As a partner in the consulting firm eatbigfish, and the co-author of the book A Beautiful Constraint: How To Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, Mark is highly sought after as a speaker and facilitator skilled at helping companies discover breakthrough solutions.
Some of the highlights of his colorful career include a Platinum Award for direct response marketing, taking a dot-com public, starting his own ad agency to launch Yahoo!, selling Guinness beer door to door, working as a carney at state fairs throughout the Midwest, playing the part of a Buddhist monk in a Kleenex commercial, and warming up a crowd for Ellen DeGeneres.
Mark, his wife, and their two daughters live in Marin County, California.
In this episode, Mark shows us how constraints shouldn’t get such a bad rap in the creative world, but should be embraced as opportunities to look at a challenge in a different way. Constraints can often turn out to be the stimulus for coming up with a more beautiful solution.
Mark also observes that habits serve us very well – until they don’t. It’s important to know when habits need to be challenged in some way – to break “path dependence” and question our assumptions.
“Character is deciding what it is that you want, and then waking up every day and making progress towards that goal. We don’t have habits – our habits have us.” ~ Mark Barden
