I want to share with you a theory I have about tall poppies. What happens to tall poppies? Tall poppies get … cut down. Tall Poppy Syndrome is a cultural belief in New Zealand, where I now live. There’s a lot of resistance when people see others daring to raise themselves up above the crowd. [...]
The singer Beyoncé Knowles has an alter-ego she calls Sasha Fierce. When she was young in her career, and nervous about a big show, she would internally decide it was not Beyoncé going onstage, it was Sasha Fierce. This character was brave, and strong, and confident. Assuming this persona allowed her to handle difficult challenges, because [...]
One of my coaching clients surpassed her revenue goal last month. She started August believing that her $30k goal was impossible, and wanted to avoid thinking about it. But every week, we reviewed that goal, and renewed her commitment to (attempting to) achieve it. A few times, she said, "There's no way I can do [...]
In the game of life, how well you play determines your success. Every day is another round, every year is another level, and at the end of the game, it doesn’t matter if you won the high score - all that matters is that you played the game well. There are lots of ways [...]
I was in the middle of mighty-tasking when I had a brilliant idea. This idea had nothing to do with the project I was working on. If I had stopped to tend to this idea properly, it would derail the state of flow I had achieved. I did not want to sacrifice my current project for a [...]
I'm just gonna say it: Candyland is a boring game. Candyland art by Midjourney I’ve played this game dozens - maybe hundreds - of times with my own children. We don’t play it anymore, because now that they are older, they agree that it is boring to play. But when they were [...]
Rebecca Houghton wanted to position her community as the premium resource for B-Suite Leaders - the modern middle manager. But her website was built on WordPress.com (not .org), her team had a hard time making it work, and there was not enough technical aptitude to create a membership experience that was smooth and easy. The business couldn’t get [...]
In his book The Game Changer, Dr Jason Fox says that a game is anything that has goals, rules, and feedback. A good game balances all three of these against one another, to make an experience that can be so good it can be addicting. Work is often the opposite. Unclear goals, arbitrary rules, and confusing feedback (if there [...]
The house was a wreck. That’s what happens when six young boys spend Saturday morning running amok. My two brothers and I were often left with another family when we were young. This other family had three boys the same age, making us six boys under the age of ten. Containing this hurricane of activity [...]
I’m a polymath, so you may have been surprised by the variety of topics you see me write about. Depending on what phase of my interests I was in when you started following me, you may be a little confused about who I am and what I do. To give you some context, I’ll give you [...]