After reading Donald Miller’s “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years” cover-to-cover over the course of a long weekend (I could hardly put it down at points) I’m now soaking in some of these lessons. I know that my story will be different for having read it. Here’s ten things I learned from this book.

I frequently get asked what books I would recommend to improve the skills of founders of creative service firms. Here are a few of the books and articles that have most formed me as a business owner and leader.

Fear is perhaps the most powerful stupid drug that the human body has ever felt. When we are afraid our reasoning and thinking is disabled by our body and instead we are thinking with our brainstem, basically reacting to reflexes instead of acting. Business owners can’t survive like that.

In the last week I have attended two different economic forecast presentations, where I heard 4 different economists and prognosticators describe what the see in the year ahead for the US and world economies. I am not an economist and so what I’ve written here is my interpretation of what they predicted, not predictions of my own.

With the rise of blogs, YouTube and Twitter we have more creative content produced to day than ever before. Let more and more of it is DIY or created by amateurs. Is this the death of the creative class, or a fundamental shift in the role that professional creatives play?

In 2010 I’m going public with my goals as a way to help me to achieve more of them. These are my 2010 health goals.

In 2010 I’m going public with my goals as a way to help me to achieve more of them. These are my 2010 Business goals.

In 2010 I’m going public with my goals as a way to help me to achieve more of them. These are my 2010 personal goals.

As I sat down to create my goals for 2010, I reviewed my goals for the last few years and I wasn’t so happy with the results. It looks like I’ve been batting about .500 in achieving my goals and that’s not good enough. So this year I’m doing three things differently with my goals to insure that I will achieve a higher percent (like 100%) this year.

RESOLVE. Strong in the face of uncertainty, forceful in doing good work in turbulent times, unflinching in making the changes needed to thrive in the environment we find ourselves in. 2010 will require that of us, but we also need to “convert or transform”, “separate into constituent or elementary parts”, and ” deal with conclusively”. It’s in these contexts that we need resolve in 2010. We need to conclusively deal with issues in our business. We need to convert and transform our business by breaking it down into component parts, parts that we thought were solid, and rethinking and re-engineering them.