How to Organize Your Work & Your LifeFrank Discussion of Problems
Lately I’ve been thinking about the failures in NASA’s 30-year-long Space Shuttle program (1981-2011). There were many, but of course the two biggest were the fatalities associated with Challenger and Columbia. In both cases, the problems that ultimately brought down the shuttle…
Elements of Successful Negotiation
When you need something from another person and you don’ t have the power to just commandeer it, you’ll benefit from applying some basic negotiation techniques. Negotiation is particularly important when you expect to be coming back to this same person for…
How to Increase Your Influence
As I have said before, unless you’re working in a cave somewhere, cut off from the internet and other means of communication, your productivity and success depend at least to some extent on the productivity and success of other people. But simply…
The Power of Subconscious Processing
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…
How Well Does Your Work Position Suit You?
Productivity and success depend on many more factors than your solo smarts, drive, and persistence. One that’s often overlooked is the practical fit between you and the position in which you work: the better this fit, generally the better your results. To…
Strive for High Quality
There are several reasons to keep your focus on delivering high-quality results. These include: High-quality work earns you a more respectable reputation, larger rewards, and greater freedom to do things your way.High-quality work rarely needs re-adjusting, revising, or reworking: once done, it…
Thriving After Rejection
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…
Improving Your Interpersonal Communication
As I’ve mentioned many times, your ability to work well with people is almost always vital to your productivity and success. And one of the most important of these “people skills” is interpersonal communication. Communicating well with other people allows you to…
Operate in the Sweet Spot of Productivity and Success
Have you ever worked on a project that went beautifully? You knew exactly what to do, you were operating at the peak of your skills and abilities, and you seemed to be catching all the breaks? Your productivity and success were pretty…
The Power of Personal Rapport
As I’ve said many times, unless you’re a hermit you cannot prudently ignore the impact of other people on your productivity and success. That’s why you’re never done seeking out and maintaining strong relationships. A word that characterizes some of the strongest…
Identifying and Resolving Conflicts
You’re probably aware that improving your productivity and success is dependent not only on your own efforts, but on your ability to work with and obtain top results from the efforts of others. That automatically brings up the issues of conflict. Conflict…
Avoiding Unnecessary Failures
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…
