In the west, we have been taught to make logic and our analytical mind our God. Our education system perpetuated this dogma, and even our standardized tests were created in order to often test one type of intelligence, a left-brain thinking type of intelligence that relied on logic and linear thinking.

For the last 100 years or more, those who had the greatest capacity for logic and analytics were rewarded financially and were often most desirable in the workforce or in academia, as long as they had some basic skills of communication. …

Go-To-Market is oftentimes the most difficult part of any product launch. It’s a word that I often see people use in meetings without understanding what it even means. Oftentimes, this is through no fault of their own, as it hasn’t been defined well.

Go-To-Market is essentially the strategy for how a company plans to reach customers within a market.

Sharebird, the largest online peer mentoring community for product marketers, and I recently launched a new show called The Essential Go To Market: Tips and Strategies where we offer short video content in interview style conversations with global Product Marketing leaders…

Most companies waste a lot of money on demand-generation, paid ads, and other marketing activities and tactics without understanding how their tactics fit into the larger strategy with product, engineering, and sales.

A number of companies think growth marketing is synonymous with demand-generation marketing, and they’re not entirely wrong. The majority of growth-marketers are in fact, demand-generation marketers. Growth marketing is a misunderstood word, and one that many companies, especially early stage, completely get wrong. I define all of these terms below.

Demand-generation and growth-marketing are important, but they are often hired too soon before a company truly understands how to position and frame its message to customers. Oftentimes, growth marketing is done in a silo, outside of the greater narrative and cross-collaboration with cross-functional stakeholders.

Both companies and customers often pay the price when companies hire growth marketers before they confirm their market validation, positioning, and go-to-market strategy, often resulting in an initial spike of growth, but low retention or long-term customers.

So what is a Product Marketer?

“The morning breeze has secrets for you. “ — Rumi

In the last several hundred years since the industrial revolution, we’ve inherited a new lens on work, with the “assembly-line job”, which fast-forward a few hundred years later, ironically moved from manufacturing to technology with a 9–5 workweek.

We’ve also adopted this model in our lives, and many of us are living an “assembly-line” life, with a checkbox to mark off milestones which we must accomplish at the same rate as those in the same age range of our social media feed.

We’re obsessed with productivity because we’ve been conditioned…

Trying to define the world of creativity is like trying to explain a meditative experience and is nearly impossible. Creativity and the creative life is a subjective experience, one that we only understand through our own eyes and reference points, and I attempt to share my subjective experience here.

My relationship with creativity has been at times expansive and nourishing, and at other times fraught with doubt, disappointment, and frustration. I struggle with the same resistance to the creative process as everyone else, but I have taught myself to ride the tidal wave pushing against me.

But some days, the resistance is so strong, I have to shout out into the silence that no, I am still a creator, even though my ego reminds me that the number of critics far outweigh the number of creators. …

How to live a creative life and manifest

I was sitting at the office, but my mind was on my future vacation in Japan. I looked at the clock and realized it was time for my next meeting. Why do calendars only provide meeting options in 30-minute chunks? I spent half the day in agenda-less meetings that probably could have ended much sooner than 30 minutes, or even worse — 60 minutes.

Even though I was physically in the office, my mind wanted to be almost anyplace else. When you are not present or fully engaged in what you’re doing, your energy moves into another place and time, which is often why we feel so depleted when we’re not engaged. The gas in the engine has been given away to another car, and another person.

Before I started my meditation program, this happened almost 50% of the day or more — and while I had achieved some of my goals, I couldn’t sustain that level of manifestation. …

Hindsight is 2020.

I’ve always been surprised by the resiliency of humans, especially whenever I heard stories of extreme tragedy and loss. I’m also amused that this surprises me, since I’m a first-generation Iraqi-American, and stories of loss were fairly common in my community.

But resilient we are. And resilient we will continue to be. And if 2020 has taught me anything this year, it is that resiliency is an underrated character trait.

Many people described 2020 as the year that all of humanity experienced a quarantine together. Some exclaimed, “We’re all on the same boat”. But I’ve also heard this year described differently, that instead, “We are all in the same storm but on different boats”.

To me, the latter felt more true. This year served as a reflection, a mirror to the economic divide in the world, and most especially the West…

Recently, I got a chance to interview Marci Shimoff, one of the world’s international experts on happiness, co-author of Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul, and featured in the movie The Secret. We talked about how to harness our happiness even amidst difficult times.

After achieving all of her personal and professional goals, Marci broke down in her hotel room after a book signing, determined to learn what it was that made people happy, and how to learn the formula for being happy all the time. …