Welcome to my list of books read, quotes pulled, and media that’s useful. I use it regularly to look up what I’ve found in books and podcasts and online that has mattered. I use it to find quotes to use in blog posts. I hope you enjoy it.
There are currently a few hundred resources to be found here which strikes the next question:
Where to start? I suggest starting with the topic or type you want to search. Then see what authors are available.
Resource Topics
Resource Types
School doesn’t set you up for success
Often, individuals are not set up for success either from the universities or the companies that employ them. People need to take education and learning into their own hands and ultimately be responsible for their own career and job success.
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Managers must connect with employees
Autonomy and flexibility only work if managers frequently connect with their employees to discuss tasks, set goals, set expectations, and provide feedback. If a remote-working situation isn’t working out, surely the manager should take accountability for the employees failure to deliver.
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Culture is not a consumer good
Culture is not a consumer good. In Silicon Valley there are companies that serve free catered lunches created by celebrity chefs or some that offer on-site massages. When companies focus on too many “perks,” it creates a culture of entitlement, which is a dangerous paradigm because it makes it harder for the company to keep up with the latest trend in perks and doesn’t necessarily help your company achieve its goals. Ultimately, culture is not about the extrinsic motivators but more about the intrinsic ones.
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Employees want impact
What today’s employees want is the ability to have an impact in their work, the flexibility of when and where to do their work, to see their work connected to a bigger purpose, and to have the opportunity to learn and grow in their careers. Compensation is a key external motivator, but recent studies have shown that people, particularly millennial, will take less pay for more flexibility and more opportunities to learn and advance their careers.
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Employees want to stay relevant
Old methods of corporate learning are not going to be effective strategies for building skills for the future. People developing new skills and building expertise are often self-directed. This means employees are learning everywhere all the time, but companies are not recognizing what people are learning, what skills they are building, and how they are working to prepare for their future careers. Your employees are doing this for survival — they want to stay relevant in the workforce too.
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The Expertise Economy: How the smartest companies use learning to engage, compete, and succeed
A look at how we should be learning in corporate culture in today’s fast moving landscape.
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The Dangers of Distracted Parenting
This article highlights the danger to child development that our screen addicted parenting has. Not only do children see less language development, parents have less empathy towards their children, and are more irritable with them when interrupted when using their phones.
How simon reads
I’m a sucker for how people read and interact with books. Simon provides us with a very thorough walk-through of his reading process. He seems much more organized when it comes to choosing than I am.
Building bridges
Yes, people work from numbers but they really believe in the connection. You’re the bridge to the connection. The decisions you’re making today are being viewed by others, and they will come to you for their needs.
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- Book: Why Simple Works
It doesn’t have to be new
We don’t always have to build something brand new. We don’t always have to spend millions on research when the audience is already there.
- think Dyson tweaking the vacuum instead of inventing some new appliance
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Why Simple Works
This is a short book looking at why we don’t always need to make the next idea more complex. Instead of focus groups, ask your frontline sales staff for the biggest hurdles to making a purchase and fix those.
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- Quote: It doesn’t have to be new
- Quote: Building bridges
Tim Ferriss and Howard Marks on the importance of saying “I don’t know”
While there is much to be taken from this episode, the biggest thing I liked is the willingness we should have to say “I don’t know”. Not knowing something isn’t a sin. We can’t know everything. We need to admit when we don’t know and then we need to do the work to figure it out.
WHO do I serve?
Ask “how” less and ask “who” more. Who do I serve? This is the most important of all questions a business owner who is looking to streamline their business can ask. Yet we rarely ask it.
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Why your SOP’s aren’t working
People are like rivers. We will seek the easiest path to get where we are going. And when you see your employees ignoring your SOP’s, that is a sure sign the SOP’s aren’t working.
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Your queen bee role (QBR)
The number one goal for you, and for everyone on your team, is to protect the QBR so that the QBR can drive the business forward without distraction or interruption.
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Your business can be streamlined
The next time you dare say “my business can’t be streamlined” or “I need to do all the work” take a pause. You are lying to yourself. Your business can run on it’s own. If an old-school painter can do it, you sure can, too.
- the painter is Sir Peter Lely who did the face and had a team to do the rest of the painting in the 17th century
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Without a plan your business will spin in circles
Because a business that doesn’t devote time to determine where it wants to go, seek ways to get there, and identify the landmarks it will offer the most direct route is destined to spin in circles for eternity.
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You start as a Doer
Every entrepreneur starts out as a doer, because doing things is what we’re good at. The problem arises when you get stuck in that phase, and al the Doing keeps you from your bigger vision of building a business.
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Variability hurts your business
The biggest cause of business inefficiency is variability. The more services you provide to a wider mix of customers, the more variability you have, and the harder it becomes to provide extraordinary and consistent services.
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You have too much time to work
Whatever time you give yourself to work, you will use. Nights, weekends, vacations — if you think you need it, you’ll work right through your time off.
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Hours don’t equal value creation
“Work harder” is the mantra of both the growing and collapsing business. Work harder is the mantra of every entrepreneur, every business owner, every a-player employee, and every person just struggling to keep up our perverted ride about working longer, faster and harder than everyone else in our industry has take over.
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Our business plan didn’t quite work
What has become of my dream? Does that question ring true for you? It did for me when I read the email. We work, and work, and work, and work, and before we know it, the business idea we once proudly shared with our friends, the plan we outlined on a whiteboard, the vision we shored with our fist employees, all seems like a dim memory of an unobtainable goal.
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Clockwork: Design your business to run itself
Mike Michalowicz uses this book to help you build a business that doesn’t need you. One that runs and grows while you do what you want in it.
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- Quote: Our business plan didn’t quite work
- Quote: Hours don’t equal value creation
- Quote: You have too much time to work
- Quote: Variability hurts your business
- Quote: You start as a Doer
- Quote: Without a plan your business will spin in circles
- Quote: Your business can be streamlined
- Quote: Your queen bee role (QBR)
- Quote: Why your SOP’s aren’t working
- Quote: WHO do I serve?
How much is a word worth?
This explores how the rates that writers are paid have plummeted over the years.
View the original: How much is a word worth
DHH on Trickle-down Workaholism
Great piece by DHH about how we fool ourselves in to thinking that workaholism is great. How this is even more prevalent at startups. How so so many successful people always prioritized rest and relaxtion and vacation and hanging out with their families.
Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests
The short version is that cities with increased Facebook posting seemed to have increased incidents of violence against immigrants.
Tyler Cowan has some issues with the data though. He concludes that “As it stands right now, you shouldn’t be latching on to the reported results from this paper.
Even good things end
When it comes to our gatherings, far too many of us are that horrible person who never really breaks up with anyone but just stops calling. That person may tell himself that he is being kind or low-key. But guests, like romantic partners, deserve a proper breakup.
- make sure you plan the ending
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Things are better with controversy
In so many gatherings, we are so afraid of getting burned that we avoid heat altogether. There is always risk inherent in controversy, because things can go very wrong very quickly. But in avoiding it, we waste countless opportunities to truly connect with others about the things they care about.
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The Danger with sponsors
Sponsors are there to amplify what you can do with an event. However, the moment the host of the event is not also the person funding the event, the event has two masters: the host and the sponsor. And their interests are not always aligned. This misalignment can arise throughout your gathering, but it is often most painfully clear in the opening and closing. So a host must be aware of the fact that handing over precious real estate to sponsors is never cost less or neutral.
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Gatherings start with the invitation
Your gathering begins at the moment your guests first learn of it. This may sound obvious, but it’s not. If it were obvious, hosts wouldn’t fail to host the pregame for their gathering as often as they do. In my experience, host often think of their event as beginning when you call the meeting to order or take your seats at the wedding or walk into your dinner party. In each of these cases, your guests have been thinking about and preparing for and anticipating your gathering well in advance of that moment.
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A successful gathering is
One measure of a successful gathering is that it starts off with a higher number of host-guest connections than guest-guest connections and ands with those tallies reversed, far in the guest-guest favour.
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Don’t abdicate power
The hosts I guide often feel tempted to abdicate that power, and feel that by doing so they are letting their guests be free. But this abdication often fails their guests rather than serves them. The chill approach to hosting is all too often about hosts attempting to wriggle out of the burden of hosting. In gatherings, once your guests have chosen to come into your kingdom, they want to be governed—gently, respectfully, and well. When you fail to govern, you may be elevating how you want them to perceive you over how you want the gathering to go for them. Often, chill is you caring about you masquerading as you caring about them.
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Over-including can mean shallow connections
With certain types of gatherings, over-including can keep connections shallow because there are so many different lines through which people could possibly connect that it can become hard to meaningfully activate any of them. Excluding thoughtfully allows you to focus on a specific, underexplored relationship.
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Isn’t exclusion the enemy of diversity
You might ask: In a world where exclusion becomes OK, aren’t we moving backward? Isn’t exclusion in gatherings something we’ve been fighting against for years? Isn’t exclusion, however thoughtful or intentional, the enemy of diversity?
- she says no, that exclusion makes sure that the gathering is on target and purposeful. Diversity for diversity sake isn’t good.
- and if you have more “diverse” people, but never really let them talk, what on earth was the point
- diversity is not a checkbox
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Specificity is crucial
Specificity is a crucial ingredient. The more focused and particular a gathering is, the more narrowly it frames itself and the more passion it arouses.
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The Freedom to Assemble is a Foundational Right
In democracies, the freedom to assemble is one of the foundational rights granted to every individual. In countries descending into authoritarianism, one of the first things to go is the right to assemble. Why? Because of what can happen when people come together, exchange information, inspire one another, test out new ways of being together.
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The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker asks us to be more thoughtful about every portion of gathering with others. How do we invite them? How do we transition from invite to the event? How do we fulfill the purpose of the event? How do we end well, because events don’t last forever.
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- Quote: The Freedom to Assemble is a Foundational Right
- Quote: Specificity is crucial
- Quote: Isn’t exclusion the enemy of diversity
- Quote: Over-including can mean shallow connections
- Quote: Don’t abdicate power
- Quote: A successful gathering is
- Quote: Gatherings start with the invitation
- Quote: The Danger with sponsors
- Quote: Things are better with controversy
- Quote: Even good things end
What will it take to fix work-life balance
I know there has been an arms race over parental leave in Silicon Valley, for example, such that companies are offering better and better parental leave policies. That’s commendable and important. On the other hand, it doesn’t take three or ten months to raise a child, it takes 20 years. I haven’t heard about Silicon Valley firms embracing flexible work policies like job shares, telecommuting, non-marginalized part-time schedules or flextime. Those are quite different from paid leave.
Also they found that more stable work hours for retail, eliminating on call shifts, reduced the employee turnover. This meant more sales because the employee was Moreno versed with the products and could help the customers well.
Looking inside indoctrination in a sex cult
Interesting reflection on being inside a cult. The psychology of how the Guru broke down emotions is crazy.
Research advice from Ryan Holiday
Good post on how to find good stories and such for writing. In short, do the work beforehand to collect things. You know like my resources which you just found.
The 5 Step Research Method I Used for Time Ferris, Robert Greene, and Tucker Max
Find the committed customers
Find your bright spots. If you’re not seeing the traction you want, look for bright spots in your customer base, pockets of customers who are truly engaged with your product. See if you can figure out why it works for them and if you can expand from that base. If there are no bright spots, it may be a good time to pivot.
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You have to change strategies
Startup growth happens in spurts. Initially, growth is usually slow. Then it spikes as a useful traction channel strategy is unlocked. Eventually it flattens out again as this strategy gets saturated and becomes less effective. Then you unlock another strategy and you get another spike.
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Define your traction goal
Before you can set about getting traction, you have to define what traction means for your company. You need to set a traction goal. At the earliest stages, this traction goal is usually to get enough traction to either raise funding or become profitable. In any case, you should figure out what this goal means in terms of hard numbers. How many customers do you need and at what growth rate?
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Do traction and product development
Traction and product development are of equal importance and should each get about half of your attention. This is what we call the 50 percent rule: spend 50 percent of your time on product and 50 percent on traction.
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Traction shows that something is working
Traction is the best way to improve your chances of startup success. Traction is a sign that something is working. If you charge for your product, it means customers are buying. If your product is free, it’s a growing user base.
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Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
This book introduces us to the “bullseye” method of finding the best traction channel for our business. Start by testing all 19 methods. Take the 2 or 3 that look most promising and test them more specifically. Stick with the single one that achieves your single metric that matters.
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We Want to Be Known
As humans, we so desperately want to be known. We want to feel like people get us, like we have someone on our side, like a group wants to have us as a member.
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No one thinks about you
We always feel our vulnerabilities are painfully obvious. That people are scrutinizing us at every turn. That our blemishes define us. I hate to break it to you, but no one really cares—and I mean that in the nicest way possible.
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Ownership makes you want to achieve more
Every time someone uses their talents to accomplish part of a goal, they feel more ownership over that goal—and this makes them want to achieve it even more.
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Stories bring us together
Stories help us literally get on the same wavelength as the people we are with. They not only listen to what we are saying but also experience what we are saying. Even simple stories rev up brain activity and sync us up with the people around us.
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Feeling underappreciated eats away at employees
Feeling underappreciated eats away at employees who shoulder hard projects on their own, moms who aren’t thanked for cleaning up after kids, and friends who feel like they always end up hosting. Lack of appreciation is an especially pernicious problem in the workplace—and it’s often overlooked. In fact, 65 percent of Americans say they received no recognition in the workplace in the last year.
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Contempt is relationship death
Contempt confuses us because we mistake the smirk for a partial smile or boredom, but that could not be further from the truth. Contempt is a cue of serious dislike and scorn. We often show contempt when we feel that someone or something is beneath our attention.
- also showing contempt in your marriage is death to the marriage
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Threads of commonality
Every interaction should be about finding threads of commonalities. Every thread that binds you brings you closer to a person. The more threads you have, the more socially attractive you become. Here’s how you can use thread theory to connect with the people you meet instantly.
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Just be you
When you try to be the same as everyone else, it’s boring. When you try to fit into a mold, you become forgettable. When you try to be “normal,” you become dull. Just be yourself, because no one is like you. If you’re a little weird, own it. The right people will like you for it.
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Social scripts are easy
We stick to social scripts out of habit. We use the same dull conversation starters over and over again because they are in our comfort zone. But you know what? Nothing spark-worthy ever happens in your comfort zone. If you keep using social scripts, you will be stuck in small talk forever.
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Keep Your Hands Out of Those Pockets
When someone can see your hands, they feel more at ease and are more likely to befriend you. This is an easy one to implement. When you walk into a room or are waiting to meet someone, keep your hands out of your pockets.
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Don’t network by the door
When you approach someone before they get oriented to an event, they are not only more distracted during your conversation, but they will also be looking over your head to scope out the room and find people they know—you’ll have a much harder time engaging in eye contact. They are also more likely to excuse themselves to get their drink, grab some food, say hi to the host, or go to the bathroom—and less likely to be receptive to anything you have to say.
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Control the situations you play in to win the social game
The first step in winning the social game is to control the situations you play in. Only interact in places where you don’t have to fake it. No matter how many behavior hacks you learn, if you go to events that make you unhappy, it will be incredibly difficult to increase your memorability.
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Captivate: The Science of Succeeding With People
This is a book that is designed to help you succeed with people in a bunch of scenarios. Edwards specifically targets three areas:
1. The First Five Minutes
- as in how do you make a great first impression that stands out
2. The First Five Hours
- how to you stay memorable
3. The First Five Days
- how do get that next date or make a friend a best friend.
Unfortunately, some of the chapters don’t provide enough depth to really learn the topic at hand, which is where Edwards training is supposed to help you if you purchase it.
Overall decent book, though some of it seems to aim more towards creating intellectual property than sticking with the terms that are already used.
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- Quote: Social scripts are easy
- Quote: Keep Your Hands Out of Those Pockets
- Quote: Don’t network by the door
- Quote: Control the situations you play in to win the social game
- Quote: Just be you
- Quote: Threads of commonality
- Quote: Contempt is relationship death
- Quote: Feeling underappreciated eats away at employees
- Quote: Stories bring us together
- Quote: Ownership makes you want to achieve more
- Quote: No one thinks about you
- Quote: We Want to Be Known
IQ is going down
Still need to read and summarize the main paper for myself but the linked article seems to do a good job.
Disordered environments prompt mere goal pursuit
The researchers evaluated the campaign of bombing in Britain in early WWII. In the midst of the chaos of the bombings, how did the posters “Keep Calm and Carry On?” do? Were they effective in calming the nerves of the people frayed by the bombings?
Do people find and pursue goals regardless of if the goals are tied directly to a result of disorder? Does it help them cope with the lack of order in other areas?
The authors propose that goal setting and striving to achieve goals brings calm in the midst of the things that are going on.
They define goals as “…concrete, domain specific representations of desirable end states that people want to attain and/or undesirable ones that they try to avoid”
There was a correlation between disorder and seeking goals. This means that the participants with a higher experienced disorder felt more attracted to a reward program with a clear and specific endpoint.
We have a strong need to perceive our environment as a place of order, one that we have some control over. This study affirmed that when you have more disorder, you are more attracted to goals that let you feel in control. The goals don’t have anything to do with the disorder, or at least they don’t have to. You just want to achieve goals so that you have some control and thus order over something.
It seems to me that disordered environments then make it easier to grab any goal and run with it. Since we’re searching for any control in the midst of chaos, do we evaluate what it is the best goals for us to pursue?
Fennis, B. M., & Wiebenga, J. H. (2015). Disordered environments prompt mere goal pursuit. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 43, 226-237. doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2015.07.005
Find Online: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494415300256
Situation problem
What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem
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A caution against Jordan Peterson
I’ve got Peterson’s book 12 Rules For Life on my radar to read in the coming months. This adds some interesting background that would be worth reading.
What strikes me about this article is the alignment with some of the far right sides. While I agree with Peterson on his stand against pronoun usage, and his argument towards speech control being a precursor to dictatorship seems plausible to me, I almost hate saying that seeing some of the allies that have been chosen.
That means I need to hold in tension the agreement with some ideas, and the groups with which he has allied himself to get support for the ideas. Can I support the ideas knowing that I’m standing beside some of these groups?
I should do more research into the books and topics discussed in the article and the other research I have regarding Peterson and then write more about it. At least think much deeper, which is what writing does for me.
Veiled Conflict
Teams that lack trust are incapable of engaging in unfiltered and passionate debate of ideas. Instead, they resort to veiled discussions and guarded comments.
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Life consists of cycles
Life consists of cycles of remembering and forgetting, and I, like you, still forget far too often, every time I get anxious or feel like a victim. And in that forgetting, my view is clouded once more until I remember who I am and surrender who I am not.
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Christians can’t measure up
So many Christians today see a system in which they cannot measure up and so they feel unworthy. The church seems to have failed them. They have found the promises made from the pulpit to be suspect if not empty, and they are leaving in droves. Leaders are left to scratch their heads while secretly struggling with their own feelings of failure, or they speak harsh words in anger, publicly demonstrating the very guilt they preach against.
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Our doctrine doesn’t matter our actions do
What matters isn’t our stated belief and doctrine but how we live and what we experience in the story of our lives, as Jesus, John, James, and Paul all make so abundantly clear. It’s our actual experience and expression of life that shows us and the world what we truly believe and to what extent we truly love, not what we say we believe or who we say we love. If we say we have faith, but the workings of our life don’t reflect that faith, that faith is either asleep or dead.
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The Chrisitian Elephant in the room
If there is one elephant in the room among most of us who call ourselves Christian, it is that what we think and say we believe and what we actually experience are all too often two, radically different realities.
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Waking Up: To Who You Really Are (If You Dare)
This is Ted Dekker’s exploration of his faith journey. You can feel the pain in so many pages as he searches for what he knows Jesus can be.
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Rudeness is cancer to love
Rudeness is the cancer that devours love. Everyone knows this, yet it’s notorious that we are more polite to strangers than we are to our own relatives.
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Marriage is a series of trivial incidents
That’s what marriage is in the long run—a series of trivial incidents. And woe to the couple who overlook that fact.
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Make a problem seem easy to fix
Tell your child, your spouse, or your employee that he or she is stupid or dumb at a certain thing, has no gift for it, and is doing it all wrong, and you have destroyed almost every incentive to try to improve. But use the opposite technique -be liberal with your encouragement, make the thing seem easy to do, let the other person know that you have faith in his ability to do it, that he has an undeveloped flair for it -and he will practice until the dawn comes in the window in order to excel.
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People accept an order when…
People are more likely to accept an order if they have had a part in the decision that caused the order to be issued.
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Admit you’re wrong
You will never get into trouble by admitting that you may be wrong. That will stop all argument and inspire your opponent to be just as fair and open and broad-minded as you are. It will make him want to admit that he, too, may be wrong.
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I’m telling you you’re wrong subtly
You can tell people they are wrong by a look or an intonation or a gesture just as eloquently as you can in words -and if you tell them they are wrong, do you make them want to agree with you? Never!
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You can’t win an argument
Nine times out of ten, an argument ends with each of the contestants more firmly convinced than ever that he is absolutely right.
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Listen to people’s problems
Remember that the people you are talking to are a hundred times more interested in themselves and their wants and problems than they are in you and your problems.
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Too lazy to remember a name
Most people don’t remember names, for the simple reason that they don’t take the time and energy necessary to concentrate and repeat and fix names indelibly in their minds. They make excuses for themselves; they are too busy.
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Names are important
Whether you are dealing with clients or meeting with colleagues, always remember and address them by their names. In a moment when people are often viewed as job titles or potential sales, this will make a massive difference in your work.
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Become interested in others
You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
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Solve Customer Problems
Thousands of salespeople are pounding the pavements today, tired, discouraged and underpaid. Why? Because they are always thinking only of what they want. They don’t realize that neither you nor I want to buy anything. If we did, we would go out and buy it. But both of us are eternally interested in solving our problems. And if salespeople can show us how their services or merchandise will help us solve our problems, they won’t need to sell us. We’ll buy. And customers like to feel that they are buying -not being sold.
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Make Them Want to Do It
There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything. Did you ever stop to think of that? Yes, just one way. And that is by making the other person want to do it.
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Don’t condemn people
Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. “To know all is to forgive all.”
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Criticism is futile
Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.
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How to Win Friends and Influence People
This is a classic book by Dale Carnegie detailing many steps and practices you can take to do relationships better. While it is an old book and does have some very dated thoughts on marriage roles, the principles are all great.
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- Quote: Too lazy to remember a name
- Quote: Become interested in others
- Quote: Solve Customer Problems
- Quote: Make Them Want to Do It
- Quote: Don’t condemn people
- Quote: Criticism is futile
- Quote: Listen to people’s problems
- Quote: You can’t win an argument
- Quote: I’m telling you you’re wrong subtly
- Quote: Admit you’re wrong
- Quote: People accept an order when…
- Quote: Make a problem seem easy to fix
- Quote: Marriage is a series of trivial incidents
- Quote: Rudeness is cancer to love
Give them a reason to be loyal to your brand
Even if on paper you are the most qualified, even if you can demonstrate that your product is superior, even if you have a watertight rationale to demonstrate that you are the best choice by a mile, people will be reluctant to support you unless they believe you. And they won’t believe you unless they can see you. People need to understand what you stand for, just as much as they need to know how your policies, products and services can help them. You need to give them a reason to be loyal to your brand, rather than a hundred reasons why you’re better than the competition.
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Shortcuts that others care about
In a digital and globalised world, we have more opportunities and choices than ever before. Sometimes in our attempt to fit in or keep up, we look for the shortcut to success or pursue goals that are more important to others than to ourselves.
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What front-line service tells you
Being story-driven is less about following brand guidelines and more about choosing to act in ways that are consistent with core values. We’ve all witnessed how a company’s purpose and values manifest in the actions of its employees—for good or ill. You have likely experienced an unhelpful doctor’s receptionist or a disengaged sales assistant whose behaviour tells you more about the business than their managers realise.
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We don’t set out to be mediocre
Nobody sets out to create a product or company that’s mediocre or, worse still, one that causes harm. We all want to do work that matters. We start every day with that intention. And yet, despite our best efforts, we falter. We sometimes take shortcuts. Say things we don’t mean.
- the author says we do this because we prioritize going for “more” instead of aiming for “meaning” in our work. That’s more money more fame…
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Win by mattering
Great companies have something in common: they don’t try to matter by winning. They win by mattering. The people who build them know what they stand for and act on those beliefs. What they think, say and do are always in alignment. Their story is consistent. Great companies rise to our expectations by being who they said they would be.
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We have become reactive
We have become reactive to the competitive landscape, rather than responsive to the needs of our communities—those people we hope to serve. We are so focused on the competition, or even the threat of it, that we’ve forgotten to double down on what makes us and our work unique and valuable.
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Story Driven: You don’t need to compete when you know who you are
This is Bernadette Jiwa’s look at what it means to live yourself authentically. She develops a “story driven” process to help us tell our story so that we can live up to the ideals we want in our work and life.
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Fear of Genius
There is a huge fear underneath every complaint: If I took the Big Leap into my Zone of Genius, I might fail. What if I really opened up to my true genius and found that my genius wasn’t good enough? Better to keep the genie in the bottle and coast along in the Zone of Excellence.
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- Book: The Big Leap
In the Zone of Excellence
In the Zone of Excellence are the activities you do extremely well. You make a good living in your Zone of Excellence. For successful people, this zone is a seductive and even dangerous trap. To remain in this zone is to hobble yourself from taking the leap into your Zone of Genius.
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- Book: The Big Leap
Zone of Incompetence
The Zone of Incompetence is made up of all the activities we’re not good at. Others can do them a lot better than we can. Surprisingly, many successful people persist in wasting their time and energy doing things for which they have no talent.
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- Book: The Big Leap
Upper Limit Problem
The Upper Limit Problem is our universal human tendency to sabotage ourselves when we have exceeded the artificial upper limit we have placed on ourselves.
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- Book: The Big Leap
The Big Leap
If you’ve ever wondered why you see some success and then failure, it may be because of your Upper Limit Challenge. Dr Gay Hendricks addresses this in The Big Leap.
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- Quote: Upper Limit Problem
- Quote: Zone of Incompetence
- Quote: In the Zone of Excellence
- Quote: Fear of Genius
You need 1000 True Fans
Kevin Kelly’s excellent essay saying that with 1000 people who will purchase everything we put out we have a strong business.
Unpaid Interships and decreased Job prospects
At least for college graduates the data suggests that it decreases your job prospects.
Do Unpaid Internships Lead to Jobs? Not for College Students
Give money its place
Yes, you must make money to make art. But don’t give income too much importance. Just give it its proper place. We need money to keep the lights on and buy supplies, but it’s not everything. As novelist Steven Pressfield wrote, “Money exists, in my world, to buy me another season.” Every season you create instead of scramble to find work is a win, and with time, those seasons add up. The more money you have, the more time you have; and the more time you have, the more art you can make.