From the Author

I’ve previously mentioned how Edison rejected the idea that he’d ever failed to find a way to make an electric light bulb. Instead, he insisted he’d found 10,000 ways that wouldn’t work. While these 10,000 experiments were at least in some sense failures, they probably could not have been avoided, since Edison was operating in […]

There’s more to you than meets the eye. Whether you know it or not, you possess a wide range of skills, talents, and capabilities you can use to pump up your level of productivity and success. Since I don’t know you personally, I can’t tell you exactly what they may be. But I can give

Your “Basic Choice” is the name I’ve given to the simple act of choosing what you’re going to do next. You make this Basic Choice every time you stop doing something, and start doing something else. For example: Are you going to continue reading this blog, or flick to something else?  The next time you

I remember when I watched a young couple in a San Francisco park enjoy their two-year-old daughter’s ability to climb up a couple of stairs and throw herself down a three-foot-long metal slide, over and over again. Back at my hotel room, I felt that same level of enjoyment as my then-25-year-old son described a

It’s a basic assumption of mine that if you work to your maximum capabilities, and steadily seek to grow those capabilities, in the long run you will accomplish a great many of your most important tasks, projects, and goals. But while this sounds simple in theory, in daily practice it can be quite difficult. There

Deep down, we all want to know how good we are, really. But our ability to evaluate how good we are – at our work, at our relationships, at life in general – is unhappily not very good. We’ve all heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which documents this problem. First publicized in 1999, it’s the

There are times when our work and our lives are going great, and times when that’s less true. But difficult times need not be all bad. They often present ripe opportunities to shake things up and make them better long-term. This seems obvious to me, and there is ample logic supporting this notion. Here it

As a fan of the Tour de France, arguably one of the most demanding athletic events on the planet, I have long been intrigued by a statement from one of its most famous winners, the American: Greg LeMond. “It never gets easier,” LeMond is quoted as saying, “you just go faster.” For those who don’t

I’ve written several times on resilience and how to achieve it, starting here and continuing through here. Now I’m doing it again. But this time I’m focusing on some of the benefits of resilience and some of the characteristics you can cultivate to strengthen your ability to rebound from setbacks and difficulties – which we