“A career is only a job that you’ve had for too long,” I said jokingly in a corporate meeting. The room fell dead silent.

It’s not your responsibility after all. What would happiness be if you take the genius out of your mind and gave it up to your higher spirit? Would creativity flourish?

Every time I hear “Don’t take this personally but…,” I brace myself for the criticism. You know it is coming and it’s not going to be good.

Building morale by doubling down on a losing hand, workplace reform is destined to fail.

“They’ve never built a statue for a critic.” Celebrators are hard to find and it is too easy to fall into the trap of being critical.

It always seems like life is always more interesting five feet further than the end of the rope.

…only epic failures.

‘New Coke’ marketing was an epic failure. Today Coke is firmly positioned as the number one selling soft drink in the world.

Why? Marketing

“People work for money but they go the extra mile for recognition…” – Dale Carnegie. Recognition comes in many forms.

To paraphrase the Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu: A mythic journey always starts with your first step.

How do you get started when looking for inspiration?

Where does inspiration come from?

Forbes reports, “The highest paid hedge fund manager only made $1.3 billion last year.” Last year, 2014, was a bad year for hedge funds and hedge fund managers. It wasn’t just a bad year, it was the worst since the great recession started in 2008.

I would love to have five dollars for every time a business owner says to me, “I want my employees to think like an owner.” “Oh, really!,” I respond…

Lately, I’ve started noticing a lot of actions that have unintended consequences, and sometimes they backfire.

Creativity takes time. It requires space. Space to muse. Space to think. Space unconstrained by time. Creativity is timeless.

When things don’t go well, it is easy to take on all the responsibility, maybe blame someone else, and cry in our beer (or wine).

Why not put a problem in front of others and see what they come up with? You might be surprised by the outcome.

So many books, blogs, and podcasts purport to help you in writing your own success story, to help you develop your purpose. But they don’t work for me.

Finding the passion that lies deep within to drive you for the rest of your life seems to be a struggle for so many of us.

Yet we never seem to find the answer.

The question has always stuck with me, like the elephant in a circus, how many things have I been told or experienced that I couldn’t do when younger that I could do today?

It seems like we live in an increasingly competitive society where anxiety and stress have become a cultural norm. Meditation has been promoted as a tool to help reduce anxiety and stress. But there might be a better way…

“…The life that you ought to be living is the one you are living…”

In the many years of my continuous self-improvement, I tried to develop a practice of positive affirmations but do they work. The answer is no.

Why do you want to play or work to your full potential? Finding the why will create the motivation for how.

Inspired motivation is the activity of leadership, i.e. transformational leadership. It can take on a traditional role of inspiring a group to accomplish something.

Do you ever have the problem of making a project bigger, more glorious, than it needs to be?

Even the best laid plans do not guarantee success. It still takes work and determination. Often, it takes hard work and the perseverance of an oak tree, often with unanticipated obstacles and outcomes.

“Follow your bliss,” says Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth, implying that bliss is happiness. But happiness is not a destination. Happiness is a feeling.

With the correct mental attitude you can accomplish anything. REALLY?

In 2009, a study by Joanne V. Wood and John W. Lee from the University of Waterloo and W.Q. Elaine Perunovic from the University of New Brunswick discovered that some people felt worse about themselves after repeating positive self-statements. Do affirmations work?

…I am an Explorer.

I love learning, finding new challenges, solving puzzles, discovering myself. The unexpected discoveries are the best. When working on a project I get distracted and wind up chasing rabbits down holes.

Honestly, I was a little embarrassed about how immature and naive I was five years ago. But then I placed myself in that time frame, five years ago, and thought, “How did I feel about how much I had grown five years before that?”

For years I worked as a sales manager for a company that set a sales target of a 40% increase over last year. Every year you knew in advance the sales target would be a 40% increase.

There’s another view to this situation we call success. In the spirit of Zen, letting it flow, so the choice between control and out of control is within our own mind.

Hard works may not equal getting much done…

The foundation of culpable deniability is plausible deniability and allows leaders to deny blame for questionable activity taken by others, activity that they should have been aware of but were not. They were willfully ignorant.

Is willful ignorance an abdication of responsibility?

There is nothing simple about quantum physics but in its simplest terms, the Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle refers to the ‘observer effect’ as its basis. The observer effect is a phenomena that cannot be observed without the observer influencing the outcome.

When the measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a measure…

We all have our special brands of heroes and villains. It is the heroes and villains that are the lesser known that have the greatest impact on me. And it is in the lesser of our heroes and villains that reside a little piece of ourselves.

Irrational behavior can be made consciously plausible maybe even admirable. The greatest lies are the lies we tell ourselves.

Money, the concept, is strange. I create value for someone else and I receive money for it. This sounds very simple…

The phrase “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” must have been coined by the likes of the Marquis de Sade. Of course, the Sade was either in prison or an insane asylum most of his adult life.

I know harassment when I see it. I thought… Companies can harass their customers. Recently my internet service became exceptionally slow.

Can you imagine child labor? Can you imagine women not having the privilege of voting? Can you imagine slavery? Can you imagine the prohibition of alcohol?

Non-competes have always puzzled me. A non-compete agreement is usually signed by an employee who agrees not to start or join another company that competes with their employer. Do they work? Or do they keep around employees who are better off leaving?

It seems that housewives in the 1950s preferred to add some of their own creativity into the mix.

What would it take for you to look at your reality in a completely opposite direction? How would you look at your life, your friends, your work?

What would it take for you to look at your reality in a completely opposite direction? How would you look at your life, your friends, your work?

Motivation is everything. “Win one for the Gipper,” comes from a speech Knute Rockne gave to his football players at Notre Dame during halftime while playing against the undefeated Army in 1928.

I recently gave a presentation about client survival to an audience of experienced business coaches highlighting why coached clients stay or leave.

When big data meets big management, big management feels like they have to do something with it. And they do.

A prioritized list might work, but then the next big project comes in, and now I have two big projects to do. More big projects come in, making me feel a bit overwhelmed.

The paradox of awards occur in the awards of recognition and merit. These awards are usually presented with an aim of encouraging the recipient to keep doing what they are doing and to encourage others to follow suit.

Answering the question as to why intimate relationships succeed or fail was found to be easier than suspected; however, the results are not what might be expected.

Business is about balance. Like a three legged stool, we balance marketing (I include sales in with marketing) with operations and with finance.

McDonald’s is pulling out all the stops in an effort to revive the company. Changing the menu, pulling the CEO, developing a new branding strategy, enhancing digital marketing, and of course, the obligatory corporate restructuring.

Raining money sounds too good to be true. It’s either a magic trick or a prank.

The technology we currently use requires us to continuously deal with upgrades. Inevitably, products and their software become faster, less expensive, more user-friendly. We expect it.

When I first entered sales one of the best pieces of advise I received from one of my counterparts was, “Don’t ever let backorders stand in your way of making a sale…”

It’s a given. If you dislike your mother-in-law, she’ll move in with you. That office copy machine will always break when you most need copies for an important meeting.

Success is almost always a surprise. It seems to come when least expected. It is elusive. “I’ll know it when I see it,” I tell myself.

Face it. Most workers are not engaged with their work. They simply show up; do what is asked; go home; and get a paycheck.

How would you feel if your employer or your client (if you are business owner) exceeded your expectations? It doesn’t happen often but it happens.

Bullying culture has become a wide-spread issue: from school bullying, teacher bullying, cyber bullying, gay bullying, etc. and it goes beyond school.

Rules of the road: When driving you never ‘have’ the right-of-way. You can only ‘give’ the right-of-way. This is an important distinction to the driving test question.

Technology is amazing. Telsa has an electric vehicle that does 0 to 60 mph in three seconds. INSANITY!

I want to be different like everyone else. I first noticed this phenomena when my sons started to be teenagers.

“Rank and yank” – How does an institution, or a business, or an individual elevate oneself by their ability to create losers?

I just can’t seem to manifest more time and energy. Maybe I can take a clue from nature. Plants get their energy from the sun.

Fear chokes creativity. When in fear I resort to that which is comfortable, i.e. my past. I go back to the past even when I know that past behavior wasn’t good for me.

When I have a decision to make, I most often combine emotional thinking with critical thinking, thereby justifying my decision.

Less dropped calls than the competition? Poor customer service rules. How can you compete as not being as bad as the other guys?

…time savings. We, as a workforce, have become dramatically more efficient. We can do more today than ever before, or so it would seem.

Over time, I have come to expect that the hardest sale to make is a sale to my own group of trusted friends, associates, and clients.

Recently, multitasking has had a run of bad luck in the popular press. The Wikipedia entry on multitasking notes, “Multitasking can result in time wasted due to human context switching and apparently causing more errors due to insufficient attention.”

The World – Capricious? Yes, the world has a degree of capriciousness to it that can make life seem impulsive, fickle, unpredictable, even volatile.

A young woman, enrolled in one of the nation’s top medical schools, was told 50% of what she would be taught over the next four years would later be found to be inaccurate. The school just didn’t know which half of the training would be inaccurate.

Yes, you are precious – rare, valuable, and highly esteemed. Is precious holding you back? Is precious an excuse for not letting go, for not showing up?

It’s all an excuse to say, “I don’t care.” I don’t care about you and I don’t care about your problems. I have enough of my own.

Trust is an elusive characteristic that builds over time and experience. It is easy to lose and difficult to develop.

If employees are an organization’s most important assets, then why do I feel like a commodity? Maybe you do too.

Boring can be an indication that everything is running smoothly. There are no fires to put out; no dragons to slay.

Stop the procrastination. Make up your mind and do it. Just do it. Easier said than done, right? Most of us delay. We wait. We wait for the right moment.

Motivation, fire in the belly, is an invitation to a journey. A journey of self discovery, an awareness of others, and your role in the universe.

When I worked for an owner of a rather large manufacturing company. He put a lot of pressure on everyone to produce. Fear is a tremendous motivator.

We could not live our lives daily without faith. Faith in all sorts of outcomes. Faith is based on trust. Trust in ourselves, others, and the universe.

One of the assumptions of the industrial revolution is that as we automated more tasks, people would have more leisure time. Am I out of balance?

There are too many self-help books. Like diets, they are everywhere and, generally, they don’t work. Get your heart out of your tactics and put your tactics into your head.

The Bic pen, atomic bomb, and Disneyland are all disruptive innovations.
What did it take?
1. Vision
2. Innovation
3. Fearlessness
4. Persistance
Today all three of these stories makes sense, but at the time, they were all incredibly different.

What is your greatest strength?

How do you find it?

Then what do you do with it?

For most, we can not self-identify our greatest strength. We have it and do it so naturally that our greatest strength just seems normal. Not at all unusual. It comes easily and effortlessly. You just do it. It’s a part of you that is so intimately you that you’ll never notice it.

One aspect about myself is that I like to do a good job. I like to do a good job at everything. I strive for excellence. Do you know when you’ve done enough?

A baseball team’s shortstop is one of the most versatile players on the field. He handles infield fly balls, relays outfield balls, relays infield balls, and backs up third base, second base and the pitcher. A good shortstop makes a great baseball team. Does your team have a shortstop?

Are you ever too old? Or ever old enough? I remember when growing up how I felt too young. Too young to cross the street alone. Too young to go to the movies alone.

We are all born with inherit creativity. “Can you dance?” asks the question of where did you lose it…or did you really lose it.

Fidelity is a word rarely heard today and perhaps less frequently thought of. More than loyalty, fidelity signifies a faithfulness, a loyalty to a purpose.

I worked with a salesman in an insurance office, who for every lost sale would say, after a brief diatribe about why he didn’t close the sale, “You can’t fix stupid.” Implying that every lost sale was the fault of the prospect. It certainly wasn’t his fault. It was always the prospect’s fault.