I've been writing stories to my kids, one email at a time. Last month I caught myself sneaking a physics lesson into one: most things in life are set to decay. It's like ice. It takes energy to keep something frozen. It takes energy to keep something hot. Room temperature is what happens when you stop paying attention. (It's July in Texas. An ice cube on my driveway doesn't melt so much as vanish. I live inside this metaphor.) I learned the business version at Dell. Margins s

My dad told me I had to start paying for my own haircuts. I called him from college, outraged. Was I six? No. I was nineteen. The deal was already lean by the standards of my friends: I paid 25% of my own tuition, plus most of my expenses. Now haircuts too? I hung up convinced this was an injustice worth telling people about. (I'm telling people about it right now, so apparently I never fully let it go.) But here's what happened next. I started noticing what things cost. I ty

The loudest cheer at our drift school isn't for the fastest driver. It's for a beginner doing one slow, wobbly circle in a parking lot. At Texas Drift Academy, we teach car control in pieces. Vision first, always. Then initiating with the handbrake. Then countersteer. Then throttle control. Each one is its own skill, its own set of reps, its own failures. And then one lap, it all clicks at once, and a student holds their first clean donut. A controlled slide, all the way arou

For half my career, designers assumed I was a numbers guy. Analysts assumed I was a creative. Neither group meant it as a compliment. I started on the creative side, paying my way through college doing freelance graphic design, ads for local businesses, whatever kept rent covered. Then Dell wired up the other half of my brain: Six Sigma green belt, DMAIC, living inside web analytics while we grew consumer ecommerce to $3.5B. By the time I was CMO at Bazaarvoice, I was shippin

My dad lost an investor because his hands shook during a pitch. That failure is the actual reason Decker Communications exists. Before he started DCI, he was pitching investors on a documentary. He knew the material cold. He believed in it. He still lost the deal, because he came across nervous in the room, and nervous reads as unprepared even when it isn't. Around the same time, he was producing a different film, Speaking Effectively — to One or One Thousand, and needed real

I got rejected by the same school four times in a row before they finally let me in. Cal Poly ran on a quarter system, so I applied for Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. Rejected every time by admissions. I was never an A student. I've made peace with that over the years, mostly because nobody's ever asked to see my transcript before signing a contract. At the time, though, it stung watching each envelope come back the same way. Eventually I stopped applying through admission

Ten of us, a dune buggy we rebuilt ourselves, and a garden hose for a shower. It's still the best trip I've ever taken. Spring break, community college. A friend named Mike and I put together a group of ten to go to San Felipe, Mexico. Someone's grandpa had a rustic house on the beach. We rebuilt an old dune buggy from parts. We built our own volleyball net. We waterskied in the ocean behind a jeep instead of a boat, because that's what we had. Showers were a hose outside. I

I walked out of Dell on my last day carrying a cardboard box, thinking: and THIS is the thanks I get?! Six years there, a good run inside a Fortune 100 company, and I was leaving to take an exec role at a company that hadn't even closed its funding yet. Real title, real risk, zero reputation outside Dell's walls. I don't know what send-off I thought I deserved. Apparently something grander than a box and a handshake. Within weeks, Dell was already gone from my head. Not becau

I was 20 and became a landlord for the first time, mostly because I couldn't yet afford furniture of my own. My dad bought a three-house property near Cal Poly. His money, my labor, was the deal. I lived in one house, rented out the other two, collected rent, fixed what broke, mowed what grew. "Sweat equity" is a nice way of saying free labor from someone whose only other asset was time. The plan worked exactly like we drew it up. Rent covered the mortgage every month, on tim

I spent my first mountain chasing the finish line. It took meeting my wife to notice there was a second one. For years I measured things by the win, then the next one, then the one after that. I was proud of the pace. I didn't really clock what it was costing the people closest to me until I was already well past due noticing. Meeting Shayna is what actually broke the pattern. I doubt I'd have gotten there on my own. Around then I read David Brooks' The Second Mountain, and t

Somewhere in your shared drive is a deck nobody will ever open again. I'd bet money on it. That's basically what I told a marketer named Gerardo Dada when he interviewed me back in 2014. He asked what marketers still get wrong. I gave him a line I still believe: over 50% of product marketing efforts get wasted. I just don't know which half. I stole that structure from John Wanamaker, the department store guy who said the same thing about advertising a century ago. Applied to

Before I knew what "freemium" meant, I was already selling it. Just on a placemat. I was 19 or 20, living alone in a tiny apartment near Cal Poly, waiting out community college until I could transfer in. Lonely stretch. I worked at Kinko's, watched a lot of Miami Vice reruns, and filled the rest of my time with every odd hustle I could think of: typing papers for other students, freelance graphic design, flipping VW bugs, even a short-lived carpet shampoo business (don't ask

My son Canon told me recently that I'm a workaholic. He's not wrong. I've worked a lot, my whole life, and there are pieces of that I regret. I don't recommend losing yourself in work. But there's a distinction I've been trying to explain to him, more for myself than for him really: not all work costs you the same thing. Take Texas Drift Academy. Money and time, I haven't gotten much return on either, if I'm honest about it. But I've built it because I enjoy building it. I'm

I wanted a map. Guy Kawasaki handed me a mirror. I was 25, my daughter Haley just born, sitting across from him at breakfast, trying to get him to help me chart my career path. I don't remember what I ordered. Probably eggs. In 1996, everything was eggs. I don't remember exactly what I asked him. Probably some version of: how do I know if I'm on the right track? What he said back is the part I've carried for thirty years: "You could be sweeping the floor at Toys R Us right no

I've spent my whole career winging it. My first executive title just made it official. Ray Kaupp paid me $500 to design a flyer for his team at Apple. I had no idea that was a lot for a flyer. I just knew it covered rent. Six months later he asked me to join the startup he was spinning out of Apple. Six months after that, the woman I reported to got fired. Nobody else was in line for her job, so at 23, with zero executive experience, I got handed it. I had no idea what I was

Here I am, posting again. Time to get some of the stories I've told a hundred times out loud finally down in writing. It started in 1994, writing newsletters for the tech community. Then two books on word of mouth marketing. Then a blog, Deckermarketing.com, started while I was at Dell in 2003. By the time I was CMO at Bazaarvoice, I'd kept the same habit going inside the job: over 250 blog posts, 50-plus articles, more than 100 events spoken at, a Twitter following that cros

He tinted windows for a living and still couldn't see his own numbers clearly. A few years back I sat down with the owner of a local auto detail and tint shop, expanding into a second location. Revenue: $130k a month. Margin: 3%. He thought he had a revenue problem. He didn't. He had a measurement problem: he was watching one number and had never built a way to see the four layers of profit sitting underneath it. Here's the framework I gave him. Five layers, top to bottom: 1.

I once took a designer's work, crudely cut it up in PowerPoint, and handed it back with instructions on how to do it right. Two weeks later, he quit. This was 1998, running marketing at an early startup. I owned a Mac, so I was a "designer." (I was not a designer.) Still, I was confident, direct, and sure I knew better. So I rewired his UX design my way and told him how it should be done. He didn't argue. He just left. I didn't fully understand what I'd done until years later

I had a crush on a girl for years in elementary and junior high. Every six months, I asked her to "go steady." Every time, her sister said she couldn't talk on the phone because she was "washing her hair." What are the odds? It took me until 8th grade to catch on. I was persistent. I was also completely wrong about what persistence does. Pushing harder didn't make her want me more. If anything, it made her want to duck my calls. I didn't understand intrigue vs. persistence un

A cartoonist doodled three words on my business card. Twenty years later, I still remember them. I was at a BBQ dinner during SXSW with a small group of bloggers and marketers: Charlene Li, Shel Israel, Dell's Bob Pearson, a few others. Hugh MacLeod was there too, the cartoonist behind gapingvoid, known for doodles so sharp that Microsoft actually paid him to walk their halls sketching on employees' business cards as a kind of culture catalyst. Hugh asked me what I did. I pro