Welcome to One Thing Better. Each week, the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine (that’s me) shares one way to achieve a breakthrough at work — and build a career or company you love.
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I tell a lot of personal stories in this newsletter. But I have a rule for writing about myself:
When I write about me, I’m actually always writing about you.
It’s a communications and marketing trick worth stealing. Treat yourself as a stand-in for your audience. When you tell a story, or share a personal detail, ask yourself: Can my audience see themselves in my experience? What details will help them relate? Your story is never just about you. Make sure it’s always really about them — helping them connect to your advice, ideas, or solutions.
This rule has served me well. But today, I’m going to break it.
Here’s why: I’ve discovered a nuance to it. When someone trusts your storytelling, they don’t just absorb the lesson — they get curious about the storyteller too. At that point, sharing occasional personal details doesn’t distract from that trust. It deepens it, by making you more real. This is how audiences become personally invested.
So in that spirit, I’m going to do something different today.
Today, July 28, is my 46th birthday. (Am I officially old yet?) To celebrate, I’m taking a break from this newsletter’s usual format. Instead, I’m going to tell you three random things about me. These are the things that wouldn’t normally show up in this newsletter, but that hopefully give you a better sense of who I am and how I think.
(My usual format will be back next week. If you just signed up for this newsletter, welcome! See last week’s newsletter for what usually happens here.)
OK, ready to learn more about this newsletter writer?
Let’s begin.
1. I have no sense of taste or smell
It’s been like this my whole life, but I didn’t discover the issue until college. My girlfriend at the time noticed that something was off, so she gave me a blind taste test. Turns out, I could not tell the difference between chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry ice cream. We were shocked.
I’ve gone through a lot of tests, trying to identify the cause of this. The core issue is smell. My olfactory nerves (which produce your sense of smell) simply do not work. I smell nothing. I do “taste” in the technical sense — in that I can tell the difference between sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. But I cannot detect flavor, because these two senses are so closely linked.
Here’s how to understand the problem, in a quick science lesson about cake…
When you eat chocolate cake, your tongue first identifies it as sweet. Then the cake’s odor molecules drift up to your olfactory nerves, which essentially smells the cake inside of your face — and that creates the sensation of chocolate flavor. This all happens simultaneously for you. But I’m missing that second step. When I eat chocolate cake, I only taste sweet. Never chocolate.
I’m not sad about this. I like to focus on the advantages, which are many. For example: I’m a great date. I’m happy to go anywhere, and eat anything. My wife Jen can always order two dishes at a restaurant, and I’ll just eat whatever she likes less. I also changed most of our kids’ diapers, because it made no difference to me. I can walk around New York in the summer, undisturbed by what I’m told can be some serious garbage smells. And I never crave food, which makes it much easier to eat healthy.
Every disadvantage has its advantages.
2. I started collecting ancient artifacts
It started last year, when I came upon this rock in a gallery:
That’s a neolithic flint core from roughly 6,000 years ago. See those grooves? Someone removed thin strips of rock (in a process called flintknapping), which were then fashioned into arrowheads, knives, and other tools.
I became obsessed with this rock. I thought about how, at the dawn of agriculture, this was the source material for the basics of life and trade. Everything we do today — all our work, our jobs, or technology — can be traced back to rocks just like this. It is our origin point. Our beginning. And (holy crap!) the rock was for sale.
So I bought it. I’d never done anything like that before. But I needed this.
The rock now sits on a shelf in our living room. I take great pleasure in holding it, and imagining a neolithic person holding it, and thinking about how this is the closest we’ll ever be: This shared object is our handshake across time. And because the rock is now mine, I can do what no museum ever would. I can let my friends hold it too.
(If you want to geek out more on this, here’s a conversation I had with an archeologist and stone tools expert.)
This has inspired a collection. I now also own some Hellenistic Greek terra cotta statue heads, some first-century Roman oil lamps, and a medieval coin (France, early 1200s). I want my next purchase to be a clay cuneiform tablet.
Each time I get an ancient object, I marvel anew at how it survived so much time, and how I can now become its caretaker, and how our pasts are truly ours to carry however we see fit.
3. I co-authored a saucy romantic comedy
Shortly after college, I became friendly with a nationally known sex columnist. It gave me a funny idea for a novel: What if, every week, two writers slept together — and then critically reviewed each others’ performance in a magazine? What would happen?
My friends liked the idea. So I tried to write the novel. But I failed. I am not a novelist.
Then I met and married a novelist, my wife Jen. After she sold her second novel, she asked me what she should write next. I said, “You should write my romantic comedy, because I’m never going to do it myself.”
“I’m won’t steal your idea,” she said. “Let’s do it together.”
So we did. It’s called Mr. Nice Guy, and it came out in 2018. We even sold the TV rights (but nothing was made).
When the book came out, I noticed a fascinating difference in responses:
- My writer friends all congratulated us on the accomplishment.
- My entrepreneur friends were puzzled. “What are you going to do with it?” they’d ask. “What’s the next move?”
I puzzled over this. Why the difference? Then I realized:
Writers (like most people) think horizontally. We complete a project, then move on to the next one. It’s a lateral progression.
But entrepreneurs think vertically. To them, every action can become the foundation upon which the next thing is built. Therefore, entrepreneurs naturally wondered: If I wrote a romantic comedy, how am I building upon that? Will I start teaching romance writing? Turn it into a series? Start a production company?
Once I came up with the idea of “vertical thinking”, I became a little obsessed with it. I started to ask myself: What can I build upon? If I was already doing one thing, how could I make it bigger? How could it become an asset elsewhere? How could it lead elsewhere? And now, if I’m deciding whether to invest time in something, I often explore what else it could lead to first.
This kind of thinking doesn’t come naturally. But I’ve found it to be transformational — try it yourself! And to think, it all began with a saucy novel idea.
So, that’s me!
Was that interesting? Let me know!
And if you’d like to get me a birthday gift, just do this: Tell someone you love about my newsletter. Encourage them to subscribe. It’s the greatest gift you can give me.
That is, unless you can get me a great deal on a cuneiform tablet, preferably Sumerian. That’s… how to do one thing better, I suppose.
Talk to you next week!
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