Radicalization ceases to be useful, works against humanity, and ruins lives when it leads to violence, violent extremism, and politically motivated assholism. While a microdose of radicalization may be okay, any more than that is detrimental to your future. You should be able to identify, question, and denormalize radicalizing ideas and practices. As such, here are some thoughts to consider:

Nothing distracts one from achieving true happiness more than the pursuit of stuff. Ask anyone that can’t leave a bad job, that can’t afford the car they are driving, the house they are living in, or the credit cards they are paying off, or anyone else that’s drowning in clutter or deprived of time: “Does the pursuit of stuff lead to happiness...or not?”

More often than not, businesses are built upon loans. Without loans, the world of commerce would come to a grinding halt. If you plan to borrow or lend money, here are a few simple rules to live by:

My father was a successful businessman who built an auto recycling empire. Despite the fact that he spent his days amongst a sea of wrecked cars, bent metal, and burly men, my dad went home each day to his beloved trees, his blossoming flowers, and landscape designs. He was a junkyard dog with a soft spot for pansies, pine mulch, and asparagus.

Every time I go out to move a pile of firewood, I think this is hard labor, but it's not hard work.

Over the years, I have quit caffeine for years at a time. I slip back into the habit when I forget how unnecessary it is to functioning at a high-level. A big desert after lunch…coffee. Too much booze the night before…coffee. Not enough sleep…coffee. Lots of time behind the desk and not enough time at the gym…coffee. Staying out extra late…espresso martini. Not making time to meditate…coffee. Not enough fruit…coffee (beans). Caffeine paves over bad habits, and conversely, the absence of it makes living...calmer.

It’s safe to play the middle, but power comes out of the ends of the battery. I use this analogy when I am talking about what to create or how to say it. Some creators have an inclination to attempt to appeal to the widest possible audience by splitting the middle. In my experience, the middle is never as large or as powerful as either end. If you are building an audience, consider appealing to the ends. Power comes out of the ends of the battery, not the middle.

When we put our minds to the task of making the most of the space between, it’s not all that surprising to learn what we can accomplish during a long commute to the office. What’s really surprising though, is to learn what we can accomplish as a bag of popcorn expands in the microwave. Small spaces are the biggest part of our days.

More often than not, businesses are built upon loans. Without loans, the world of commerce would come to a grinding halt. If you plan to borrow or lend money, here are a few simple rules to live by:

I frequently get into discussions and debates with friends and founders about the viability of new products and services. Product scaffolding makes it easy for me to rapidly evaluate the opportunity size, branding, and believability (is it possible). In my experience, if you can’t describe your product or service using simple, harmonious product scaffolding, your venture will struggle.

In any business, a good manager should be able to tell you the ‘end-date’. The end-date is a hypothetical day in the future when cash reserves will run dry if expenses continually exceed revenues. Knowledge of the end-date is a huge (negative) motivator. When the boss says: "We need to generate X by next Thursday or else...", people respond like soldiers going to battle.

Here are some of this best startup articles I read in 2013:

A narrow value proposition does not equate to a narrow market opportunity, it's just harder to build.

In my experience, dividing ownership equally is mistake. Without fail, things always happen that prevent or enable project participants from contributing more or less resources than they originally pledged.  You want a plastic (cable of expanding and contracting) ownership structure that enables participants to contribute as much or as little as their ever-changing (financial, time, family, health, etc.) situation dictates.  A plastic ownership structure, governed by an ownership earn-in formula, is the best way to align motivation, commitment, value delivery, timing and expectations.

Your fightline is an exact time each day, 10:00 AM for example, when you ask yourself these questions: “Did I win yesterday?” and “How can I win today?”. More specifically, “What do I need to do over the next twenty-four hours to be healthier than the last twenty-four hours?”

If we want more people to be compelled to vigorously exercise, mixed-group scheduling combined with play space provisioning is the hardest problem (in recreation) to solve.

This post on my blog is an odd duck for me. However, I realize this post is useful to others. In 2016, I did in fact consider investing in a huge restaurant concept with some friends. If you found this post, I would love to know if the spreadsheet was useful. Please send me a note and/or feedback to brucewarila on Twitter or Gmail.

Facebook is positioned to become the world's attention banking infrastructure. We live in an attention economy where the capacity to attract attention is given, sold, bought and traded daily…transparently and otherwise.

I frequently get into discussions and debates with friends and founders about the viability of new products and services. Product scaffolding makes it easy for me to rapidly evaluate the opportunity size, branding, and believability (is it possible). In my experience, if you can’t describe your product or service using simple, harmonious product scaffolding, your venture will struggle.

You can't find Austin anywhere. He's barely on the Internet. His unmastered recordings are decaying on a hard drive in a defunct studio, and the venues that loved him have given up trying to find him.

You could choose to have no website, no Facebook page, no videos, no album, no Twitter, no centralized location on the Internet, and never do much of anything on the Internet that could be called self-promotion, and that your fans can and could effortlessly do everything for you…

Do you believe crowds of humans will ever (or do now) sway as much control over the rate and depth of media dissemination as the established media machine does now?

When a westerner (an American for example) walks by the office of a co-worker, and the co-worker is quietly sitting there doing nothing, the westerner’s first reaction is that the co-worker is lazy and probably slacking. On the other side of the world…

The formula stipulates that for a song to obtain maximum traction, all the variables in the formula have to push up and max out. If you plug the formula into a spreadsheet and play around with scenarios, you will notice (it’s all multiplication), that a single low variable sinks a song (this is important). In other words, you need ALL the variables to work for you to maximize the conversion rate from listeners to fans.

The more that I read about the latest and greatest music marketing trends, the more I want to stand up on my desk and shout “don’t go over the cliff with the rest of the lemmings!”

The cost of acquiring a music collection is approaching zero, while the cost of listening to whatever you want is no more than a 30 second ad spot for every sixty minutes of music…

In any business, a good manager should be able to tell you the ‘end-date’. The end-date is a hypothetical day in the future when cash reserves will run dry if expenses continually exceed revenues. Knowledge of the end-date is a huge (negative) motivator. When the boss says: "We need to generate X by next Thursday or else...", people respond like soldiers going to battle.

Written in 2013: Today, a great wireless device has to be a phone, a camera, a computer, a GPS, an e-book reader, an application ecosystem, an entertainment center, a social instrument, a business toolbox, and a great music service. Music probably consumes more device-time than any other phone feature. So, it’s clear that device manufacturers understand that music-as-a-service (MAS) is a core feature that’s essential to competing. However, the current music stack that includes: MP3 acquisition and management, playlist management, playback control, music discovery, music recommendation, and social sharing is outdated and cumbersome.

Does death by obscurity really happen to great songs, or does lack of traction only happen to mediocre songs?

I think this is one of the most important questions that we can ask ourselves. Do most fans just want your music, or do most fans want something else from you beyond your music?

Music absorption is the process that occurs between music discovery and the (self) conversion of an average music consumer into an active fan. I believe the music absorption process is radically different now than it was just two years ago, and understanding how this process has changed should impact your approach to succeeding in the music industry.

Music is now the most naked product on Earth. Music sits upon the shelf unwrapped, raw and void of packaging. Consumers can fully try it before they buy it; they can take it home unmolested; and they can pay for it randomly, or not at all. I can’t think of another product that is so fully exposed and vulnerable to quick and precise, pre-purchase decision-making as music.

You don’t need to hit home runs. 10% weekly growth will get you where you need to go.

Artists, labels and rightsholders, tell the nerds the Internet is already broken. The web is balkanizing around huge ecosystems run by giant companies and paranoid governments.

Art requires investment, as somebody always has to pay the bills.  Investing in artists has to appear attractive on a cost-to-scale analysis basis.  Every attempt: legal, cultural or otherwise, to weaken copyrights is an assault on every artist's capacity to scale via minimal incremental investments, and thus the capacity to compete for investment dollars.

When it comes to music and advertising, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution. What works for some artists will not work for others, and vice versa. However here’s one thing I can tell you for sure: too many artists are using advertising as a blunt force instrument. Simply dropping a picture of yourself, your band, or your album art into an ad unit and then indiscriminately campaigning nationwide for clicks will rarely generate the advertising ROI you need to justify spending on another campaign.

What do you call the person that has decided to surrender an email address, follow you on Twitter, or Like you on Facebook? If the word ‘fan’ is short for ‘fanatic’, or as someone said last week: “a fan is someone that buys all your stuff”, then we need an intermediate descriptor that sits between a potential fan that has yet to learn about you, and a fan or fanatic that is already buying your stuff. ‘Pre-fan’ seems like it will work, but why bother? As more and more labels and artists use advertising to bridge the gaps between social media islands, it’s essential to get the advertising return on investment (ROI) calculation correct. If a potential fan is not yet a fan, and if a pre-fan is not really a fan, then you need to apply TWO conversion rates to your ROI calculation.

One might be misled into believing that the equation: decent artist + solid business support = success. However this formula is about as a sound as building a table that only has...one leg. If you are ever thinking about financially backing or supporting an artist, you should know that there are two other legs of the table that are of equal or greater importance. In fact, if these first two legs are solid, the third leg, the business leg, almost organically grows itself.

Even with overlap, at one thousand fans per artist, one million artists cannot acquire one billion true fans.  All the music lovers in the world are never going to accept and process billions of artist-initiated emails, status updates and text messages.  Pushy self-promotion doesn’t scale.  If everyone is doing it, nobody is going to do it effectively; the same applies to fundraising; fans are going to tune these messages out.  Collectively, artists and their managers are running the risk of appearing like financial planners at a cookout…occasionally invited, but often avoided.

Last week, you put seven kids on the field, and three of them were your most experienced players, but the other team’s demoralizing attack overwhelmed your defense and scored at will. Chances are, the other team was coached to cross the ball to score, and they were coached on how to defeat the cross on the defensive end of the field.

We are a soccer family. I coach and all of our children play or played soccer. Our daughter captained her varsity team. Our twin boys play varsity, and they are also seasoned referees. Our youngest son plays for a local club team. And together, we have spent thousands of hours on and around soccer fields across the country.