Author: Jeff Shearer

I’ve gone through countless pens in my life, never paying them much mind. My drawer is full of them, pens I’ve never use, pens I probably will never use. But I started using a particular kind of pen a year or so ago for my journal and handwritten notes. The pen is pretty ordinary, with…

The first problem with good documentation is that no one wants to do it, so it never gets done. The second problem is that once it’s made, no one remembers to refer to it. Since no one refers to it, no one wants to create it. And around we go. If you want documentation to…

A “depth year” is a year where you focus on enjoying what you already have, rather what’s new, novel, or happens to be a desire right now. A depth year is a way of finally reading all those books already on your shelf. In my case, it’s also a way of revisiting favorite games, or…

The more you build it up to a momentous, life changing occasion, the more likely you let yourself down with a failed resolution later. You can start making a positive change in your life any day of the year. No need to wait for tomorrow if today will do. And speaking of resolutions: skip them.…

“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower Increasingly I’ve realized that one trait that separates good leaders from the great is the ability to discern the important from the merely urgent. Dwight Eisenhower had a great system for identifying the relationship between urgent and important…

I was recently in Leavenworth, a mountain tourist town themed after a Bavarian village, and known for its annual Christmas tree lighting festival. But the moment we rolled into town, we realized that seemingly everyone else in the state was there too. Every shop, restaurant, and street space was packed with throngs of people. Parking…

I often hear people talk about the amount of work they can get on a cross country flight. Maybe it’s the sensory isolation, or the crappy wifi. But me, I’m too tall for most airline seats, so I rarely can get much productive work done on the flight. But the time before the flight is…

The increasing value of most martech vendors is the underlying data they create or augment. The activity log of Marketo is a perfect example. So much value and insight is locked up in one place – it’s what fuels much of the automation magic, but it can be used for reporting too, with a bit…

I just finished re-reading Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, a book I first read in the altMBA program I participated in last year. Though the book is framed as a resource for writers and artists, the lessons can be applied to any pursuit in life. Pressfield starts by introducing the “Resistance”, a catchall for…

I’ve now launched three different Marketo environments from scratch, and in this process I’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps the biggest lesson of all, however, resides around complexity. It’s quite easy, especially if you have prior experience with the tools, to plan a sophisticated rollout and to try and immediately…