I love tools that make the internet a more private and secure place, and here are a few products and services that I use. Many of them will be overkill for the average consumer, but you might not be the average consumer.

• NextDNS: Cloud-based DNS service that lets you control and monitor DNS resolution on your devices with a focus on privacy, security, and content filtering. Blocks ads, trackers, and prevents your ISP from snooping on your DNS traffic.
• 1.1.1.1: CloudFlare’s super-fast, privacy-respecting DNS resolver that doesn’t log or track your browsing activity. There’s also a companion mobile app that works like a VPN and securely connects to the Cloudflare network.
• Flashrouters: Wi-Fi routers that come with open-source and highly customizable software installed, allowing you to enjoy an expanded feature set, better security, and improved performance. I run an Asus mesh network at home.
• Tailscale: A secure networking tool that creates a private, encrypted network between your devices. Works like a VPN, and uses the Wireguard protocol.
• Proton: Suite of high-quality, privacy-focused tools created by former CERN scientists. Their mail, VPN, password manager, and secure notes app are top-notch.
• Brave: Free, privacy-focused web browser based on Chromium (which powers Google Chrome) that blocks ads by default.
• Ente Photos: End-to-end encrypted, open-source, cross-platform photo backups.
• Signal: Secure, end-to-end encrypted messaging. SMS is not secure.
• Advanced Data Protection for iCloud: An optional security feature from Apple that gives you end-to-end encryption for your iCloud data.

Responsive Conference is my friend Robin Zander’s two-day annual summit in Oakland, California, for founders, entrepreneurs, and executives that want to make things better at work and beyond. 

It’s a conference, yes, but in practice, it’s more of an immersive love letter to collaborative problem-solving. Everyone I know who attends Responsive Conference raves about the experience, and there’s still time to snag general admission tickets.

An unconventional and delightful preamble to the Conference is—brace yourself for some serious meta—The Conference for Conferences by the incomparable Jenny Sauer-Klein. 

The Conference for Conferences disrupts the tired conference paradigm that leaves attendees overwhelmed, overstimulated, and over-programmed. Expect an intimate, high-impact gathering for people who convene people, focusing on the kind of participatory connection that stays with you long after the Conference concludes.

Both conferences will be held at the stunning Oakland Museum of California on consecutive days in September, and I hope you can attend.

I was at a birthday party 15 years ago, and an unassuming guy that I didn’t know walked over and introduced himself. His name was Michael.

He shared how he knew our mutual friend whose birthday it was, and asked me what I was working on. We chatted for a few minutes and exchanged information before mingling with others and enjoying the festivities.

The next day, I received a follow-up email from Michael with a bullet list of five people he was happy to connect me with, along with links to their LinkedIn profiles. They were all interesting, successful NYC-based entrepreneurs that I was interested in meeting and highly relevant to the work I was doing.

Michael is a superconnector.

The introductions beget other introductions, with each new connection radiating with positive energy and goodwill from the last. It’s an infectious energy and activity, so I started being intentional about making introductions in my life as well. This has in turn added a lot of value to my friends’ lives.

You probably know dozens or even hundreds of people whose lives would be made better by knowing other people in your network. It’s easy to complicate the process, and I’ve certainly made some glowing, multi-paragraph introductions, but it’s also fine to just say, “Hey, I think you two will enjoy knowing each other.

My first sales role was as a founder, which was like learning how to swim by jumping into a river wearing winter clothes.

I was running a mission-driven media company that produced long-form content, and I sold sponsorships to fund it. Launching and running that publication changed my life, due in no small part to the lessons it taught me on cultivating a healthy relationship with sales.

I secured six sponsors for the magazine’s launch, and the fanfare around our splashy entrance generated significant sponsorship interest that sustained us for a while. But once the momentum slowed and things were humming along, sales became something I dreaded (and dutifully avoided).

The challenge was that I felt personally identified with the sponsorship I was selling, and every time someone declined to purchase a sponsorship, I felt personally rejected. I asserted that the world needed what we were producing, and I went to the market to validate that assertion.

Another challenge is that I took myself and my work Very Seriously, which left little room for creativity and fun. Work felt like work.

Things changed when I shifted from being consumed with my feelings of worthiness to inhabiting a place of generosity. When I treated money like it was scarce and unavailable to me, it was elusive. When I treated it like an abundant resource to attract, sales became more of a game with a scoreboard than a quest for survival.

This shift in perspective helped me get clear on what I was selling, which was the opportunity to be a part of something meaningful and worthwhile. When I exuded the confidence and power of the mission, my value proposition shifted from focusing on metrics and subscriber growth to the story my buyer would share with their spouse over dinner.

Being in alignment with the power of my mission also led to some weirdly awesome things happening: when I spoke with a prospect about sponsorship, he was excited and assumed the pricing I sent was per month (it wasn’t monthly pricing), and said he’d like to start with three months (as it turns out, it was monthly pricing). That was a fun email to forward to my advisor.

Ultimately, I parlayed my insights into a mission-driven career at the intersection of my passions: facilitation and public speaking, empowering people to more deeply inhabit their humanity in relationship with others, and serving as a coin-operated spokesmodel for the cause (sales).

The result was millions of dollars in sales activity that I mastered, looked forward to, and helped others unlock their brilliance around.

The shift in perspective changed everything.

I’m in a mastermind group with a group of disturbingly impressive professionals. Most of us knew each other beforehand, and a couple of us had even worked together on projects, but consistent biweekly meetings focused on mutual support are new territory for us as a group.

The conversations have hit their stride in recent weeks, and I’ve been reflecting on how the group only exists because the organizer reached out to a few of us and said, “Hey, do you want to do this?”
And so we did.

Some masterminds cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to be a part of, and have application processes with stringent requirements around business revenue. That makes sense for some groups, but not ours.

Our group is composed of people in one transition or another, questioning and answering, and perhaps most valuably, reflecting what we see in each other.

At any given time, we’re scattered across two countries and three time zones, navigating imperfect circumstances and life transitions. It’s a sacrifice and an opportunity to show up, and we’re all better for it.

You might benefit from a group like this as well, and you can be the reason that it happens.

Proceding in the crosswalk when you have the right of way, delegating a task to a direct report, and having a friend deliver an important letter should all be fine.

But it pays to verify that the coast is clear, the assignment is understood, and that the task is complete.

We don’t need to move through the world as paranoid, micromanaging, and mistrusting, but we can bring judgment and increasing levels of trust to bear when appropriate.

The remedy for a tender gum is usually to floss it. Similarly, a great way to boost your energy levels when feeling sluggish is to exercise. Also, addressing the tension in the air between you and your business partner is better than letting it simmer, and massaging a sore muscle helps alleviate the pain.

Denial and avoidance are perfectly valid ways to deal with discomfort, but they’re unlikely to yield durable and positive results.

When it comes to agreed-upon deadlines, your manager doesn’t need you to be a hero or a self-sacrificing martyr. Consistently meeting deadlines without drama and fanfare will save you unnecessary stress in the long run.

Early in my career, I relied on my ability to perform well under pressure (at the last minute) to deal with anxiety-provoking deadlines. Even when the deliverable was strong, it was energetically costly to produce under those circumstances.

Much later, I discovered the joy of starting early, revising with plenty of time, and engineering accountability along the way. The upshot is a career hack: once you reliably tap into your brilliance on-demand and ahead of schedule, you can level up and become the owner of how a solution is delivered at scale, rather than the recipient of yet another task.

I was gassing up a rental car last week before heading out on a road trip, and I spotted a caffeine emporium (Starbucks) across the street. I live in Brooklyn, so it would be faster and easier to leave my car at the gas station instead of trying to find a nonexistent parking spot.

It would only take about five minutes for the round-trip excursion, I estimated, and I was confident that I could make the trip before the gas station proprietor called a SWAT team on me. But wasn’t there another way?

I went inside, let the gentleman know the vehicle I was in (so he could see how much I had spent on purified dinosaur extract), and asked him if I could leave the car there while I grabbed a coffee across the street.

Despite my being the only patron at the moment, he would have been well within his rights to decline my request or ask me to move the car away from the pump, but after looking outside, he said, “If it’s only going to be a couple of minutes, it’s fine.”

Candidly, this is the response I expected. It was early morning, my walk inside was a third of the way to the Starbucks, and most importantly, I put him in a position to be generous and to feel good about giving me a break.

If I had acted entitled and counted on him not bothering to make a fuss, would there have been a problem? Probably not, but that’s not the point.

The point is that we all have dozens of micro-moments to give people the dignity, respect, and consideration that they might not get elsewhere.

It’s easy, it’s free, and it matters.