John Doherty

“Rest at the end, not in the middle.” This is a quote from the late Kobe Bryant, which has been my phone lock screen for months now.  Kobe was known for his relentlessness. He was at the gym before anyone else, so he could get in 3 workouts per day instead of the two his […]

There’s a concept that has served me well throughout my career that I’ve never been able to voice before until now. It’s the concept that doing more work than the next person, as fast as you can, is one of the cheat codes to inevitable success. It’s not for everyone, and if you don’t care […]

Pricing. It’s one of the topics in the entrepreneurship/startup world that’s full of ideas and anecdotes like “raise your prices!” (which isn’t necessarily wrong most of the time) and “charge for value, not hourly.” This advice isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete. Once you’ve implemented these, you’re making more money, but you’re also missing out on […]

I’ll be transparent with you – from about the end of 2021 to mid-2023, I dealt with pretty intense burnout.  Because of that, I did the work I needed to do to sustain my businesses, and even launched EditorNinja around the end of 2021, but I struggled to do even that. I survived the weeks. […]

What a year, y’all. This is my 2023 recap and is meant to chronicle the big things that happened, both good and bad. I’m going to break it down across work, personal, health, personal development, and travel. Work 2023 brought a big change for me. I shifted my focus from Credo, the business I started […]

My family moved into a new house in March 2023. With an expanding family and my wife and I both working from home, we needed more space.  Part of the change was going from 1 bathroom to 3. While this has been great for everyone, something I didn’t plan on was the immediately needed maintenance. […]

I talk to a lot of business owners and in-house marketers. A common trope I hear is that they’re testing different marketing things, but they’re not sure which ones work. I have a theory that I’ve developed over time, as to why they’re not seeing more success. My friend, Peep Laja from Wynter and CXL, […]

Let me tell you about Fiona. Fiona is a philodendron that my wife acquired shortly after we moved to San Francisco and got married in 2014. For those three years, Fiona hung in the corner of our sun-filled San Francisco apartment. Then we moved to Colorado and Fiona hung in each of our living rooms […]

Imagine you’re going somewhere to meet up with friends. You’ve plugged the location into Google Maps, you know what time you need to leave, and your friend is waiting for you to pick them up. You get in the car and turn on the ignition. An hour later, your friend calls you. “What’s up? Where […]

Want to know how to succeed in business? Do the work that others are not willing to do, or simply just are not doing. My wife and I own a couple of properties. As such, we have different contractors for different things: Plumbing/Septic Electrical Lawn mowing Fence building Cleaning once per month Plumbing/Septic At our […]

Those of you who know me, know that I’m all about personal development. I work hard to improve myself, for my own good but also for the good of others. By working on myself, I’m a better husband, father, boss, friend, son, brother. In the last few years, starting with the pandemic where I wasn’t […]

On my personal podcast recently, I shared my take on “the upcoming recession” (spoiler: I don’t think we are in nor will we be in one, and if we do it will be markedly different than any past one and will only be purposeful, not because of an underlying instability AFAIK) and why I don’t […]

I’m sick right now. I caught some sort of cough thing (not Covid) when I was in Virginia for the holidays, and it’s miserable. I’m throwing everything I can at it – Mucinex, Sudafed, zinc, vitamin C, water, tea, rest. And yet I’m still coughing hard. It is, as I said, miserable. Of course, this […]

I often get caught in the trap of thinking that anything worth doing “should” be hard. It’s a perfectionist tendency that I’m trying to unlearn. Because of this tendency, I am prone to over-complicating things. I feel like I need to add a lot of steps to a process or features to a product before […]

I recently listened to a great podcast episode from Brene Brown, that was published in September 2020, titled “Stretching and Chasing”. In that episode, expert Dr. Scott Sonenshein talks about two concepts that help explain a range of things in life and business. The two concepts are: Stretching – where you are being scrappy and […]