Sparked By Work
There are a lot of personality and work aptitude tests out there, which makes sense. Westerners work a ton, we look to work for a sense of community, accomplishment and self-realization.Stories of work frustration and difficulty which are then overcome and lead to triumphant work self-realization are extremely attractive to us (cue Joseph Campbell’s Hero…
Timely Points from the Little Book of Sideways Markets
I like little books. The Little Book of Common Sense Investing (by John Bogle). The Little Book that Beat the Market (by Joel Greenblatt and Andrew Tobias). How to Retire with Enough Money (by Teresa Ghilarducci). In the Little Book of Sideways Markets (by Vitaliy N. Katsenelson) the premise is concise: After an extended bull…
The Incompetent Expat
The expat life is one of high-churn relationships and circumstances. The harsh reality is that a lot of people don’t stay long, they repatriate or move on. Stress, frustration, health and changes in circumstances create a permanent state of flux for a lot of expats. Divorces are frequent, and depression can be pretty common. So…
Appreciating Our Limits and the Limits of Others
Patrick Lencioni is has working on a book “The Six Types of Working Genius”. (link here) While I don’t like it when people throw around the word genius, because the reality is that most of us really aren’t and never will be, but marketing, etc etc. I really like the main idea of this book…
My Expat Whole30 Experience
So the new year is a good time to hit the reset button health wise. After the overindulgence of Christmas and vacation, it seemed like the appropriate thing to do. Plus I’m not getting any younger. It was a classic “seemed like a good idea at the time” type of thing. Honestly, I was really…
Listen to your Expat Spidey-Sense
One of the great parts of being a longer-term expat is that you start to develop what I would call a “Spidey-sense” in your interactions. Different cultures have differing expectations of leaders and patterns of relating that is often more complex than the interactions that take place in the USA. The result is that interactions…
Is Your To-Do List Really a Project List
I’ve started using Microsoft’s ToDo app. I liked it a little better when it was called Wunderlist and was a small Germany company, but I’d like to think that those guys got compensated handsomely when Wunderlist was acquired by Microsoft and that now they are all drinking pilsner in the French Riviera while wearing socks…
The Lost Art of Reading Deeply
“Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them, masticate and digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by…
When Tools Become Masters
A calendar is an incredibly useful tool to organize your time and understand what you’re going to be doing. Truth be known, I need to use my calendar more. But when your calendar controls what you can do, prevents you from taking risks, or doing the things you love because every free moment has been…
Always Check the Snake Twice
The classic rule of carpentry is to measure twice cut once. The reason this is so important it’s because you can always make the board shorter but it’s way harder to make the board longer. You don’t want to waste the lumber, but at the end of the day, it’s not the worst mistake in…
Focus and Refocus
The ability to focus is becoming progressively rare. The ability to refocus, while underpraised, is even more so. Part of the reason focus is difficult is that we haven’t done the thankless work to figure out what we should be focusing on. If you don’t do that, it doesn’t really matter if you’re focused or…
The Best Leadership Material You’re Not Reading
Leadership literature is really all over the map with some of it brilliant and some of it really less so. A lot of it is internally focused (increase your discipline, increase your effectiveness ala Jocko Willink from Extreme Ownership). The onus of effective leadership lies largely within you, and relies on your willingness to move…
The Cost of Feeling Competent
We want to feel competent in our lives. We want to feel like we know what we’re doing, and we’re good at it. Whether it’s work, teaching, relationships or just the inevitable difficulties that arise in life. However, choosing conscious incompetence is the best learning opportunity we’ve got.
The Best Return on Investment for your Time
When you think about investments in the stock market, you’re always looking to get back way more than you put in. That’s how compounding interest works, and its why you should invest early and often. In reality, what exactly you invest in doesn’t matter as much as having invested. If you just invest in everything…
Ninety Minutes To Change Your Week
What if I told you that by investing 1.2% of your week in a specific activity you could get a boost of creativity and insight that would help carry you throughout your entire week. You’d probably be at least a little curious…