You’d think it would be an enviable position, but I know a Stanford MBA who doesn’t like being the smartest person in the room. “Nobody ever challenges me,” she complains. “They all just do whatever I say.” There’s wisdom in this attitude, because having people around you who are skeptical and hard to convince, who […]
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When facing an important decision, it’s a fairly common piece of advice to “sleep on it.” The operative idea is this: in many situations, you can’t quickly sort out the various factors and considerations by using only your conscious mind. However, if you give your subconscious mind time to work on the problem, it’s likely
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Dissatisfaction. Disappointment. Failure. Rejection. These are “facts of life” for people on Planet Earth. In fact, if you don’t experience some of these feelings, some of the time, you probably aren’t fully engaged in the exciting activities of living. So the goal should not be to avoid these devastating feelings, but rather to be sure
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Bravery might not tie in directly with productivity and success, but I believe there are important advantages to cultivating a little more bravery than you’ve got right now. I’m not talking about the kind of bravery that leads to fighting dragons, storming beaches, or charging into the teeth of enemy defenses. I’m talking about the
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Think about every task, project, and goal you’ve ever undertaken. Unless I miss my guess, for each and every one of them you started somewhere and finished somewhere else. In between, you followed a process. Put simply, a process is just a series of steps you execute with the intention of obtaining a specific result.
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One of the classic interview questions is something along the lines of: “Where do you see yourself in five years?” The time frame may vary, of course, but the point is to elicit some sense of your future orientation and vision. In this advisory I’m suggesting you ask yourself the same question, not merely to
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There are several reasons to keep your focus on delivering high-quality results. These include: But none of this suggests that producing high-quality work is easy. Quality improvements usually require an intense focus on expertise, technique, and detail. Unfortunately, some people don’t enjoy or don’t value these requirements. Nevertheless, if you want to strengthen the quality
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There’s a documentary called “Space Shuttle Columbia: The Final Flight.” It’s full of indications and references to an attitude then pervasive at NASA that might best be termed “hubris.” While certain engineers were asking almost from the beginning for more information about the condition of the shuttle’s left wing, which had suffered an impact of
Success is Fueled by Learning Read More »
Yes you do. You may deny that you ever get angry, or you may believe you have your entirely-justified anger response tightly under control. But the truth is you experience the energy of anger – whether or not you unleash its full destructive power – far more often than you’d like to admit. Perhaps even
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You’ve probably been through enough experiences to have learned that perspective is important. The way you view a situation greatly influences your emotional and practical reactions to it, as well as how effectively you can create results as close as possible to exactly what you want. This brings up an interesting perspective on perspective, because
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