Welcome to Brass Tack Thinking

We know who you are: You make things happen.

You want to make things happen. You need to make things happen. It’s part of who you are—maybe even at the core of it. You’re one of those people who brings change. It surrounds you. Follows you wherever you go.

You’re not the only one. But you are frustrated.

You’re an outlier. Not a lot of people see the world the way you do. Even fewer are willing—like you are—to do something about what they see.

Sometimes you feel like Cassandra, cursed to speak the truth to a world that doesn’t believe. Or like Sisyphus, rolling the same rock, up the same hill, only for it to come crashing down again (minus only a few pebbles, now mostly lodged in your feet) to reward your efforts.

You see what needs to happen, but no one else does. Or maybe you see what needs to happen, and can’t figure out how to get there from here. Or maybe you know something needs to happen, but you can’t yet figure out what. Or maybe you just want to make things, including yourself, better and want a way to do that.

That’s where Brass Tack Thinking comes in.

We’re like you. We’re constructive heretics, working within systems to change them, and intellectual magpies, finding solutions wherever they hide. We’ve each spent years making things happen—for individuals, for organizations, for ourselves. And now we want to do it with you.

Brass Tack Thinking is mindset – a set of principles and systems – for making things happen. When we started to talk about how each of us has tackled our life and career challenges over the years, we realized that, far from being alone, we shared an approach, a mindset, for bringing change. For making it real, not just something we wished for. For setting our minds to something, and laying out a path to get there.

The chief tenet of that mindset is a belief that making things happen is a process. A teachable one. A repeatable one. It’s a process that uses basic elements—brass tacks, if you will—to assess a situation as it is, how we want it to be, and how to make that future state real and sustainable.

So let’s do it.

We’re starting this blog as a collaboration. Both with each other, and more importantly, with you as well. We want to use this collaboration as a way to help you make your priorities happen—in work, in life, wherever—and to help build a coalition of those of us for whom action is the validation of thought.

Some of the posts will be purely tactical, others philosophical. Some will be well-planned, others are likely to be off-the-cuff rants (so forgive us in advance). Some will be about specific tools (yes, even social media…), others will be about what specific tools enable in the bigger picture. But all are meant to move talking about doing things into actually, well, doing things.

We have bigger plans, of course, for where this all could go. But we’ll keep those under wraps for now. (You’ll be in on the ground floor.)

In the meantime, weigh in. Tell us where your “pain points” are. Tell us where you stumble and where you succeed. Tell us how we, and this approach that we’re developing, can be most useful to you. We’re listening, we’re excited, and we’re ready to get down to Brass Tacks.

Let’s make things happen. Together. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Our best,

Amber and Tamsen

p.s. – If you’ve been a subscriber to Altitude Branding, no need to change a thing. You’ll continue to get posts right from BTT just like you always have. And if you haven’t subscribed yet, what are you waiting for?

image credit: monamarie

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