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Change is hard for all of us, myself included. In this new series, I’ll be sharing daily mediations on transition, change, reinvention. Look out all you rock and rollers, turn and face the strange. # # # Archimedes was a true renaissance man.  Working as a mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer, he became one of the leading scientists in history.  You’ve probably heard his most notable quotation.  Give…

Hyperfocus is the ability to hone in on a specific task, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else.  It becomes a trance like state in which we concentrate until everything becomes invisible but the thoughts we think.  This is both a blessing on a curse.  From a creativity standpoint, we easily lose all sense of time and perspective and disappear into the glorious oblivion of flow as the ideas…

Concentrate was a spooky game we used to play at sleepovers.  The object was scare your friends by predicting their deaths. You begin by telling the person to close their eyes. Then you stand behind them, reciting gruesome chants and performing scary rituals while pounding lightly on their back with your fists.  At the end when they open their eyes, whatever color they saw represented how they would die. …

A startup is, among many things, a marketplace of ideas. It’s this magical bazaar where people regularly gather to sell and purchase intellectual effects, conceptual assets and creative goods. And the challenge giving your team members tools for testing ideas in the workshop of their minds. Okay folks, are you ready for some startup perspective? Then welcome to Metric Collective! Let’s kick off today’s lesson, it’s called: Idea Marketplaces…

Soup to nuts is an idiom that goes back five hundred years as description of a full course dinner, progressing from beginning to end.  At that time, soup was likely to feature as the first course of a formal meal, while a selection of nuts was offered as the last.  Delicious. Bon appetite.  This idea, tasty enough, can be applied to any our business projects. Because the goal is…

Here’s my favorite question on the personality type quiz.  Do you find visionaries to be somewhat annoying, or rather fascinating?  In my experience, most companies and organizations will choose the first answer. Even if they act fascinated in the meeting, deep down, they are probably suspicious and threatened by that person.  It’s a primeval reaction. Anytime some visionary marches into their office with a big idea, their collective corporate…

Can we be comfortable without the hunger for more?  Can we free ourselves from the constant demands for additional bounty?  For those of us seeking a cosmic coloration in consciousness, this is an inner battle that will continue to wage on. And it will most certainly be one worth fighting.  And so, whether we are starting a new business or changing careers or simply making a life transition, let…

Everything seems, sounds and feels so much better inside our own minds.  God bless the human imagination. It’s such a wonderful, fascinating, tricky thing.  But as a result of this glorious machine, each of us are burdened with impossible expectation, right up until the moment life slaps in the face and says, welcome to how it works. Epictetus comes to mind, who once said whenever he saw a person…

Boredom isn’t a feeling.  It’s an adjective, a description and a characteristic.  But it’s not a feeling.  Quite the opposite, in fact. Boredom is a word people say without any particular need to communicate how they are really feeling. It’s a rhetorical placeholder. A psychological dodge. Boredom signifies that there is an emotional reality lurking beneath the surface.  When somebody is asked how they feel, and they respond by…

Gollum bit off the hobbit’s finger and danced about, shouting the words: Precious, precious, my precious, oh precious. But in his elation to be reunited with the one true ring, teetered on the edge of the great pit, blundered into the crack of doom and burned in the molten lava.  This is what can happen if we are too precious. About anything.  From sentences on the page, to strategies…