In most service-based businesses, the phrase “the client is always right” tends to come up. The idea being that because the client is forking over their cash, they get what they want.

Fortunately for you, that’s bull honky. The client is not always right. In fact, they’re frequently 27 shades of wrong. They don’t have a fat clue what they want or why they want it. That, my friend, is why they hired you.

If you aren’t pushing back on nearly everything that comes out of your client’s mouth, you’re doing it wrong.

Now, I’m not saying you should be a jerk and make the client feel like an idiot. You shouldn’t. But when you get hired to do something like design, development, writing, or art, it’s typically because you know your stuff and are good at what you do.

For example, when someone comes to me for UI design work, it’s because they need help. And they don’t need help just “making it...

I’m debating on doing a little experiment: For an entire month I’ll only produce and never consume.

David Tate wrote a great article a few months back called The Dangerous Effects of Reading, where he talks about how, for most people, our lives are optimized for input (consumption).

We dedicate so much of our time to consuming. Standing in line at the grocery store? You’re probably checking your email. Lying in bed before you go to sleep? You’re probably reading the news on your iPad. In the bathroom? You’re probably playing Angry Birds or checking Facebook.

It’s all consumption. Every free moment or every moment you’re trying to procrastinate is spent consuming. It’s bad for you.

On the other side of the coin is producing. Being creating. Making things.

Creating changes you and the way you think:

When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability...

The neighborhood I live in is fairly expansive (as in, there are an absurd number of houses that stretch for miles), so what that translates to is us getting a lot of people trying to sell stuff door-to-door to us. It’s easy for them because they could spend days or even weeks in one neighborhood walking to each house and trying to pitch something.

Most of the time I just keep my mouth shut long enough to let them finish their pitch and then quickly tell them I’m not interested.

But recently, on a hot Saturday afternoon, a younger guy (probably 18-20 years old) knocked on our door. He had clearly been out quite a while and was sweating profusely and I just felt bad for the guy.

So what was this guy selling? Magazine subscriptions. As if anyone on the planet needs more magazines.

I wanted to hear his story, though. Why was he out in the blazing sun, walking door to door, trying to...

Back in high school I went on a mission trip to Brazil. Everyone in my youth group had volunteered to do various things on the trip with the kids we’d be working with (soccer, crafts, music, etc). What did I sign up to do? I signed up to be a clown. So that ultimately meant making balloon animals and juggling…both of which I had to learn how to do. I never got all that great at balloon animals, but I can still juggle pretty well to this day.

Unfortunately juggling physical objects (balls, bowling pins, rubber chickens) has zero correlation to juggling life.

Being a Maker of Internets™ means I have my hand in a lot of things, and pretty much anyone with even the tiniest entrepreneurial bone in their body is the exact same way, especially if they’ve got some development chops.

The large majority of my time is spent in the online survey space, but I also dabble in package tracking and...

Okay, so there’s no official “law” called “The Designer’s Law of Diminishing Quality,” but it very much exists in the design world.

Here’s the gist: the tighter the deadline, the lower the quality. Meaning, for every day that you want your project finished faster, the quality and attention to detail drops accordingly.

You want that logo designed in a week? Fine, you can have something generic that “looks cool” in a week. But something that’s well researched and thought out just won’t happen in that amount of time.

You want a full site redesign done in two weeks? Okay. Again, you’ll get something generic that probably will satisfy you. But it the little things that make a design great and more importantly, usable, will be left out and you’ll most likely feel the pain of that decision with a higher support load or lost users.

Good design takes time, and not just pure grunt work...