Category: Expectations
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When you’re switching careers, don’t rush to a resolution
There’s a great piece of advice that Herminia Ibarra writes in Working Identity, which is to allow for a transition period between holding on to an old identity, and letting go of it and taking on a new one. She writes, “Better to live the contradictions than to come to a premature resolution.” This assurance…
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Say what needs to be said
It took Wattpad co-founder Allen Lau decades to learn to speak up, instead of stopping himself when something needed to be said. He writes, “For me, I kept telling myself I needed to err on the side of speaking up too much. Trust me, even with that, the end result is that on many occasions…
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“I’m already doing that, though!”
When someone gives you advice, or when you apply a best practice, you may not actually be doing it the way that person intended. In other words, if an expert watched you practice your work or apply your approach, they might say, “Hey, wait—that’s not what I meant.” That moment is a gift. There’s a…
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Choosing how you feel
My friend Peter has been running Barrel, which has grown into Barrel Holdings, for 18 years. In the past, he’d constantly feel the worries of what could go wrong the following week, even on holidays. If you’re an entrepreneur or independent, you’ll know exactly what Peter means—when the buck stops with you, you’re ultimately responsible…
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Derrick White and confidence
I wouldn’t call myself much of a sports fan, and still there is a lot to like about this piece profiling professional basketball player Derrick White. The most outstanding story, to me, is about White’s initial wavering confidence to keep shots up after a couple of misses—perhaps due to a transition moving from San Antonio…
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The work vs. the strategy
The films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have made nearly $30 billion in box office sales. The studio spent around $7 billion of that to make the films. That’s an incredibly successful film franchise—the highest grossing one of all time. Naturally, film studios are trying to copy it. And yet, Marvel’s chief creative officer Kevin…
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Stick around until you find the lightbulb moment
While Marques Brownlee is well-known for his influence in technology now, his first YouTube video wasn’t even about tech. It was a video of his golf swing, and a request for analysis. Marques eventually started filming tech tutorials though, and he saw a lightbulb moment a dozen videos in, when a video of him installing…
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Pecking wood
Long before Kevin Feige became the president of Marvel Studios, he was rejected from USC’s film school program five times in a row. He was accepted with his sixth application. Imagine if you were Kevin, writing the second, third, fourth, and fifth applications. Your family starts to ask you questions, inadvertently turning up the volume…
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Letting go
Unlearning is an incredibly important skill. It’s also often, in my experience, much more difficult than learning. Part of that is probably because we go through decades of learning to acquire facts, lessons, and insights, but there isn’t much of a curriculum on unlearning beliefs and scripts. I’ve had some experience applying and practicing in…
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Three mechanisms of “manifesting”
Matt Webb is pretty sure about manifesting, the idea that you can manifest the goals you imagine into your physical reality, even though he doesn’t have evidence for it. He writes, “I don’t know what the mechanism is. I don’t need to know.” I’ve found this to be a driving force in my life, and…