Category: Expat Life
Avoiding Expat Compartmentalization
Compartmentalization is the idea that a person can keep conflicting ideas, values even personalities in their lives simultaneously. They have a personality at home that is wildly different from their personality at the workplace. With their close friends they are warm and generous, in business they are ruthless…
Discovering Keystone Habits
I love the concept of leverage. The idea that there are tools, technologies and techniques that we can use to have a disproportion impact is really fascinating to me. That’s part of the beauty of ideas, and paradigm shifts. A single idea can upset the entirety of societal order. A single paradigm shift can transform…
Sticky Habits
When people decide to be more intentional in their lives they often fall into the trap of trying to live someone else’s life. They decide that they want read books that literate people read, workout like fitness experts, eat like Mediterranean long-livers, or pick up the morning routine of Tim Cook. They want the meditation…
Where did your Habits come from?
We are all creatures of habit. We can’t help it, it’s quite literally built into the biological structure of our brains. That’s either great news, or it’s just depressing. You need habits. Per Inc, adults make about 35,000 choices a day. That’s about 36 choices a minute for every hour you’re awake (assuming 8 hours…
Undervalued Art of Reframing
Reframing is the idea that we can take an experience, and give it a new context that allows for dramatically different perception of that experience. For example, telling students that they must get rid of all the stress they feel before a test or they’re sure to do poorly, verses telling a group of students…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
Consistent Effort or Bursts of Intensity?
One of the challenges of leadership is that there isn’t anyone to tell you how to pace yourself, or pace others. The tyranny of urgent needs can be overwhelming, and the reality of the matter is the buck stops with you. You can’t (or at least shouldn’t) push issues off onto others. Couple that issue…
Daily Choices made Daily
Seth Godin recently had a episode called “Paul has a Practice” – about how Paul McCartney had a creative process and rhythm. Really well done podcast – succinct, thought provoking and engaging. One of Seth’s points near the end was the idea that he’s a fan of the daily blog model because it eliminates one…