For 20+ years, I have known that there is an energy that has been waiting to be unleashed.

Society tells us to say “no” to this. Maybe the same has happened to you.

After a lifetime of saying no, I am finally choosing to say yes to the creative urge within me.

I have bargained with it, negotiated with it, and have supressed it. I have tried to manipulate it and convince myself of alternatives.

But, as I near my 35th birthday and look at my baby daughter, I realize I need to have the courage to be the person I am.

They say I need to be practical. But the practical reality is that I will be a lot more successful doing what I love. Because I can give myself fully to my work.

I am scared to do it. But it is scarier still to hold myself back and look back at a life that is half-lived.

They say leave work at the door and focus instead on what actually matters – family, spirituality, yoga, etc. But what if work itself can be a spiritual practice? What if being creative means to show up with an energy to engage more fully in my relationships?

Creativity is the natural order of life. Life itself is creative energy. Creativity is my gift from God. To use this creativity is my gift back to God.

What does creativity mean? Does it mean to write? To paint? To make music?

I am choosing to think of creativity as a way of letting the higher power create through me. Some days, it will be in the form of a written word. Other day, it will be in the form of videos. Or products, services, talks and more.

To create is to give myself fully. To feel into things. To trust. To leap into the empty void. To lead with my heart and then engage the head to stick the landing.

This is a scarier way to live. I am sometimes jealous of my friends who are doctors, lawyers, actuaries, engineers, and more. The small shop owners.

But as the world economy evolves, I realize that to live a creative life is the only real game left. It is a game that never ends. You play it because the game itself is endlessly interesting.

While with other jobs, people play will play until they win the Monopoly game. Their homes are made.

Not so with the creative. My game is endless and I wish to play it forever.

My inspiration to play this game in my own way comes from a man who gave himself to the world. Pramukh Swami Maharaj. He taught to live and give abundantly. To hold nothing back. To love freely and openly. To always inspire. To always give.

Why would I not want to live like that?

If you have been waiting for a sign to live creatively, take this to be it. And join me for the journey!

You might be drawn too much to one medium to miss out on ways to fast-track your growth if you just shift the medium.

I have been looking to learn more about tax fundamentals now that I’ve been living in the US for a few years. However, all my previous attempts at trying to understand it have been in the form of books. I would procrastinate with it and never read it. The numbers, concepts, and ideas were too difficult to digest for me.

Based on my search history, I soon started getting YouTube recommendations as well. However, YouTube optimizes for recommendations and watch times, and I soon started getting recommendations for highly polarizing videos.

I would see videos like “here’s why you’re poor,” or “what to avoid if you don’t want to get audited.” These are shocking videos that makes me less likely to engage with them (although I see why others would be drawn by the click bait titles).

What I needed was a calm way of being explained basic concepts, without the hype. I needed this knowledge to be transmitted visually with examples shown to me as I went through it.

I finally realized that I need to learn this from almost a university like lecture format. So I found a course online and I’m now learning about these concepts in a more constructive manner.

The same goes for other things. For some other business skills, I am finding that I do better looking for live communities where I can engage with others who are also trying to master the same new skills. So I’m looking for that.

For deeper ideas, I still find myself looking at books. For bite-sized digests of ideas, I go to podcasts.

If you’re struggling to acquire a certain skill, or grow on a certain path, it might just be that you’re using the wrong medium to learn it. You are perhaps using the medium you are most familiar with, not the medium that works best for you to learn it.

Find the right medium and accelerate your learning.

Caveat: it is just as important to avoid the wrong medium. Reading a book isn’t always the best idea for example, sometimes a TED talk is enough to grasp the big ideas. At the same time, a talk is not always the right idea and you can understand it better if you just read the book or original paper behind it.

It’s not about how long you’ve been a practicing attorney.

It’s not about how big or small your law firm is.

It’s not about how impressive your network is.

You can get outsized clients if you know how to construct the buying experience.

The research backs me up:

“The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) found that 53% of customer loyalty is attributed to the customer’s buying experience, according to a survey of over 5,000 people at members’ customer organizations. Compare this to company and brand impact (19%)…and value-to-price ratio (9%).”

Have you ever constructed a Client Buying Experience (CBE)?

I’ve identified 9 different variables you can use to construct your own CBE in 5 minutes or less.

I’ve created a short email course to get into this topic.

5 Ideas. Shared over 5 Days. Actionable in 5 Minutes.

“What’s your plan to provide value to your prospective clients?” I asked the lawyers.

“We will publish thought leadership and post it on LinkedIn and our site,” they replied back.

“Does anyone read it? Have you gotten any business from it?” I asked back.

“Uhh…we aren’t really sure.”

Without optimizing any content, without any measurement, without any calls to actions, law firms are all following the same “playbook” of publishing content that no one reads or engages with.

It’s the blind leading the blind.

This is a way of deluding yourselves into thinking you’re doing big things with little to no payoff.

No, this is not about asking for likes on an article. But you do need a strategy.

Even if you rise conversions from 1% to 2%, you’ve just DOUBLED your revenues or client base. Are you measuring this? Do you have a plan?

In the interest of walking the talk, I’ll make an offer: If you’d like to talk about how to have a coherent game plan for business development, keep reading these posts. Over the next month, I’d like to pull back the curtain on how to do this all right and identify the biggest mistakes that lawyers make right now.

If you’d like to short circuit that and move faster, check out my services here.

“I don’t know why a client would choose me vs any other lawyer or law firms out there.”

This is a common thing I hear when working with lawyers. Despite all the posturing, most lawyers I’ve spoken with are deeply unsure about their place in front of the client.

To combat this, most of them were putting in even more effort. Attending more virtual events. Writing more pieces. Grinding even more to become more technically proficient. And of course burning out in the process.

This is so unfortunate.

The fact is simple: you don’t need to do MORE.

Your success in front of the client has everything to do with being able to deeply understand your client and solve their needs then and there. You don’t need to be a superhero lawyer for this.

You just need to be more human.

Thankfully, this skill is learnable. It is the first thing we go over when I work with lawyers.

Sadly, lawyers are often taught to suppress this. They aren’t taught how to do this while being professional.

The other antidote is to find your unique selling proposition or USP. This is one of the first things we do when we start working together. If you’re curious about this, check it out here.