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According to an interview with a sleep expert and clinical professor of psychology at the most prestigious university in the country, between twenty and fifty per cent of people have had at least one academic anxiety dream in their lifetime.  You know the one. It’s where you show up late to class for the final exam of and realize that you’re completely unprepared.  I have this dream often. Typically when I’m…

Philippe’s compelling book on his creative process explains that to offer the most honest performance, he must be all alone. He must be prisoner of the fortress of his art. And so, he creates a giant wall around himself and, inside that wall, follows his honesty and intuition.  I agree with his philosophy, but only eighty percent of the time. Because the other twenty requires collaboration. For years, I had it in…

Respect doesn’t require extra time.  Just intention and attention. And that can be the different between a happy customer and an infuriated hater who leaves a one star review online.  Macinnis’s fascinating study about incivility found that customers are less likely to patronize a business that has an employee who is perceived as rude. Something as simple as witnessing an uncivil interaction can lead customers to negatively generalize about…

All creativity begins with the moment of conception. That little piece of kindling that gets the fire going. That initial source of inspiration that takes on a life of its own. That single note from which the entire symphony grows. That single spark of life that signals an idea’s movement value, almost screaming to us, something wants to be built here. Based on my books in The Prolific Series, I’m going…

Apatow receives widespread criticism for making comedies that are tool long.  Viewers and critics alike argue that most of his films could be cut down by about thirty to forty minutes a piece.  And yet, the director couldn’t care less about people’s opinions. Because he’s the writer, director and producer of his films, and he can do whatever he wants. He answers only to himself. In fact, he explained…

Thanks to the technological trappings in which our culture has dressed itself, we’ve officially stopped thinking.  Because we’re too occupied with responding.  With so many thousands of messages and signals and pings and notifications demanding our attention, it’s a wonder anything gets done at all.  The sad part is, quality hasn’t risen commensurate with volume. Eighty percent of the information we respond to is completely unnecessary. And that’s being…

Farmers know that all ground needs occasional change and invigoration to becoming fertile.  That’s why they invented crop rotation. It balances soil fertility, avoids diseases, blocks pests, increases organic matter content, decreases weed stress, keeps the farms under continuous production and ultimately provides the land with fallow time to enrich it with real rest.  What’s interesting is when you look at the business applications of this concept. Because in…

The scary part about it anxiety is, sometimes you’re too overwhelmed to figure out what to do about the problem.  Ask anyone who’s ever suffered a panic attack or an anxiety episode or a depressive spiral, reaching out for help when you’re despondent is like making a phone call when you’re vomiting. It just doesn’t seem physically or emotionally possible.  The secret, then, is to plan for catastrophe in advance….

I recently read a study about the impact of procrastination’s on the workplace.  Ferrari’s research assessed over twenty thousand people and found that procrastination was statistically associated with lower salaries, lower well being, shorter durations of employment and a greater likelihood of being unemployed. But what’s truly revelatory about the study is, researchers found that procrastination wasn’t merely a failure of professional execution, but a failure of emotional regulation.  Turns out,…

Most people deliberately wait for the pressure of a deadline to sharpen their thinking.  They heighten the tension around a project by setting the amount of time between vision and current reality. And the pull of gravity helps thrust them to completion.  Unfortunately, I don’t work that way. Deadlines are not how my brain operates. Ever since I was a kid, I was always more of a reverse procrastinator….