Did you know Southwest Airlines was dreamed up on a paper napkin? The company’s founder drew out the initial idea on a cocktail napkin. It was a triangle representing the three cities the airline would fly between. It was a massively simple idea meant to make business travel in Texas easier. I love how some…
Mercury is in retrograde. Normally, the planet Mercury appears to travel from west to east across the night sky. But right now, Mercury will is traveling westward. If you could watch it happen all at once, Mercury appears to slow down its movement, stop, reverse direction, slow down, stop, then reverse direction again. How is…
In marketing, there’s a concept called decoy pricing strategy. It’s meant to make you spend more money than you would otherwise. Let me illustrate with a scenario. Imagine you’re at a coffee shop and they offer a drink in two sizes: small for $2 and large for $4. You’d almost certainly buy the small size…
People always approach me with their ideas. They’ll often say something like: “I have a good idea. I just don’t know how to make it happen. Can you help me?” I’m always tempted to tell them, “It’s not a good idea if you don’t know how to make it happen.” See, a good idea that…
Each week I’ve begun writing one “funny post” for my two blogs, SeriesIdeas and WorshipSetIdeas. The goal of these posts is simply to provide some fun, highly shareable content for my readers. Normally the sites are devoted to ideas from other churches, but I knew there needed to be something more to get people excited…
I’ve been working with a branch of Moody Publishers on a devotional project I’ve written. They’ve been helping me edit it and prepare it for publishing. It’s been a blast. But it’s also been enlightening. In my first call with my editor, he said something that surprised me. I’d written this devotional that I saw as…
This week I pulled a tiny prank on my Twitter followers. I found the Wikipedia entry for “link baiting”, and shared it on Twitter with the status: 12 A-list celebrities that look like chipmunks. It wasn’t particularly malicious, I just wanted to see what would happen. I wanted to see if those ridiculous blog post…
Remember as a kid, having one of those huge dreams? You wanted to be the president. Or the first astronaut on Mars. Or a cowboy. You had one big goal in mind—the crowning achievement of your life you’d one day attain. But then you grow up and you realize how truly far away from that goal.…
I spend most of my day chatting with churches. Either I’m posting up a stage design, worship set, or graphic design they’ve worked on, or I’m chatting with them about their creative process. One of the big things I’ve noticed from so many churches, is that they assume they’re being creative if they have a…
There are two big steps to being successful. Two huge steps. And I believe most people fail in one of these two areas. Sure, there are tons of steps to any successful endeavor. Tons of tiny decisions and tiny actions that lead you along the path toward success. But those tiny steps aren’t the ones…