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Three forces—material abundance, automation, and global outsourcing—are rendering pure left-brain analytical work insufficient. The economy has shifted from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, where right-brain abilities would become the primary source of value. There are six senses exist for this new era: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning.
We evaluate our past decisions under conditions that would be thrown out of any fair court. The defendant is your past self. The judge is your current self, armed with all the information the defendant never had. It's a rigged trial, and we run it on ourselves constantly.
The most useful definition of stress I've encountered is also the simplest: stress is the internal state of wanting two incompatible things at the same time.
If you've reached out over the past two days—thank you. Whether I was able to express my gratitude appropriately or not, it really mattered and meant something to me.
Character isn't a moral ideal. It's a filter. And over enough time, it's the most powerful one you have.
We evaluate our past decisions under conditions that would be thrown out of any fair court. The defendant is your past self. The judge is your current self, armed with all the information the defendant never had. It's a rigged trial, and we run it on ourselves constantly.
Most of us are operating on more borrowed knowledge than we realize. The frameworks we've absorbed, the terminology we've picked up, the concepts we reference because we've heard them referenced—these give us fluency. Fluency is genuinely useful. But fluency isn't understanding, and the gap between the two is easy to miss because the fluency feels so much like comprehension.
There's a difference between working on something and being in something, and I think the difference is time. It's not necessarily clock time, it's accumulated attention.
There's a question I've started using with clients that sounds simple but tends to land hard: What's actually driving you right now?
I've started thinking about self-esteem differently in that it is the reputation you have with yourself. Not confidence as a personality trait or positive self-talk, but something more structural.
There's a line of thinking I keep coming back to: the idea that time isn't wasted by what you're doing, but by whether you're actually there for it.
I've been recommending something to the leaders I coach that sounds almost too simple to be useful: twenty minutes of longhand writing, first thing in the morning.