Meet Colin Wright

We were lucky to catch up with Colin Wright recently and have shared our conversation below.

Colin, we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?
There’s something very liberating about surviving failure: it’s a friendlier version of a near-death experience, but has a similar impact on one’s sense of oneself.

I was fortunate to do pretty well with my first entrepreneurial effort, but then I failed quite publicly with my second, and though it was a horrible experience in the moment—I didn’t want to leave my apartment ever again—it was educational and showed me that I can and will get back up after I (humiliatingly, painfully) fall down.

More than anything else, that self-knowledge has made me more confident in my ability to tackle big things that otherwise seem out of reach, and to test myself even when failure is likely.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I’ve been writing professionally since 2009 (books and online publications), have been speaking to audiences large and small since 2010, and in 2016 I started producing podcasts, as well.

I still write, speak, and broadcast, today, focusing on topics that interest and challenge me, and working with people who inspire me. And all of these efforts align with the life I choose to live outside of work, which is filled with learning and growth and good people and new experiences.

I live simply, explore broadly, and feel incredibly fortunate to get to do what I do for a living, and for life.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
1. It’s important to develop strong relationships and treat people well.

2. It’s also useful to have a sense of what you care about so you can orient your goals and actions in that direction, even if it takes time to get to where you’d like to be (and that self-knowledge can take time to acquire, but also changes over time, so being able to keep tabs on that is valuable).

3. I also think it’s worthwhile to acquire skills and knowledge outside of your current skillset and conception of things, as you never know where you’ll want or need to go, next, and having a three-dimensional sense of the world (even if some of that knowledge and know-how seems useless, initially) makes it more likely you’ll be able to take the steps you want to take when you want to take them, and that you’ll be situationally aware enough to understand when things are changing in such a way that your life and work and everything else is due for a recalibration.

How can folks who want to work with you connect?
Always!

I typically work solo on just about everything, but I’m on the lookout for people who are different from me—bringing different backgrounds and skill sets and everything else to the table—who want to talk about their interests or ideas with someone who’ll likely be interested in what they have to say, and who may want to collaborate on something related to those interests at some point in the future.

I’m big on saying “no” to most things, because that’s what allows us to say “yes” to the most vital things, but I’m always keen to meet new, interesting people and to see what they can teach me, and vice-versa.

The best way to reach me is at [email protected].

Contact Info:

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