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Your talent needs two things.  First, the right environment to take your talents on the ride they deserve. Meaning, the platform, venue, vehicle, organization or community through which you can make use of all of your gifts and create real value in the real world.  And second, the right mentality to bring yourself into the best shape for contribution. Meaning, the belief that you can make a difference. The courage to honor the…

A scary moment for any entrepreneur is when they discover the discrepancy between the labor intensity of their input and the dollar amount of their output.  In short, they’re working way too hard.  It feels like they can never fully break out of the ghetto. They can never quite rise above the middle market. Jason, my cartoonist friend, said it best.  You feel like a hippo in a hot…

Fear need not always be harmful to our lives.  We can have a healthy relationship with fear by approaching it as a continuum. A vehicle to get where want to go.  And so, from farm to table, so to speak, here’s how we engage with it.  We notice it, name it, greet it, accept it, thank it, love it, unravel it, share it, and lastly, channel it. Let’s unpack…

People can be foolish, heartless, annoying and toxic.  But since we can’t change others, we can only change our responses to them, the onus is on us to take the first step. Before reverting to cynicism and deeming that all people are blanks, we learn to start from a place compassion and curiosity.  Because every grating personality trait in another person has a long history behind it. Every emotional response…

It’s easier to land a job when you already have one.  This is not a cliché, it’s a clinically proven marketplace reality.  In a national survey of more than four thousand job seekers and human resources professionals worldwide, people with jobs have a better chance of being hired than unemployed job seekers.  It makes logical sense. They have social proof, confidence in their own abilities, greater negotiating power and, most importantly,…

Netflix once published an inspiring employee culture guide about freedom and responsibility.  There’s an entire chapter about setting the right context, rather than controlling people’s actions. According to their managers, high performance people will do better work if they understand the context and are turned loose to work within it.  Here’s the best passage:  When one of your talented employees does something dumb, don’t blame them. Instead, ask yourself what context…

When we have number of different feelings, thoughts and emotions running simultaneously, it’s really difficult to manage them all.  Because our psychological bandwidth can only cope with so many components before the emotional malaise engulfs us and starts overloading our system.  And so, instead of trying to manage them all, we should manage them one by one. Sounds like a perfect opportunity to introduce my latest technology innovation.  Feelz is…

Who do you think you are?  We liked you better when you did everything we wanted you to do.  But then you just had to start growing and maturing and taking the time to care for your own needs. And now it’s just not the same between us. Ever since you decided to wake up and get off your treadmill of obligations, now you’re not a deluded as you used to…

One of the more common reactions people have towards my nametag is gratitude.  Specifically at a party or a gathering where there are lots of new faces, people will actually thank me for being the only guest whose name they don’t have to worry about remembering.  And so, it provides mental relief. A break for the brain. The nametag is an interpersonal totem that reassures people, hey, relax, the…

Assisi’s most famous prayer is as follows.  Divine master, grant that I may not so much seek to be understood, as to understand.  Eight hundred years after its conception, his words are cornerstone of modern communication theory.  What’s interesting is when you invert the prayer. Approaching the interpersonal experience from the other person’s perspective.  This is a strategy our marriage counselor taught us. She said to enter into dialogue…