Category: Work & Money
Take Back Your Time From Complicated Tasks
Time has a way of drifting to our weaknesses, not our strengths. We lose time for a number of reasons, and complicated tasks can be a main reason for losing time….
New Starts and New Habits
Habits. We all have them .It shouldn’t really matter if we want to start habits on January 1st or any other random day. But to our mind, new beginnings have significance. Before we start new habits, we need to answer some key questions…
Productivity Mindset vs Project Mindset
There tends to be a lot of emphasis on increasing your productivity in the online work space. Podcasts are dedicated to it. Best-selling authors like James Clear (Atomic Habits) make the argument that if you were just 1% better the result over the course of that year would be pretty astounding. Online courses are willing…
Leadership in Full Retreat
As culture changes, people change. Leaders are needed, but it seems that leadership is currently in short supply. Priorities, desires, methods and knowledge all shift, and the result is that what might have worked yesterday not only doesn’t work today, what might have been praised yesterday might be unacceptable today….
You Set the Tone
In Daniel Coyle’s book the Culture Code he has a chapter called “The Good Apples.”It’s about how an academic experiment was disrupted by some “good apples” – people who were committed to keeping the emotional tone of a meeting in a functional, productive, enjoyable place. You see the goal of this experiment was to see…
Progress in all areas of Life?
When you start thinking about the areas of your life that you want to progress in, there are a lot of areas you can consider. There are too many in fact, and trying to set goals in all of them make you unlikely to make any real progress. Instead, think of where your best return…
Efficiency Is Good But First Vision
Efficiency aficionados love the idea of squeezing a little bit more out of every hour. Adding just a little bit more efficiency to every day. Getting 1% better. Fine-tuning the habits, stacking, sorting, and refolding them. It becomes an endless cycling of refinement and tweaks, trying to get the perfectly efficient day. The problem arises…
Finding Your Blind Spots
We all have strengths and weaknesses, and one of the weaknesses that we all tend to have is that we don’t know what our weakness is. That’s the worst part. It’s like a form of mental color-blindness. People can tell you that your clothes don’t match, but then you look in the mirror, and conclude…
The Twenty Questions Challenge
As a kid growing up road trips were long periods of silence, interrupted by sibling bickering of course, and playing games. One game was twenty questions, also known as “Animal, Mineral, Vegetable” or “Person, Place or Thing”. The goal is to guess what someone is thinking of asking only yes / no questions. It was…
New Vision New Perspective New Opportunities
When you’re feeling stuck or frustrated in your life, work or relationships, one of the most difficult things to do is regain vision and perspective and see the new opportunities before you. The challenge is that we’re too close to the issue, to emotionally invested to make decisions rationally…
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…
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…
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…
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…