Marcus Schaller

Expanding Your Comfort Zone and Identity As an Entrepreneur

Sometimes the best way to build a successful business is to lean into the unknown, experiment using the resources available to you, and double down on what works.

Feeling Burned Out? Maybe You’re Majoring in Minor Things

When’s the last time you felt truly in love with your work—when you felt 100% focused on the things that really matter, when you were overflowing with creative energy, when ideas seemed to pour out of you without any conscious effort on your part?

If your answer is something like “this is how I live most days,” then congratulations! You can stop reading and get back to doing amazing work.

Most people’s response is probably closer to “sounds like some woo-woo pipe dream. I live in the real world, where in order to win you need to hustle and grind, then rinse and repeat. Success requires forcing things to bend to your will, and pushing yourself past your limits every single day.”

In other words, most people believe that in order to succeed in life, you need to be able to do it all, and do it non-stop. But what if trying to do it all is really just an addiction to busyness, a distraction from doing the things that actually lead to success?

Fear of Rejection, Part 5: Level Up Your Exposure

In this final post in the series about overcoming your fears around failure and rejection, we’re going to wrap up with ways to slowly ratchet up exposure to your discomfort and break down your deepest limiting beliefs—without getting completely overwhelmed.

Fear of Rejection, Part 4: Making Freedom from Fear a Daily Habit

In the last few posts, I shared how many of us accidentally train ourselves to expect failure, why trying to use “positive thinking” to overcome your fears rarely works, and how to start dismantling your fear-based, limiting beliefs.

Today we’ll look at a simple daily meditation practice you can use to let go of deeply ingrained fears and start instilling healthier mental habits.

Fear of Rejection, Part 3: Uprooting Your Limiting Beliefs

In the last two posts, we explored how we accidentally train ourselves to expect failure, and why trying to use “positive thinking” to overcome our fears rarely works.

Today, we’ll look at how you can dismantle those fear-based, limiting beliefs by asking yourself one simple question.

Fear of Rejection, Part 2: The Limitations of Positive Thinking

In my last post, we explored how many of us accidentally train ourselves to expect failure. Today, we’ll look at why your attempts to reframe rejection and failure as “good” usually fall flat, and what you can do instead to start overcoming the fears that are holding you back.

We’ve all heard that you should think of failure as learning, that every no just brings you one step closer to a yes, and that rejection is the natural byproduct of success. And yet, despite your best efforts to adopt a more positive spin on failure and rejection, it’s likely that you still struggle with both of them.

There’s a way to detach from fear-based conditioning and start seeing through the limiting stories that are keeping you stuck. But first, you need to get out of the habit of trying to cover up your limiting beliefs with positive thinking.

Fear of Rejection, Part 1: How We Accidentally Train Ourselves to Expect Failure

You’re an entrepreneur. An artist. A creator.

You have a calling so strong that you can feel it in your bones—to build a business that expresses your unique talents, interests, and purpose.

But for many of us, there’s a knot of fear and anxiety deep under all that ambition. A nagging voice that keeps telling us “this won’t work,” overshadowing our natural optimism and inspiration. These conflicting beliefs create a constant battle for control between the entrepreneur/artist/creator, and the part of us that expects to fail.

How to Have Brilliant Ideas Without Really Trying

It happens to all of us at one time or another. You’re driving to the store, or taking a shower, or walking through the park. When all of a sudden—bam! A solution to that nagging business problem you’ve been wrestling with for three weeks suddenly pops into your head.

But have you also noticed that when you try to consciously force those kinds of brilliant ideas, you just end up mentally exhausted?

Why Obsessing About a Goal Makes You Less Likely to Achieve It

Most advice about succeeding in business is based on the notion that in order to achieve anything worthwhile, you must:

Have a clear, measurable, and actionable goal.
Commit to achieving that goal no matter what it takes.
Keep your goals top of mind at all times.

To be sure, having a clear goal can help you focus on the actions that will have the highest impact. Without any idea of your destination, it would be hard to know what actions to take—let alone muster up the motivation to tackle a challenging project.

But what happens when you take the advice to “focus on the goal” too far? When does guidance become obsession?

Aligning Your Existing Business With Authentic Purpose

In my last post, I shared the difference between authentic vs ego-driven purpose. The question was—is your sense of purpose coming from the truth of who and what you really are, or is it coming from a place of who you think you should be?

Getting clear about your authentic purpose makes it much easier to build your business’s unique offering, positioning, and messaging around your true strengths.

But what if that authentic purpose looks a lot different than what you’re actually doing right now? What if the business you’ve spent years building doesn’t really seem to match your talents, strengths, and interests? Should you just scrap everything you’ve worked so hard to build and start over?

Not necessarily.