting content on social media, there are a number of insights that have emerged from this time away. I’ll probably cover it in a much longer post after the sabbatical ends, but there’s one thing I wanted to highlight from this period.

That, my friends, is the idea of distance. Distance shapes our lives, in so many inscrutable ways. We don’t realize it, especially in the age of constant connectivity, but it’s a very important quality that will help you in more ways than you know.

Distance offers perspective

When I decided to…

The year of depth is something I personally believe in and consciously aim to practice with more intention regularly. I first came across this term in the beginning of 2019, although David Cain had actually floated the idea towards the end of 2017.

In it, he talks about how we’re always constantly overwhelmed by chasing every new thing out there, instead of digging our heels in and focusing on what we already have.

After you’re established in your career, and you have some neat stuff in your house, you take a whole year in which you don’t start anything new…

Whether it’s on Medium or YouTube, I follow less than 20 people/channels/publications. There’s a very good reason for that.

As a productivity coach, one of the things I talk about frequently on my podcast and website is the idea of intentional and mindful affluence. It’s the idea that we have an entire day, week, or month that lies open and waiting, ahead of us. We now have the choice to decide how we’re planning to spend that cornucopia of abundance.

The Gift of Time

Most time management books will focus on the principle of scarcity —

You only have 16 hours a day; make…

I’m a die-hard fan of all things Google. I’ve said it before when I referenced it in my article on why I believe every business owner can benefit from using Google Calendar to streamline their workdays.

However, in just the past month, a couple of interesting things have emerged:

1- I embarked on a 60-day break from social media

2- I stopped picking up my phone multiple times through the day

What’s fascinated me, particularly with the latter habit, is how instinctively we tend to reach for our phones or the internet when a query pops into our brain. It…

J.D. Salinger, Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, Marcel Proust, Aravind Adiga, Ruskin Bond, Bill Watterson — what do all of these people have in common?

1. They were/are prolific creators and artists in their own right
2. They guarded their right to privacy and the need to create their art in seclusion

As someone who created outside the limelight for the first 6 years of her blogging career and was then creating with an audience over the next 7 years, it’s almost as if life has come full circle again.

Maybe it’s age or perhaps it’s the jaded feeling I have in…