I Became a Better Marketer When I Started Thinking Like an Entrepreneur When you think the way entrepreneurs think, you see everything around you differently.

A few months ago, my wife and I were brainstorming ways to market our novel. We spent three years writing it together -- it's called Mr. Nice Guy, and it comes out October 16. And as any author knows, publicizing and marketing a book is tough. It's a crowded space, few publications cover books in any meaningful way and readers are hard to reach.

We stared into the air for a while. Then I thought, What would happen if I stopped looking at this like an author, and started doing it like an entrepreneur? And with that, a new world opened up.

I don't see entrepreneurship as a career choice. It's a mindset. That's the thing I marvel at most when spending time with brilliant entrepreneurs, and it's the skill I think everyone should continually hone. When you think like an entrepreneur, it's like wearing augmented reality glasses. You see the same things as everyone else, but you see them differently. They appear as inactive opportunities, just waiting to be activated. All you need is to find a new way for something old to be useful.