I don’t think Seth Godin ever says anything uninteresting — he might be the most profound bald-headed guy since this dude — but I particularly liked this post, in which he describes the three stages of preparation:

The first I’ll call the beginner stage. This is where you make huge progress as a result of incremental effort.

The second is the novice stage. This is the stage in which incremental effort leads to not so much visible increase in quality.

And the third is the expert stage. Here’s where races are won, conversations are started and sales are made. A huge amount of effort, off limits to most people, earns you just a tiny bit of quality. But it’s enough to get through the Dip and be seen as the obvious winner.

Godin’s point is that the middle stage is useless. You have to go through it to get to…

Tags: Tags: expertise, professionalism, publishing, seth godin, writing

I’ve been resisting the temptation to write about Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers for the past several weeks. But every time I sit down to work on something else, my mind goes back to that book. More specifically, I start thinking about the book’s second chapter, “The 10,000 Hour Rule.” Even more specifically, I come back to the idea that not all hours are created equal.

The book, as you know, is the nation’s #1 nonfiction bestseller at this moment. I think everyone I work with in the fitness business has read it. TC, editor in chief at Testosterone Muscle, wrote about it in his Atomic Dog column more than a month ago. Chad Waterbury recommended it to me even before that, and finally sent me a copy as an early birthday present when I mentioned in early January that I still hadn’t gotten…

Tags: Tags: books, journalism, Media, outliers, publishing, writing

For me, this holiday season was more exhausting and stressful than usual, for reasons that are ultimately positive.

I was busy with work, which is great. I love my new(ish) job at Testosterone Muscle, a magazine I admired for 10 years before I finally joined the team this summer.

Kimberly and I were driven like parental sled dogs this December, but I can’t complain about that either. I love the fact our children do things that weren’t available to us when we were growing up. When I was a kid, I got a few karate lessons and could only play sports if my parents didn’t have to drive me back and forth. Kimberly got to do even less. Yeah, it’s a pain to shuttle Harrison to karate twice a week, and Annie to ballet, and Meredith to all the things she’s involved in,…

Tags: Tags: books, Media, personal, publishing