December 2021

It’s very difficult to overstate the power of habits, both good and bad. If you have habits of hard work and persistence, you’ll likely be productive and successful. If you have habits of sloth and capriciousness, you likely won’t. To help you become more productive and successful in your work and your life, here are […]

I recently wrote a piece about signs that show you’re successful, and received a lot of positive feedback on it. Without them falling all the way into “imposter syndrome,” a lot of people apparently feel less successful than they really are. That motivated me to think more about the topic, and I came up with

Follow me, if you will, in a brief thought experiment: Visualize yourself floating down a river. You may be hanging onto an inner tube, on a raft, in a boat, or whatever you prefer. The river is mostly tranquil, flowing smoothly and peacefully through a lovely landscape. But there are areas containing white water, sharp

Much of what I write, speak, and teach about involves focus: focusing on getting on your most important tasks, projects, and goals completed as effectively and efficiently as you can. But it’s also true that “all work and no play makes for a dull person.” That’s why it’s helpful to spend a portion of your

Did you really mean to do that? Whatever the last thing you said or did, was that really what you intended? Or were you drawn by outside forces or influences to spend time on something you didn’t plan, didn’t care about, and didn’t intend? This is an important question because the power of intention in

There are times when making an abrupt change is appropriate: quitting a bad job, closing a failing business, killing a worthless project, terminating an experiment, and so forth. But in far more instances than we often realize, gradualism is a better strategy than abrupt change. This is particularly true when the change is about starting

A few months ago, I first wrote about improving your performance under pressure. In that piece, I focused on dialing up and down the factors causing you to feel pressured so you could more often operate in the “sweet spot” where your performance would be optimum. In addition to that approach, however, there are several

In a previous post, I wrote about self-motivation to succeed, and how you can increase your level of motivation by changing the ways you think and the things you do. I got a lot of feedback on that one, including some people who asked about ways to maintain their motivation over the long haul. This

Unless you’re a “rookie” at the tasks, projects, and goals you’re trying to accomplish, you’ve most likely developed some fairly routinized ideas, habits, methods, tools, procedures, rules of thumb, and other settled ways of thinking and working. These are probably helpful and effective. But it’s possible for them to take on too much importance and