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Can you tell the difference between patience and procrastination?  It’s harder than you think.  Because it’s one thing to take your time and avoid rushing and ship quality work out the door; but it’s another thing to delude yourself with a brilliantly executed stalling maneuver.  It reminds me of my lawyer friend. God bless his extreme detail orientation, which is essential in the legal professional where there is zero…

The winds of work are variable in the extreme.  One day we’re operating at our highest point of contribution, creating significant value at within the organization, the next day we’re sneaking off during lunch to do job interviews with potential employers. It’s confusing and stressful and frustrating.  But the good news is, when we view our career as a long arc game, treating each of our jobs as stopovers…

It’s true that language is a powerful lever for changing the world around us.  But it’s also true that words can be twisted to match any desire we have, and interpreted to justify any action we take.  In fact, many of our greatest revelations occur in speechless moments when we perceive things greater and beyond the sum total of all words.  That’s one of the great joys of songwriting….

Emerson wrote that good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed.  It’s a loving invitation for us, in whatever endeavor we’re chasing after, to push towards that precious point of no return. Where we stop longing and start making it a matter of transaction.  Sadly, some people never make it to that point. They remain trapped in their dream world, gradually grinding down their grand…

Everything in this country is extra, extra large.  We love our big cars, big houses, big food, big guns, big corporations, big brands and big personalities.  In fact, according to a recent study from the journal of female health sciences, even our women have a significantly larger mean breast volume than women born in other countries.  America is always trying to stay ahead of the curve, aren’t we?  But let’s stay…

We have a genetic reflex to avoid change.  And we are geniuses at inventing reasons to avoid change.  But what we don’t realize until we come out grizzled on the other side is, change isn’t actually what hurts. It’s our resistance to it that creates the suffering.  Bonnie sings one of my favorite songs about it. It’s obviously a breakup song, but what’s fascinating is, if you switch the pronouns from…

Emerson was said to have lived his life as a series of experiments upon the external world, and by every one of which a new power was awakened in his mind.  The words from his celebrated book come to mind: Leave me in the splendid labyrinth of my perceptions to wander without end.  It’s a standing invitation for the collective sanity of humanity. The philosopher’s forewarning is not to close the…

You can’t scale yourself.  Even if you could, you wouldn’t want to. Because unless you have buckets of cash, an endless supply of energy, or a human cloning machine, scaling yourself is not a sustainable strategy.  It might work for a few years or even a decade, but eventually it’s going to catch up with you.  Let’s back up for a minute. Why do you want to scale in…

Our great joy in life is when we realize that the journey is no longer a solo adventure, but a communal undertaking.  That we can’t survive alone, and even if we could, we wouldn’t want to.  Because it’s not the way our species is wired. Keen’s theory comes to mind, that human beings are single selves who exist only within a community of interdependent beings. And as we grow aware of…

Managing other people’s perceptions of us can be a full time job.  If there were an application posted on a career website, the headline would read: Seeking a codependent narcissistic workaholic to dive deep into the ego vortex of excessive impression management. Low pay. Burnout likely. Zero prior experience necessary.  Funny thing is, we justify our obsession with people’s perception of us in the name of managing our golden reputation. Protecting…