I’ve been asked this question by everyone from bloggers to actors, artists to entrepreneurs and corporate aspirants to movement makers.

How do I make a mark when it seems everything that can be created, said or done has been created, said or done by someone else?

Short answer.

No field is too crowded to make a mark when you’re remarkable. Click here to tweet!

In fact, the very existence of a robust market filled with competition and a near cacophony of voices is a signpost of demand, which in business, is a good thing as long as you do one big thing…

Become the signal, not the noise.

There are two things you really need to own, hone and cultivate if you want to burst onto a massively crowded scene.

First -

Embrace your eyes, ears and filters.

The way you see the world is unlike anyone else. Put 100 people in a room, surprise them with a dramatized alarming incident, then interview them after and you’ll get 100 different stories about what happened. 100 people see the exact same thing, but experience it and process it differently. The filter you bring to any experience literally alters what you believe you see and hear. Often on the level of gross distortion.

This may not serve you well in eyewitness scenarios, but in everyday day, the unique perspective you bring to any situation can be become a huge asset. Your unique world-view and life experience makes you experience circumstances differently. It allows you to see possibilities and connections that nobody else sees.

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Today’s guest contributor is my friend, Jennifer Boykin, an amazing writer, mentor and creator of the soulful, sassy and simply divine LifeAfterTampons.com.

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Last March, my daughter Grace should have been twenty. She should be a sophomore in college. She should have come home for the weekend. There should have been a party and mani-pedis and some lame-ass boy or two hanging around waiting around for us to get home so he could drool all over her.

But there wasn’t. Because Grace died shortly after her premature birth. And instead of a lifetime of little girl memories, I had 32 minutes to be her mother.

People say they can’t imagine what it’s like to be the mother of a dead child, but I think they can. They can picture the whole thing. They just don’t want to.

But here’s the thing, Sweet Cheeks – sorrow, loss, illness, betrayal, economic hardship, divorce, loss of faith – these circumstances are just part of EVERYONE’S human condition. If you live long enough, you WILL have to face these and other losses.

When you do, here’s the first challenge you are likely to meet – lack of training.  In our culture, we don’t teach people how to work through loss and suffering. We acquire things, achieve things, make things happen.

It’s a woefully poor strategy for living. When we come face to face with the shadow side of ALL GAIN – which is LOSS – we are tragically unprepared.

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Every great entrepreneur or marketer is a student of human behavior.

It’s no different with me. I learned to write response-driven copy in part because I wanted to learn how to sell more stuff, but even more because I’m fascinated by the process of influence and action.

How can you craft a set of words or images, in print, on screen, on video or audio to move people through a psychological process that triggers a specific behavior?

That’s my real fascination. How can I inspire someone to start meditating, eating better, moving their body, embracing a calling, act in the face of uncertainty? And if there’s some way I can help them along this path, how can I show them the value of my assistance on a level that makes the decision to buy a mandate in their minds?

It’s like a giant psychological puzzle for me.

Insanely complex, one part craft, one part science, one part Hail Mary.

To help accelerate my learning, I’ve ended up studying many of the greatest copywriters and marketers in the world, dead and alive. If you look at my book shelf, you’ll see as many books from before 1950 as you will after.

I’ve also keyed in on the marketing and launch processes of the best marketers online. I subscribe to their newsletters and every time they launch a new solution, I track their processes from beginning to end. Often creating folders filled with screenshots, video and copy.

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How do you build and scale a venture or a movement to touch as many lives as possible without blowing apart your own life along the way?

This is a question I’ve been working on for years. Exploring models, strategies, ideas and tactics. Through it all, one overriding ideal keeps bubbling up to the top. It’s, at once, ridiculously obvious, but at the same time extraordinarily difficult to execute on.

Because it means removing ego from the picture. Inserting faith. And focusing on service, empowerment and exalting relationships.

The fastest way to expand your own power, freedom and impact is to relinquish control, to trust and empower others.

Simple to say. Obvious in every way. Yet brutally hard to execute, especially when the baby you’re birthing is a manifestation of who you are.

So, my question is…

Who can you trust and empower today to help you turn your dream into a collective movement?

One that accomplishes your end game, allows others to share in the ownership and the outcome and affords you the space to be with the people and do the things that make you come alive?

“I decided to stop selling and start radiating.”

That, from the mouth of highly sought-after speaker, entrepreneur, strategist and author, Danielle LaPorte.

The words tumbled out during the filming of an interview for my soon-to-launch web series, Good Life Project TV (don’t ask, more on that soon). We sat facing each other on the floor of the yoga studio I founded in 2001, talking about her killer new book – The Fire Starter Sessions. She was sing-songing her way through a longer answer to a question I’d posed about her success.

Wait! I said. You can’t just do that. You can’t drop something like that and not explain. What do you MEAN you decided to radiate? How do you DO that?

Which led to a whole conversation about the immense power of working from a place not of force, but of ease. Of building a sense of integrity, authenticity, alignment, confidence and raised energy that literally draws people to you like moths to a light. One that attracts them by standing in your truth so fiercely and publicly, you begin to radiate…and others want to know how…and do it themselves.

Sounds cool. But, for realz?! You can build a serious career that way?

Answer is…yes!

This is the place Danielle works from, and the response has not only been palpable, but profitable.

When Danielle LaPorte walks into a room, you don’t have to look. You just know she’s arrived.

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I wonder if we’re regressing…

Any parent has witnessed the stage, it happens with every kid.

Your little one has her first play date. The kids get along swimmingly, playing with toys, giggling, yammering. And then you notice something, they’re sitting right next to each other, fully aware of each other, happy to be positioned in the proximity of another human of similar knoodlosity. But, they’re actually not playing with each other. Instead, they’re playing by themselves in the presence of each other.

Fancy kid-gurus call this parallel play. It’s, apparently, a perfectly natural evolution for infants. A stage they all go though that helps prepare them for the more genuinely social, and deeply-engaging phase of play where you actually play “with” the other kid. The phase that sets in motion the cultivation of legends and stories that make life so yummy.

But, over the few last  years, an odd thing has begun to happen…

Parents, grown-up, tweens and teens are reverting to screen-driven parallel play.

Two people, ostensibly in serious like or love, siting close to each other, comforted by the other’s presence, while being completely absorbed in the whizbang stream of bits, colors and sounds screaming from their screen-bound devices of choice. But it’s actually worse than organic parallel play. Because that’s done in the presence of a playmate with awareness of their existence. And it’s something you quickly grow out of.

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It started with my own frustration.

I’d just signed my first book deal, and being a maven and a marketer, began to devour everything I could find about book marketing.

Over the next year and a half, while writing the book and running my full-time brick and mortar company (yes, they still exist!), I spent a ton of time tracking, deconstructing and reconstructing the best launches, and talking to many of the people behind them.

I flew across the country, paid top dollar for giant book marketing events, bought books, subscribed to newsletters, read, watched and listened to everything I could find and talked to anyone who said yes. Some of the ideas and strategies were valuable. Most were not. And some were not only devoid of value, but potentially harmful to the success of a book, an author (and their reputation) and their bank accounts.

My first book, Career Renegade, launched literally on the worst week in the history of publishing in 50 years.

January 13th, 2009. The economy was crashing fast. More than 4.5 millions jobs had already evaporated. My publisher (a Random House imprint that became a casualty soon after) went dark for two weeks before my launch. Which wasn’t all the inique, the entire publishing industry was in free-fall (some might say it still is, but for different reasons now).

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I didn’t even see the words…

A small group of us stood on the roof of a beaten down warehouse, looking back over the Manhattan skyline as the sun set, wind sweeping all shoulders upward. The place was 5Pointz, also known as “The Institue of Higher Burning,” one of the world’s great epicenters of graffiti and street art. Two hundred thousand square feet of jaw-dropping, aerosol expression on walls, floors, roofs, doors and windows.

We’d spent the last two hours on a private tour, led by the self-appointed curator and artist extraordinaire, Meres One.

The depth of work floored me, full wall pieces “burned” by teams of artists from around the world that seemed to envelop you.

I glanced down to steady my footing on the old tar-cloth roof, and that’s when I saw it. In white paint on black tar. Brooding with the grit of mission and intention…

I can’t read the tag, so I don’t even know the name of the author/artist to attribute it to. The quote, however, is an edited version of one attributed to Mother Teresa that reads:

“We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, with so little, for so long, we are now qualified to do anything, with nothing.”

The words, the message, the urgency and sense of mission that pours from them.

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What if we were doing it all wrong?

According to my genius friend and founder of Riddle & Co. (recently acquired by Retargeter), Jeff Riddle, businesses are going about growth all wrong. They spend every waking hour and huge line items in their budgets on customer acquisition. Then, once a prospect becomes a customer, they all but forget about them. The common ethic, in fact, is to do the minimum necessary to keep an existing customer from leaving. That’s where the “sad state of affairs” bar has been set.

How messed up is that?

Not just from a feeling good about what you’re doing and how you’re treating others standpoint, but according to Jeff, it’s horrible for the bottom line, too. Analyzing large volumes of data, he was able to determine that 70-80% of new customers were generated not by formal acquisition and marketing initiatives, but by word of mouth from the 5% of existing customers who were most delighted with the product or service.

Newsflash – when you blow peoples’ minds in unexpected ways on a consistent basis, give them more than they expected and – check this out…actually treat them like you’d want your mom (assuming you love your moms) treated, guess what happens? They can’t shut up about you! And when they tell someone exactly what you’d say in an advertisement, it carries about 1,000% more credibility.

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Today’s guest contributor is writer, coach, violinist, filmmaker, law school graduate, and web designer, Emilie Wapnick, who works with multipotentialites to help them build lives and businesses around ALL their interests. She’s the author of Renaissance Business and the troublemaker behind Puttylike.com.

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“How do you like your Macbook case?” I asked the attractive stranger at the neighbouring table.

“What’s that?” he replied.

“Oh, I like it. It actually saved me the other night, when my roommate spilled his drink all over the place.”

We kept chatting. His name was Stephen and he played the cello.

Contrary to what you might be thinking, I was not trying to pick him up. I wasn’t even all that interested in his computer case.

Starting conversations with strangers is a practice that I’ve adopted to help me overcome fear and doubt in my work.

Yes, you heard me right. This was about productivity.

I learned this trick a while back, when I was in an entrepreneurial competition and had to give a terrifying presentation to some big name CEOs. Like many people, I’d always despised public speaking. But this talk was important.

I decided to prepare by shoring up my confidence beforehand. My logic was that if I was going to be expected to step onto The Stage — a place of supreme uncertainty — then I would practice feeling nervous first, by embracing uncertainty in small ways throughout the day. I dubbed these “mini-risks.”

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