Reading Time: < 1 minThe idea of being selfless is great. Constantly putting others ahead of you seems like an admirable way to live. It is, perhaps, but it won’t work. In order to serve others, you need to take care of yourself first. If you’ve been on a plane, you know the safety drill, and a big thing […]
Leadership
We did it ourselves
Reading Time: < 1 minThere are some professions that tend to be underappreciated until something goes wrong. Take the I.T. department at a large company, where many people will think one of two things: You could say the same about production staff at a concert. There are dozens of people working to make sure all goes smoothly, and if […]
Praise and criticism are both vapor
Reading Time: < 1 minIn listening to a recent meditation track from Headspace as part of a recent clarity break, the focus of the clip was on this: Praise and criticism are two sides of the same coin. If we believe in one, we believe in the other. Better not to get attached to either. A similar thought was […]
Goals are a commitment to the process
Reading Time: < 1 minSetting a goal is easy enough: “Lose 20 pounds by March 1” sounds great. If you follow something like the SMART framework, that simple goal essentially checks all of the boxes. While losing 20 pounds might be the goal, setting that goal really means that you’re committing to a process. This likely means eating less […]
Don’t create followers; create leaders
Reading Time: < 1 minRobert Glazer said in his book Elevate: Remember, great leaders don’t create followers. They create more leaders. A great example of this is Nick Saban, head football coach at the University of Alabama. In his time at Alabama, 33 of his players have gone to the NFL in the first round. That’s incredible! Many of […]
Make More Mistakes
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]