A young man is having a conversation with his dad. His dad is telling him how proud he is of him. “Son, you’re the first generation to graduate from college and you’ve been able to get your dream job, the type of job you always talked about since you were 12”. “I know, thanks dad.”, his son replies. “So why do I rarely see you happy?”, his dad asks. “I know this is the job I always wanted, but I…
Fred gets home from work and sees a mess in the kitchen as he walks in. He begins to make signs of frustration and soon proceeds to make comments to his wife about being more organized. She brushes off the comment and continues to make dinner. He then makes another comment when he sees some things thrown on the floor in the living room. At this point his wife blows up, mentioning how he doesn’t appreciate her and only focuses…
“It’s not what you do, it’s why you do it that matters” – Simon Sinek
One evening a co-workers called me and offered me a position in his department. It’s a great opportunity, but it’s on night shift which would have taken me away from participating in many of my kids’ activities. So I let him know I’m not interested. I also make sure to thank him and let him know that it means a lot that he would consider me for that position. He responded by saying, “are you kidding me, of course I…
Have you ever tried tickling yourself? Go ahead, pick your most ticklish part and try it if you haven’t before……..nothing right. So why is that? It turns out that to be tickled requires unpredictable movement/touching and the movement of our own hands is of course predictable to us. This is why we do get tickled when someone else does it or if we touch that same spot with a feather. The movement of others as well as the movement of…
You can categorize your time in three buckets: value added time, non value added time (also known as busy work), and artist work time. It’s not about replacing non-value added time with value added time, it’s about replacing non-value added time with time available for the artist to go to work. Driving a nail into a board to build a house is value added; finding an innovative, more efficient way to build a house, and executing on that idea, that…
My son came up to me one day and asked me how a certain word is spelled. I responded back with a question, “how do you think it’s spelled?”. He got a look of frustration and eventually answered the question. He responded with the wrong spelling, so then I asked him, “why do you think it’s spelled that way?”. Again, another look of frustration as he hadn’t signed up for this, all he wanted was the answer. But he proceeded…
I recently finished reading “Linchpin – Are You Indispensable” by Seth Godin. In my first post I talk about the fear we get of what could go wrong when wanting to do something different and tell you to not listen to your brain. The author refers to this side of the brain as the “lizard brain”. So what does he call the side of the brain that takes risks, that continues on when faced against fear, the artist! To highlight…
So you are convinced you need to do something different with your life, that you want to take action instead of putting things off until tomorrow. But what if you don’t have it all figured out? What if you’re not clear on those things to take action on? Relax, you’re not in the minority on this one. We get so busy in our day to day lives that many times we don’t stop and think of what we really want…
What’s important to you in life? What excites you? What makes you happy? Take a minute to think about this. Now, how many of these things that you just thought about have you been putting off until tomorrow, and more importantly, why? There is a ton of information out there that explains why, and it all leads to one thing, our fear, fear of what could go wrong if we do these things, fear created by our brain’s natural instinct…