You’re Not Doing It Wrong
Every so often I sit down with a fellow entrepreneur – somebody a bit ahead or behind me in their business journey. I don’t mean financially ahead or behind. Where someone is in their business journey and how much money their business makes are correlated, but not the same. Instead, I mean something less easy […]
If You’re Afraid of Feeling Manipulative
How do very successful people ask unapologetically for what they want while the rest of us offer endless caveats or don’t speak up at all? I’ve been thinking about a topic that came up in my conversation with Gagan Biyani at the Snafu Conference: manipulation. Gagan has built his career in growth marketing: a subset of marketing […]
What the Future Requires
In the ten days since the Snafu Conference, I’ve had a very difficult time sitting down to write this newsletter. It’s not writer’s block. To quote Seth Godin, “There is no such thing as writer’s block.” I’m just tired. In the last ten days, I’ve: Successfully produced a new conference. Gotten married. And over the […]
Unexpected Lessons in Service
I got married on Monday, and produced the inaugural Snafu Conference on Thursday. It was a good week! But as a result I haven’t been reading or writing as much as usual. So instead of my usual article, I thought I’d share something fun I’ve been working on over the last few months: a book proposal. What […]
My Snafu Tech Stack
Over the years of running Responsive Conference, I’ve had a lot of sponsors promoting their work: HR tech software, organizational design consultants, and global companies burnishing their brand. One of the difficulties, though, is that I am not a buyer of people promoting their work at Responsive Conference. I’m not in HR or Talent at a […]
10 Days Until Snafu
We have a really exciting Snafu Conference coming up in 10 days, so today I wanted to share a few highlights from the agenda. We’d love to see you in person in Oakland — but if you can’t join us, the main stage sessions will be recorded. Look for those in a few weeks. Coaching is Selling: […]
How To Date
I’m happily engaged. I think we might get married next month? But I sat down with a friend recently who is dating – and in San Francisco, no less. Our meeting was ostensibly a business lunch but quickly turned into a “But how are you doing personally?” conversation. The answer: her dating life was difficult. […]
How to Sell Yourself – A Workshop
How to Sell Yourself – A Workshop I taught a 100+ person workshop this week for Sidebar, a community of senior leaders in tech. Today, I thought I’d share the session – along with a write-up about it. You can watch the full workshop here: Robin’s Pumpkin Patch My first business – if it […]
The Case for Relentless Optimism
Things are pretty dark right now. It is easy to feel sad or overwhelmed. Personally, I’m finding it hard not to get stuck doomscrolling Twitter. So I want to make a case for a different kind of unrelenting optimism. The Problem When we usually think of optimism we think of positive thinking or “good vibes.” […]
How to Build Amidst Chaos
I’ve spent too much time on Twitter/X this past week. Just this morning, instead of sitting down to write, I watched footage of the killing of a protester by ICE in Minneapolis. I have a lot of business conversations this year that start with someone saying: “I’m doing well – all things considered.” Given the […]
AI ate my business… except it didn’t
A year ago, I was convinced AI was about to come for my business. About 70% of Zander Media’s revenue comes from video production, and interview-based videos, in particular. The technology exists to take a picture of someone off the Internet and generate video of them saying almost anything. But as humans, we aren’t there yet. […]
The Simplest Way to Stay Consistent
There are plenty of areas in my life where I struggle to do what I say I want to do. Exercise isn’t one of them. My fiancée and I recently started going to a new gym together. She has a long history with sports – basketball, soccer, tennis. I’m something of a gym rat. What’s […]
10 Myths of Selling
Most of us don’t hate selling because we’re bad at it. We hate selling because we believe a handful of myths that make selling into something manipulative, transactional, and bad. What follows are some of the most common myths about selling – and what actually works instead. Myth 1: Build It and They Will Come […]
Best Books of 2025
At the end of the year, I thought it would be fun to review some of my favorite books from the last year. A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan When I feel overwhelmed by the state of the […]
Don’t Try to Persuade the Unpersuadable
Years ago, when I was working alongside the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford, BJ Fogg told me not to try to persuade the unpersuadable, but to find what people want and make it easier for them to say “yes.” I’ve carried that with me ever since, and it informs a lot of the work that […]
Boundaries Are the Sale
The reason we don’t like salespeople is they don’t respect our boundaries. When a telemarketer continues to say, “This will only take one minute,” after we’ve already said it’s not a good time, they are disrespecting our boundaries. The Rocket Ship VC Story A venture capital firm reached out to us at Zander Media last year. One […]
Never Close A Sale
When I first moved to San Francisco, I worked as a personal trainer in gyms. Gyms are intense sales environments. The folks at the front desk are trying to close new members, and personal trainers prowl the gym in search of new clients and the “packages” they’re hoping to sell. I got a job working […]
The Commandments of Reluctant Sales
A few weeks ago, I spent several hours with my friend Michael, a ghostwriter who helps authors clarify their ideas. One of the fun tasks he gave me out of our time together was to list my Commandments for Reluctant Sales. The argument behind Snafu is that the very things that make us reluctant salespeople […]
You’re Asking the Wrong Questions
In last week’s How To Sell Yourself workshop, one participant admitted he sometimes asks too many questions. He gets so caught in curiosity that he “gives away all his marbles” before ever making the ask. Another participant shared the opposite pattern: she avoids asking questions because she’s afraid of what the answers might reveal – especially when […]
My First Ever Gift Guide
I’ve never compiled a gift guide before, but with the holidays around the corner and two years of “3 Things I’ve Loved” in the Snafu newsletter, I thought I’d give it a try! Best Mechanical Pencil: Pentel GraphGear 500 Mechanical Drafting Pencil I’ve been using the same mechanical pencil since high school. They used to cost […]
Behavior Change for Reluctant Salespeople
I started the How to Sell Yourself cohort series when, independently and within weeks of each other, two friends asked me for advice and mentorship on self-promotion. I’m not an extraordinary salesman or self-promoter, so I declined “mentorship” but suggested we get on a Zoom call to discuss and share ideas about selling. That single Zoom call […]
Introducing This Might Work
A few months ago, I started collecting Snafu articles into categories, and was surprised by how many taught the tactics of doing something very specific: fasting, buying a used car, raising a puppy, or buying a house. None of these experiments was a sure thing. In fact, nearly all of them began with the same […]
Fly Fishing in Montana
I went on a fly fishing trip last weekend in Montana with several work colleagues. When it comes to fishing, I’m a bit out of my element. A trail run through the mountains, a mountain to climb, snowshoeing, or a ski resort – these are all outdoor adventures I know well. But fishing is entirely […]
How to Curate a Conference
Whenever I curate a conference, I think about how people are feeling when they arrive and how they are feeling when they walk away. When it came to Responsive Conference 2025, most people – regardless of political ideology – were coming in with some degree of apprehension. Whether anxious about politics, AI, or the accelerating […]
The taboo of sales
My mother has been a practicing artist for fifty years. She makes mezzotints, which are something of a lost art. Her curriculum vitae is impressive and her work has been presented in some of the most famous museums in the world. But my mother lacks salesmanship: the ability to promote herself, share her story, and get […]
How to maintain flexible goals – and why it matters
The night before Day 2 of Responsive Conference, I spent an hour agonizing over how enthusiastic everyone was. I was worried the conference hadn’t struck the right balance of existential dread and optimism for the future – given that I feel a fair bit of existential dread myself! But after stressing over my attendees’ experience for an hour, […]
How to buy a house
Last month, I bought a house. Buying a house is more complicated than nearly anything else I’ve done – besides, perhaps, running a business. Over the last few weeks, I’ve highlighted some of my most popular articles from the last two years. In doing so, I realized that many of my personal favorites are those […]
Three alternative event formats
Last week’s Responsive Conference was the best event I’ve produced. Attendees have been raving about the experience, my team bonded in new ways, and I walked away without the post-conference crash that too often accompanies producing a big event. One of the things we did especially well this year was to incorporate alternative event formats into the […]
Events as service
The future is unpredictable In 2015, the authors of Responsive.org wrote that “the future is becoming increasingly difficult to predict.” Today, with global instability, political partisanship, and a more rapid rate of change than ever before in human history, those words feel prescient. The tension between organizations optimized for predictability and the unpredictable world we […]
The Best of My How-To Articles
Earlier this month, I shared some of my favorite articles from the last two years. As I reviewed them, I was forced to think a lot about my best writing (and also my worst). Some of my all-time favorite books are reference books. Maybe not by design, but these books teach the reader how to […]