Click here to listen. © Jane Pollak 2025(illustrated with pieces of my art process along the way) Since my eldest child gave birth in 2011, I’ve kept an ongoing Notes section labeled Grandma Activities. Whenever newspaper articles or ads for family fun...
Click here to listen. I’m very suggestible. When a fiber arts colleague on Instagram shared her wisdom about material storage, I accepted and felt compelled to honor her methodology. “At what point do you throw out leftover pieces of wool?” I asked,...
Click here to listen. Talk about ink in one’s veins! This birth announcement, created by my dad, is prominently displayed in my baby book from 1948. My mother, too, had a way of making things newsworthy just by naming them. When a neighbor in the Midwest...
Click here to listen. Do you remember the staggering number of catalogs that used to weigh down our mailboxes day after day, particularly in the fall? LL Bean came weekly, if not more often, in various iterations: Women’s, Outdoors, Holiday, etc. But there were a...
As a kid in the 50’s, I played a game called 7-Up. All you needed was a Spalding ball and a wall. Our garage was the perfect arena for mastering the seven different challenges of throwing the pink sphere against a flat surface: allowing it to bounce, catch it...
A woman in her late 70's or 80's, from a highly regarded national publication, was seated to my left at the Women's Media Group lunch event this week. The topic of the hour was: The Future of Media is Podcasting. There was an exceptional panel of women qualified to...
The musicians on the #1 train were all business. Four well-dressed gentlemen, each with his own instrument, stood in my car near the closing doors. They waited politely until everyone found a seat at the 50th Street Station. They played one very lively and tuneful...
I was thumbing through a copy of Big Money Speaker magazine: The Ultimate Financial Freedom Guide for Speakers as I sipped my morning potion. I'm fascinated by how they market. The pages were filled with quotes like: "It's worth more than anything you will ever pay...
It was driven home again to me this week that customers niche our businesses in their minds with a single word or phrase. And we can help control what that word is. Witness the magnificent catalog I just received from Mitchells--a high end retail store where I have...
Listening to Andrea Adler's CD, To Advertise or Not To Advertise, That is The Question, I heard validation for a practice I've already embarked upon--making an offering. Next Thursday evening, July 17th, I'm offering a sneak preview of my Create Your Own Future...
Laura Newman of Laura Newman PR called to get together with me last week. She'd heard me speak several years ago and wanted to let me know about her new business launch. What came up during our conversation is something that happens all the time with the small...
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