I’ve lost track of the number of people who have said that for the new year, they’re going to work on positive thinking, a positive attitude, a new outlook on life. They’re going to be less angry at their families, at work, at school, at life, and they’re going to be better people for it.…
Achievements. Every World of Warcraft player has some, and they’re awarded for things as trivial as logging in on a certain day to things as meaningful as beating certain game encounters at the hardest possible level. At the end of the day, however, they’re nothing more than a few extra pixels and a flag in…
As part of the 2011 theme at the Boston Martial Arts Center, I was doing some digging around in my brain today about anger, especially after a learning experience this morning at the dojo. (a learning experience, as my college political science teacher once quipped, is what you get when you don’t get what you…
I see what you did there is one of my favorite expressions. I’m not sure where it came from or how it got into my vocabulary (I suspect Chris Brogan), but it encapsulates nearly everything I believe in as a student of marketing, martial arts, and life. You see, most of the lessons I’ve had…
Sales master trainer Tom Hopkins has a mantra that he encourages all salespeople to recite many times a day. It’s a mantra that, if you obey it to the letter, all but guarantees your success. I must do the most productive thing possible at all times. Back when I was doing sales, we lived by…
When should you be innovating? When should you be optimizing, taking advantage of what you’ve already got? Innovation and optimization are companions. They’re complementary. You innovate something new, something untested, and then you see how it works. In the beginning, you test. You put in a lot of effort and the results you get are…
The temptation to leap in with guns blazing is never higher than right after the new year. You’re pumped, you’re excited, you’re ready to go. You’re like the little kid staring at the lawn full of fresh snow just after the morning radio announced a snow day for school. You can’t run fast enough towards…
Every year, Chris Brogan has introduced a theme summed up in three words. I enjoy playing along with the theme as it usually does a good job of crystallizing what the year will be about. They’re not goals so much as lenses, ways to focus and make decisions about whether something is worth doing or…
