Reading Time: < 1 minThis is kind of a riff on my recent post failures faced by Michael Jordan and others, but it has more to do with making mistakes. Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, is quoted as having said: “Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that […]
Business
More about clarity breaks
Reading Time: 2 minI mentioned the idea of a “clarity break” yesterday and thought I’d unpack it a bit more. It’s a concept that I’ve struggled with over the years, but find great value from when I do it regularly. The EOS Worldwide blog defines it as: A clarity break is a regularly scheduled appointment on your calendar […]
Busy isn’t the goal
Reading Time: 2 minWhen asked “what’s going on?”, I think we’ve all said it: “Super busy.” That response is usually seen as being a good thing, so we keep going back to it. Is that really the goal, though? In Greg McKeown’s book Essentialism, he has a variety of things to say about busyness. His main point: What […]
Aim to serve your past self
Reading Time: < 1 minIf you run a business, there’s a good chance that your best customers are people that remind you of how you used to be. As Rory Vaden put it: You’re most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. It makes sense for a lot of us. We had a problem to overcome, found […]
Good decisions can have bad outcomes
Reading Time: 2 minAs humans, we too often judge the quality of a decision based on the outcome, when many other factors (often luck) play into it. The “Resulting Fallacy” is a case where we create too tight a relationship between the quality of the outcome and the quality of the decision. Or as poker player Annie Duke […]
My big reading shortcut
Reading Time: 2 minOver the past year I’ve been trying to read a lot more. I’ve succeeded in reading quite a few books, but I’m also “semi-reading” quite a few more. Michael Simmons has coined this as Fractal Reading, and while I don’t follow his practice exactly, it’s pretty close. Full books First, there are some books that […]
Leadership isn’t about who goes first
Reading Time: 2 minI consider Andy Stanley to be a leader in every sense of the word. If you’re not familiar with Andy, he’s the senior pastor of North Point Community Church, speaker, author, podcaster and much more. If you ask someone that knows Andy if they consider him a leader, they’ll almost certainly say yes. Andy’s churches […]
Don’t propose on the first date
Reading Time: < 1 minBack in 1997, the show “Dharma & Greg” ran for five seasons on ABC. It was about a couple that decided to skip the messiness of dating and get married the same day they met. Here’s a clip from the first episode if you’ve not seen it before. It was a great show, and a […]
Complex language vs credible intelligence
Reading Time: < 1 minIn the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow“, author Daniel Kahneman offers this nugget of wisdom: If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. It seems almost counter-intuitive, but we’ve all seen it before. More often than not, when someone is spouting a bunch of […]
How many shots did Michael Jordan miss?
Reading Time: 2 minYou’ve heard it said that “Michael Jordan has missed more shots than you’ve ever taken“. Similarly, many people reach their success by failing more times than you’ve tried. The idea is pretty clear; most everyone that is a success has tried hard and failed many times, learned from each experience, and then eventually became great. […]