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Career Oscillations
When we make plans, we think with consistency, regularity, and uniformity as stand-ins for discipline, discernment, and judgment. “I’m going to do this everyday,” or, “My approach is this,” or “I’m going to reach this milestone.” This is helpful in that it helps us get things done. The career ladder is one representation of this;…
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Fast Company!
I worked with the Fast Company team on a piece about saying no that ended up at the homepage. The key ideas from this piece came from my daily blogging; all it took was stitching them together, editing it, and making it more cohesive. Life is about saying yes, and saying no.
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Help each other
A person goes on vacation and asks their neighbor to watch their pet animals. The neighbor obliges. The neighbor writes a letter after: Good afternoon, This letter is regarding your vacation two weeks ago, and how you let me babysit Smokey, Oreo, and Jennifer. I’d just like to give you a letter of thanks. As…
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Time is not money
You make your time, then your time makes you. One of the biggest misconceptions of time is that it’s spent like money. While it’s customary for us to trade our time for money (e.g., working a job), time itself actually has few properties actually related to money. Unlike money, time is not fungible. Time can…
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“You’re too expensive…”
There’s a saying I’ve heard and lived by, “If 30% of people aren’t telling you you’re too expensive, you’re not charging enough.” Looking back, I realized that I often ended conversations there, when there was so much more to be said. After all, “You’re too expensive,” is a claim; what people actually meant when they…
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Half a match
When psychology professor Lee Ross wanted to persuade his team at Stanford to recruit Amos Tversky, he used this story (via The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis): “I said, I’m going to tell you a classic Yiddish story. There’s a guy, an eligible bachelor. A happy bachelor. The matchmaker comes to him and says, ‘Listen,…
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You shouldn’t write a book unless…
One of the most interesting pieces of advice on writing books comes from author Ryan Holiday, who advocates not writing a book. Unless… “What matters more now than any other single thing is that what you’re saying is different–that it’s interesting, that it provokes some response from people. You’ll only accomplish this if you’ve got…
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It works for you
The emotion you’re experiencing, the block you’re feeling, the reactions and responses that emerge from your subconscious; it all works for you, for some reason. In some cases, it helps you get what you need or want. In other cases, it helps protect you from others or from yourself. It takes great discernment to know…
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30 productivity hacks
1. Start for just 15 minutes. You’re allowed to stop after. 2. If you’re nervous about writing an email but need to respond, schedule it to go out. 3. Make a decision at the end of the meeting. Don’t do in two meetings what you can do in one. 4. Do something, even if there’s…
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Wiz ships
Two weeks before I wrote this, Wiz Khalifa published a new documentary, Still Rolling Papers (11 years after his debut album, Rolling Papers). A quick look: Will Smith has close to 10 million subscribers, so does Ye. Ellen DeGeneres has 38 million. Kim Jong-Kook’s Gym Jong-Kook channel has close to 3 million subs. Gary Vaynerchuk…