I’ll be back in a few hours.

I said this to Camille, my wife, on my way out the door to meet my CEO. It was the Monday after I'd had my epiphany on the New Jersey Turnpike, or at the very least a steeling of my resolve. On a walk around the block with my CEO, I was told to leave. Just as I expected. And I was back home in a few hours with my wife as promised.

In some ways, that was the best walk around the block I'd ever taken. It was the springboard for everything that's happened since. I was ready to reframe the narrative of my life and take control of where I was headed. I wouldn't let this break me. I would come out stronger. I knew it.

Turning Failure into Opportunity

Self‐perception and narratives have such a hold over us. We all see ourselves as the star in our story, after all. But, we're also quick to see the worst in ourselves. To let doubt creep in and fear take over.

As I realized at the rest stop, the story of your life, the narrative that you tell yourself, can be determinative. Part of what finally clicked for me was that I didn't need to be the victim anymore. That I was stronger than I'd given myself credit for and that it was time to take a bet on myself and truly leap into the void of starting my own business and making my own money.

Before this revelation, I thought everyone would look down on me for being fired. Again. Or that anyone who told me it would be fine was lying. But once I viewed myself in a positive light, I could see that my reputation was better than I thought. My network was more open and willing to help than I had previously believed. I had more opportunities than I ever thought possible.

I remember the realization I had in the days and weeks after that penultimate firing, thinking to myself, “Somehow I've emerged from this experience more powerful than when I went into it.”

Failure is a framing. Success is a framing. As my father would routinely tell me, there were people who emerged from the Holocaust and, because they survived, considered themselves the luckiest people on the planet, even perhaps after losing their entire families and suffering unspeakable tragedy. And there are people who are late for an appointment or misplace their car keys and think they've suffered unspeakable loss and can't bear to face the day.

And, again referencing and paraphrasing Henry Ford, both of those people are correct. Your life is whatever story you tell yourself. And the most important point is that what you tell yourself—that story—is YOUR CHOICE.

It may not feel like it at times, but it is. If you consider yourself a loser, you are. If you consider yourself a winner, you are. We speak our reality into existence.

So I went home after my walk‐about with my now former CEO and told myself a new story. One where I got to work and started building something for myself that didn't depend on the whims of others. A fresh page where I could map out the life I've always wanted. And it all started with recognizing the power of experience.

The Power of Experience

The point of sharing my story isn't to say you should start your own company. This book is about finding the greatness within yourself and finding a way to bring it out into the world and giving you a framework for doing that. For realizing your dreams and becoming the person you believe you are inside.

For me, that journey led to Pavilion and achieving all the things I'd dreamt about for so many years. For you it may be something else. The point is that you are the author of your own narrative.

Experience is learned the hard way. From doing things right and succeeding—and doing things wrong and failing. Starting a business was the outcome of the years of experience I had leading up to that point. The time and purpose was right for me in 2017.

At that point, I'd been working for 18 years. I'd worked at high‐growth companies that had succeeded, and I'd played a part. I'd also worked in companies that wanted to succeed, but didn't have the right formula. I'd had term sheets pulled. I'd been fired. I'd made the right hires. And some wrong ones, too—like the time I brought in a new sales manager to run the team who spent an hour talking about himself and why he loved Billy Joel concerts. He immediately lost the trust and credibility of the team and damaged my credibility in the process. (I also got the strong feeling that despite being a family man he had a bad drug problem. But I digress.)

As discussed in Chapter 1, all those so‐called failures were really building blocks for later success. But only if I took a long enough view on my life and my career to see them as such.

If I needed success right away, if every experience had to be the one that put me on top of the mountain, then failures were just failures. But if I could be patient and not need anything in the moment, but simply trust that the path I was taking would lead me somewhere good if I approached it from a place of genuine curiosity, empathy, and compassion, then those life lessons could be experiences. And experiences could lead me to success.

Fresh out of school, many people prioritize money and glory. They want to climb the ladder quickly to a bigger salary and a more impressive title. I know I did.

But a career is a long‐term play. You'll never reach your full potential if you don't have a wealth of experiences to guide you. The first stage of your career is the time to gain as much experience as possible. Choosing bad companies early can actually give you powerful insights to avoid costly mistakes in the latter stages of your career. So don't be afraid to take a job for the experience. To try something new. And absorb as much knowledge as you can.

I came home from my final firing ready to get to work, but I needed to figure out what work I wanted to do and how to get started. It all started with getting my expertise on paper.

The Power of Documenting Your Expertise

One of the best pieces of advice I received was from Camille. I got home from my last day at The Muse and told her I wanted to start a consulting company, but didn't know precisely where to start. She said, “Write down everything you know about building and running a company. Why don't you start there?”

A brilliant piece of advice.

I opened my laptop and let the knowledge flow. I typed all of the elements that I knew made for a successful company. Different decisions on pricing, on team design, on compensation, on functional roles within an organization.

All at once, all of my failures transformed into critical tools, ultimately becoming a diagnostic tool I leveraged in my consulting work. That diagnostic tool then turned into a consulting product I could sell to CEOs and companies, and this led me to meeting founders, investors, and others who needed help.

More and more, it dawned on me that helping others was what I was meant to do. I was actively rewriting my narrative as I jotted down lessons from all these experiences I'd had—experiences I'd previously deemed failures. I could harness all I'd gone through and help others succeed.

If you're not sure where you want to go, the process of documentation is a useful and important step to help you understand your status quo. What are the things you've learned over the years, and how can you classify and structure them into a usable system to guide you forward?

My diagnostic tool ended up being an almost 600‐question survey I would use to evaluate companies against 144 different sub‐categories of excellence, rolling up into 21 super‐categories, and culminating in one specific grade every company could receive and benchmark themselves against to understand their performance. The result had objective criteria and became an interesting and useful piece of intellectual property as I looked to build out my consulting business and ended up generating a pipeline of well over six figures in just a matter of weeks.

Of course, the diagnostic tool was useless if nobody knew it existed, which was why the second step of my journey wasn't just writing down everything I knew but calling everyone I knew.

The Power of Maintaining Your Network

I picked up the phone and started dialing. I called old colleagues. Executive search firms I'd worked with at places like True and Daversa and Kindred. Old investors I'd known from places like Comcast Ventures or Edison Ventures. Old CEOs. Anyone who might be interested in hearing how I was doing. Anyone who might be able to help. Anyone who I might be able to help. I would give them an update, I would tell them about what I was doing, and I would see where the breadcrumb trail would lead.

I hoped every call would turn into at least one additional call with someone else, or somewhere and at some point I would find an opportunity to market my new diagnostic tool and make some money of my own.

It sounds simple, and yet so many people don't take this obvious step. As some people say, your network is your net worth.

But this never would have worked if I hadn't actively maintained my network over the years. Maintaining your network isn't just calling people when you need something. It's about offering to help them without asking anything in return. It's about finding specific, thoughtful ways you can support them. It's about rooting for them and lifting them up through their downs, then celebrating their wins.

Pavilion is built on this same mentality of reciprocity, or give to get. You should always look to give, whether it's your time, expertise, or connecting a friend with someone else in your network. Only by giving will we get anything in return from our network.

In fact, that's really the only mechanism through which I view networking. As I've shared with our Members many times, I loathe happy hours. I don't want to just bump into random people and make small talk. I'm an introvert, and happy hours suck the energy from me.

No, when I do networking, I am simply looking to help someone. That's it. I am looking to do anything I can to help them, and, importantly, I'm not keeping score. I'm not tabulating the value of my help and sending them an invoice. I am helping them with no expectation of anything in return.

I can't stress this enough, and you'll read about this in a variety of different ways throughout the book. But if you're reading these words now, please, please stop keeping score. Look to help. That's the trick. That's the secret.

The point of this book is that giving is not a detour on the path to success. It IS the path to success. Burn that into your brain and you'll have embraced one of the core concepts that's led me here.

For me, maintaining my network meant being good to other folks and seeing where I could help them. I liked helping people, and it gave me a good feeling about myself.

So when I started calling folks, I realized they liked me, too. That they remembered when I'd been useful or helpful, and many were eager to do the same in return. Importantly, I didn't go into a call with expectations. I didn't need anything from that call. The goal was simply to explain my situation, let them know that I was building my consulting business, and see if they knew anybody that might benefit from a conversation.

And something amazing happened as I worked through my call list and paced my living room, wearing grooves into my floor. Somehow, some way, I'd emerged from this “failure” more powerful and in a better place than ever before.

Undoubtedly the years of hard work I'd put into helping other people had made a difference, because so many people were eager and happy to take my call, eager to help make introductions, eager to vouch for me, eager to help.

My very first consulting project came from a call with my good friend Rishi and a breakfast with another friend, Jordan. Both, separately, mentioned this interesting company called LeagueApps that provided software for youth sports organizations. They had just fired their VP of sales, and needed assistance on their go‐to‐market. That led to introductions to the co‐founders, Brian Litvack, the CEO, and Jeremy Goldberg, the president.

Both ended up being great people and were nodding along as I laid out my idea for a five‐day diagnostic process in which I would interview their sales and marketing teams, identify gaps and areas of opportunity using my framework, and help them assess what they needed to move forward.

I quoted $12,000 and they countered with $10,000. I accepted, and just like that I had my first client. We signed the agreement on November 6—a little over two weeks after I was fired.

That's how quickly success can happen if you bring the right mindset. The right mindset is not simply one of determination, although that is part of it. It was also about reframing my narrative, refusing to be the victim, not giving in to feelings of self‐pity or self‐loathing, and then doing the work.

And part of the work was about approaching interactions with other people without a direct need and without desperation. It wasn't about one specific person to talk to or one specific outcome. It was about the process of managing and maintaining a network and looking for opportunities to have non‐transactional, long‐term relationships and connections with others.

Playing for the Long Term

A theme of my life and of my perspective on what can drive a different kind of professional success revolves around the notion of long‐term thinking.

As I mentioned above, early in your career is the time for experiences. But long‐term thinking goes beyond that. If you look at your career in the long term, you'll see that mid‐career is when you should start leveraging all of your experiences to take on more responsibility. That responsibility leads to the title. And that leads to wealth. Focusing on the long term and building up your career is a distinct competitive advantage in a world that is so short‐term oriented.

There's an element of spirituality and faith in long‐term thinking because it relies on a fundamentally positive view of existence and the universe, at least within the framework of regulated capitalism—and for things that are not tragedies completely outside of your control.

But within the lens of things that are generally within your control, you can benefit from taking a much longer‐term view of the world and of your career.

Part of the reason that long‐term thinking benefits you is because it relieves you of desperation and need. If you can enter interactions and transactions without the need to be paid back or be rewarded, without the cloying desperation that need imposes upon you, then you can find serendipity and positivity in chance encounters.

And if you can think for the long term, you can do things for people without needing an immediate return. There are so many reasons why this can benefit you from a selfish perspective, and, as one of those again that I think about, a big one is that so few people do it.

So many people have been taught to “never split the difference” and “don't leave money on the table.” So much of business philosophy is about maximizing value extraction and not about thinking about value creation from a long‐term, relationship‐based perspective.

In each interaction it might be okay to leave money on the table or to do things for people that don't require immediate payback. The fundamentally selfish reason it's okay is because the long‐term value creation you get from a warm and supportive relationship can be many factors bigger than the short‐term gain you might get from ensuring you chisel people for every nickel they might have.

Like when I got my first consulting job through my network. That wasn't because I cold‐called someone once. That was the result of years of relationship‐building and support without expectations. And when the time came that I was the one who needed support, my network was there for me.

Life is not a zero‐sum game. There's room for all of us to win, and leaning toward kindness and giving and sharing can actually help you reap even bigger rewards than being cutthroat.

The Exit Ramp

It's important to note that the exit ramp for me or for you might be different. The exit we are taking is off the metaphorical shit‐stain that is the New Jersey Turnpike of transactionalism, fear, anxiety, and failure so that we can take a different road that delivers personal satisfaction and contentment over the course of your life.

It doesn't necessarily mean that you should immediately start your own company or quit your job. But what it does mean is that you can take an intentional actualized view of your life and yourself and choose to live not in fear, desperation, or need, but act from a place of contentment and abundance.

For me, that contentment needed to come from my own independence from these forces. I needed to break free from the traditional dictates of work and transactionalism, and I needed to gain confidence in my own abilities to forge a path for myself, independent of others.

As I said, this decision was intentional and, as a consequence, empowered. By hook or by crook, I was going to make my own money, even if that meant reducing the urgency to make a specific amount of money or to achieve some specific world‐changing goal by a certain date. That pressure often comes from the influence of investors and venture capital into businesses, and it forecloses the opportunity to take things organically. They assume that capital is the key constraint and that a harried, frenzied, anxious approach to growth is the best possible route to success.

I'm here to tell you that it's not.

Reflect on Your Joy

A long‐term view is useful because it underscores the value of experience and resets failure into learning. Learning and experience translate into judgment, and over time, you use that judgment to make better decisions.

But to take an exit ramp, you have to be on the highway.

The point that I'm making is that I want you to achieve joy and happiness and contentment in your life, and I think there is a path to doing that from the moment you join the workforce. In that sense, the exit ramp is simply a metaphor for employing a different perspective on how you want to behave, what you need from other people, and what values you want to embody.

But in another sense, the sequencing is important, and you can't leverage experience if you don't have any. Which means that you may need to delay ultimate professional satisfaction so that you can develop and gain the experiences you'll need to achieve that satisfaction and success in the first place.

So many people advise you to “do what you love,” but as I learned at my failed record label, that does not mean you will have a successful career. And that way of thinking can be problematic. Maybe you've never experienced any happiness at all in life and that spills over to your work. Or you may have misdefined certain activities such that you missed how they might contribute.

But on your journey it is important to be on the lookout. Saying “do what you love” is silly if you don't know what you love. And again you may fall victim to misdefinition. Still, you should watch for the things that give you joy. To understand those moments when you feel flow, or when you feel transported, or when you feel that sense of fulfillment and maybe nobody is even paying you for it.

My favorite easy way to articulate this is to be in tune with your body and understand what activities or people bring you energy and which sap your energy. If you can be in tune with and aware of the things you're doing that bring you energy, you can optimize for those activities over time.

Over the years while I'd been toiling away as a “Chief Revenue Officer” at all these various startups, I had found flow, but I'd found it in strange places. My greatest sense of satisfaction came from helping people I cared about. Helping means a lot of things when it comes to the workplace. It could be a piece of advice, or it could be a valuable introduction.

Beginning in 2014, I started hosting regular dinners and meetups. It began with an admonition from one of my colleagues, Joanna Curran. She'd said, “Put yourself at the center of something.” And that inspired me. It inspired me to start hosting meetups and talks, and bringing people together to share common ground. Those meetups translated into quarterly dinners where we'd all show up at Rosa Mexicana or a sushi place near Union Square to talk shop.

It's funny because I consider myself an introvert. Or perhaps an ambivert. Regardless, I don't get energy from generalized human interactions. But somehow I do get energy from time‐bound, focused human interactions with a purpose.

But ambivert, extrovert, introvert, or whatever other vert, I'd been hosting dinners for over three years when I was fired from The Muse and when I was pacing around my apartment on speakerphone.

I'd always believed that random meetings don't really do very much if the people who attend those meetings can't convene in between the meetings to share thoughts and maintain the momentum of their conversations.

To that end, we'd all been on a group email thread since 2014 where everyone was in the To: line. But after a while, that seemed onerous, and furthermore it could cost confidentiality and intimacy if people's thoughts were directly forwarded from their email addresses.

In 2016, I gave that email thread a name and created a Google Group to house and archive the conversations. That name was “The New York Revenue Collective.” That name eventually became Pavilion and changed my life, but more importantly, it eventually helped tens of thousands of people change the trajectory of their lives and careers for the better.

And yet, in the moment, I was just having fun and doing what I liked to do. It's only in hindsight that all of this falls into place as a logical narrative. It didn't at the time.

At the time it was simply joyful.

Some part of me derives so much genuine satisfaction from making an introduction between two people and hearing back weeks later, “I got a job!” or “I hired them!” or some other meaningful productive outcome. I didn't need to be paid to do that—I didn't even consider that it might be possible to get paid to do that—it just felt so good.

Helping others experience happiness and joy—that's what powers me. Even before I had a name for it or a philosophy or anything like that.

When people approach me, asking, “How did you do it?” it's hard to answer. I originally approached this work with no need and no expectations. Sure, I'd always thought I'd be a better CEO than the people I was reporting to, but all I ever really wanted was freedom and independence. I didn't need to be the CEO if we were winning and achieving great things.

But the foundation of the company that I've built since then was not born from an MBA lecture or an incubator or some structured attempt at world domination. It was built from sincere joy. The joy that I derived from creating things, creating experiences for people, watching them enjoy those experiences, and finding success based on the infrastructure I'd provided and the guidance and help I'd lent.

It took a long time, and it happened from love and not from need. It happened because I took an exit ramp, but only after I'd had the years of experience and wisdom that I needed to make that decision intentionally and with purpose.

If you're not ready to strike out on your own, that's okay. Life is not about immediately taking huge risks and throwing caution to the wind, particularly when you might be in a situation with fewer options.

But along your journey, you should trust that goodness will find you if you're open to it. Look for the small activities, moments, and interactions that ultimately fill you up. Start to catalog and classify them as you go. Build up an archive. Because those moments of joy are clues about the true path of happiness for yourself and for others.

And for me I discovered my joy when I was building something that made no money and had no ulterior motive, save for bringing people together and helping them achieve their own goals. I did this explicitly with the hope that some great thing would happen to them and they didn't need to do anything for me in return.

The joy I found in giving led to the set of values foundational to Pavilion, and those values have powered us for many years as we've grown.

You Are Not a Victim

At the core of all of these decisions lies an underlying assumption. That I actually did have control over my life. That's important to underscore and stress.

Part of your path to happiness—part of the ability to experience happiness in the first place—is a belief that you have control.

And it's true that logically free will is an impossibility. But even if we all die and go wherever we're going and they tell us that free will was always a myth, life is better and more fulfilling if we believe it exists.

If you believe that you control what happens, how you feel, and what you think, you have a sense of independence and autonomy that itself can bring you joy. It's why those small acts of creation like creating a Google Group for the New York Revenue Collective were so fulfilling to me, because it confirmed my suspicion that I was in control of my life.

So as we play for the long term and look to bring happiness into our lives, we must correspondingly assume that we have that power in the first place.

It sounds simple, but for so many people it's not. Do you know folks who are constantly complaining about things happening to them? As if they play no role? My family always jokes that in Spanish the construction of the sentence defrays responsibility and blame. “Se me cayo” literally means “it fell to me” as opposed to “I dropped it.”

We have to dispense with that construction if we are to have a meaningful life. The universe is a pattern of energy upon which you can imprint your desires and your wishes, but to do that you have to believe that you actually have that control in the first place.

So one of the first steps in taking the exit ramp is to dispense with victimhood. You are not a victim. Most of the things that happened in your life were a result of decisions you made and the manner in which you behaved.

There were and are things that I've done over the years that caused me to be fired. The way I behaved and the mindset I brought to my job. Those were my choices. I was not “unlucky.” In fact, the reality is that I consider myself incredibly lucky. And I am so grateful for every failure I've ever had and every negative experience because they brought me to where I am now.

So let's ensure that you're not telling yourself a sad story with you as the victim. You weren't unlucky. You make your own luck. And even if it's not true, it's a better way to live when you believe that you do.

The conceit of living this way is that you have power over your future and the outcomes you generate. And just as importantly, whatever results you've generated in the past have been a result of your actions and behaviors and not simply someone else's fault or problem. Again, you are not the victim.

I appreciate that there are so many factors contributing to whether this is in fact true. And there are societal constructs and biases that have definitely impacted your ability to get where you want to go. I am not denying those realities. This is saying that blaming your results on outside forces isn't useful to you. That's the point. Being a victim doesn't help you get where you want to go.

Part of taking the exit ramp is dispensing with the idea that you are a victim of circumstances. That you are any kind of victim at all. Take ownership of who you are and where you want to go, and you'll get there.

Release the Pressure

I was recently on the phone with a Pavilion Member who was anxious that life was passing him by. Anxious that he'd been in the startup land, grinding it out for years as a chief revenue officer and didn't have enough to show for it. His company had just been sold, and he'd worked there for years. The founder and CEO made gobs of money, but my Member had only made a little, and he was frustrated. He was feeling like it was finally time to set out on his own and be the founder himself.

He'd been incubating a product in the insurance industry with a technical co‐founder and had been iterating and testing it for months. Unfortunately, nothing was working.

He felt strongly that he wanted to be a CEO and founder; he just didn't know of what.

The problem with this approach to entrepreneurship is that it's based on you and not the universe. It's not built around joy. It's built around anxiety and resentment and an inordinate pressure that now is the time that something must be done to make your life meaningful and purposeful.

And that's not, in my experience, where true greatness comes from.

I told my friend to stick it out. To stop focusing on “being a founder” and start having more conversations with potential customers. Pick a category that you're passionate about. Pick a problem that you're consumed with solving. Pick something you've found joy working on. Those are the criteria for finding something meaningful and purposeful.

That joy that we seek in controlling our destiny eludes us when we apply too much pressure to ourselves around what we're supposed to be and by when, and the anxiety comes from insecurity around our place in the world.

The leap of faith into the unknown must be powered by joy, not desperation. It needs to be a positive, unbending belief that propels you forward, not a cloying desperation that you're not where you're supposed to be.

So how do you do that?

Well, it starts by releasing the pressure yourself. Remember that I used to state publicly that by 28 I was going to be worth $12.8 million. I have no idea where that came from. It was 1999 during the dot‐com boom, and I was determined to prove to people that if I just said something loudly that would make it true.

It was a dumb thing to say and a weird goal to have because it didn't have anything to do with anything. It didn't come from experience. It didn't come from wisdom. It didn't come from any specific point of view on how to help people or what I could do for them. It was just a statement about my own insecurity and my personal fear that I was insignificant in the eyes of the universe.

Twenty‐eight came and went, and I wasn't worth anything close to $12.8 million. What I did do at 28 was begin a marriage that ended in bitterness, poverty, and heartbreak. I certainly didn't have a ton of money to show for it.

Saying “I need to be a CEO” or “I need to start something” comes from a similar place. A place that's only about you.

Those kinds of impractical outcome‐focused goals, without a plan, and without any kind of external focus on helping other people, are bound to fail. And they derive from the intense pressure we all feel to be significant within a certain time frame.

I'm not saying you're not going to be significant. You will be—if you come from the right place, and reset your destination around what truly gives you purpose, and if you release the pressure from every decision.

Trust your gut, trust your intuition, and believe that if you live relatively well you'll be alive a long time. You can start a business in your fifties. You can change the world in your sixties. Robert Altman didn't direct his first movie until his forties.

In Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion‐Dollar Startups (2021), Ali Tamaseb revealed that the founders of eventual unicorns had a median age of 34 when they started their businesses. More broadly, Harvard Business Review reported in 2018 that 45 was the average age at which a successful founder started their company.

There is time. There is plenty of time.

And, again, even if there isn't, it is far more useful to believe there is. This isn't about a lack of urgency. This is about not needing just to need. The more you need, the more desperately you want, and the less you'll get.

That's how the universe works, unfortunately.

Don't contort yourself into a pretzel based on bland generalities and aphorisms. You don't need to do anything by any certain time, save for the time that your heart stops beating. You can have children in your forties or fifties. Look at that woman from the Real Housewives of Atlanta. Science can do wonderful things. You can strike it rich late in life. There is no timetable.

I'm not saying be average or that you should have to accept that you might be mediocre. That's not true. I believe in your greatness, whoever you are.

I remember my therapist once tried to talk me out of these feelings by telling me that feeling special or different didn't mean I had something great inside me, it meant I had a personality flaw from childhood.

I'm not saying that at all.

You DO have greatness within you. I'm saying the way to bring that greatness out from inside yourself is not by exerting undue pressure, but by releasing the pressure and trusting that if you discover joy and grace and compassion and love, good things truly will happen even if you don't quite know exactly how or why.

Some of my happiest times in life were sitting at my little white desk from West Elm in the corner of a rundown apartment on 8th Avenue and 12th Street in 2020, the middle of the pandemic, sending emails to our Members. Revenue Collective, the company that became Pavilion, grew five times during the pandemic. It was miraculous.

And yet on any given day I wasn't focused on any specific kind of growth metric. I was focused on finding joy. I removed the pressure from myself that I had to earn anything more than what I needed to pay my bills and pay my rent. And from there I could move up Maslow's pyramid to self‐actualization.

So if you're thinking about taking a leap, striking out on your own, think first about what your motivation is. Think about whether you can afford to go for a long stretch without money. Think about if you're coming from insecurity or desperation, or if you're coming from contentment and joy.

I told my friend who wanted to be a founder to stay at his job. Thinking you should be a founder or CEO isn't enough. It's not coming from the right place, especially if you don't have any kind of insights about the market. Don't frame it as “I need to start something.” Frame it as “I found a problem that a lot of people have and I love solving for them.”

Don't mistake it for complacency. The exit ramp is not about accepting mediocrity. We will still do our thing. We will still work hard and bring urgency and intensity and resolve to our daily lives—but we'll do it from a different place. Not a place of need or competition, but a place of peace.

Once we've made the decision to start playing by a different set of rules, ones based on kindness, compassion, and helping others, we can begin to reset our destination.

Chapter 2 Tactics: Lessons of Consulting

There is no job security in the modern world. There is no security really of any kind. The world is an uncertain place. We know that, of course. So part of the theme of this book, of my philosophy, is that you need to build up sources of income for yourself that are independent of employers. Advising and consulting are great things once you have the experience.

And one of the reasons consulting and advising are great is because you can use those opportunities to talk to a wide variety of customers and people to understand their problems. Solving those problems for them might lead to an idea or a framework or a solution that could turn into a company or a product.

When you're consulting, there's only one way to scale (unless you want to hire a bunch of people, which can be a pain in the ass). That way is to charge more money for less time, since time is your only asset.

The advice I give is to avoid charging by the hour if possible and instead charge for “products.” One of the first things I did for my consulting business was build out a diagnostic tool that would assess how well a company was positioned to grow. This was the “product” I sold to LeagueApps and it was priced at $12,000 for four days (although we settled on $10,000). $12,000 for four days is a $3,000 day rate. That's a lot of money for a lot of people, but I never quoted my services by the hour or by the day. I quoted them by my product.

Eventually I raised the price to $15,000, and I cut the time to three days, and all of a sudden I had a $5,000 day rate, growing my implied revenue per project by 65% on a per day basis. Presto changeo.

If you need access to some of the materials I used, we provide them free to all our Pavilion Members. Just ask. Feel free to copy, modify, or steal in any way you want if it's helpful.