• Start small.
• Be patient.
• Think of it as an experiment.
• Do it the way only you could do it.
• Find ways to take risks off the table.
• Define what success means to you.
• A question about some of the assumptions out there.
• See adversity as an opportunity to find out what you are capable of.
• Keep going — behind mountains are more mountains.
  
   

I happened to be writing during most of the crazy period of putting this book store together. Obviously, starting a small business is not the same as running into a burning building or onto a battlefield, but one thing you can’t escape noticing when you read history or biography is just how badly we need people to step up, to put themselves out there, to pursue their crazy ideas. All of the human progress — big and small — depends on that.

  If you’re thinking of doing something, if you feel called to do something…well, maybe you should do it. Just remember to…   – It would be wonderful of course if marketing didn’t have to exist. If things could be bare-boned. If presentation and packaging didn’t matter. That’s just not how life works — never has and it never will. You have to do interesting stuff. You have to make remarkable things, as Seth Godin writes in Purple Cow, you have to do remarkable marketing. Do stuff that commands attention. Draw attention like a magnet. These things cannot be underestimated.

  – COVID has been tough. Even as I was working on this piece, we had to close because people got sick, even after all our precautions and we couldn’t stay open. That was expensive and it was scary for everyone. But we took it one day at a time, we adapted, we adjusted, we figured it out. Which is all you can do. .