My Writing
-
Reading Recap: May 2024
💸The Go-Giver: A Little Story About A Powerful Business Idea by Bob Burg and John David Mann The more you give of yourself to help others, the more that comes back to reward you. A short, fun read that inspires and educates. 🪕Born Standing Up by Steve Martin An overnight success; decades in the making.…
-
The Power of Nuance
David Epstein’s book, Range, highlights how a broad set of experiences helps us drive innovation. Knowledge in different domains enables us to make analogies to describe new and unexplored territory. Epstein doesn’t specifically call out vocabulary, but I believe an extensive repository of words helps us build the analogies necessary to explain the yet unknown.…
-
It’s ok to be the smartest person in the room.
The slogans we tell ourselves shape our actions and mindset. The common adage to surround yourself with smart people, aka “be the dumbest person in the room”, has some merit. You are prompting yourself to listen, to learn, to ask clarifying questions. These are all valuable actions. But this mindset can also hold you back…
-
What Powerlifting taught me about planning.
I competed in powerlifting for several years. One of the things I enjoyed most about the sport was building and executing a training program. As I delve deeper and deeper into the world of planning for productivity, I am finding many principles that translate from the world of strength to the world of getting what…
-
Reading Recap: April 2024
📢Talk like Ted by Carmine Gallo Great advice and examples on successful public speaking. My favorite tips were to make an emotional connection, not to read your slides, and to speak with your body language. 🧘Tranquility by Tuesday by Laura Vanderkam Another helpful planning and productivity book. I loved the focus on some of the…
-
Eyes up. Breathe. Let’s Go!
This is a little mantra I put together before a recent presentation. 👀Eyes Up When I saw pictures of myself from a previous presentation, I noticed that my body language was very different at the beginning of the talk from the rest of it. Getting started is the hardest part of presenting for me. This…
-
A Continuous Learning Organization
Growth Mindset has brought the transformation from know-it-alls to learn-it-alls. This was an incredibly powerful shift for individuals. We should ask ourselves, “what is the corresponding evolution for an organization?” When software was a “shipped” product, it made sense to train people on how the shipped version worked. You could reasonably expect that knowledge to…
-
Your reading game is too small!
Well, mine is too. But I am fighting the good fight and trying to get better every day. My goal for 2024 is to read at least 60 books. So far, I am on track. Reading is a key driver of my personal development and my leadership career. If you want to learn more, please…
-
Reading Recap: March 2024
I was not as organized as I would have liked to be in planning my reading for Women’s History Month. Nonetheless, I ended up with four out of five women authors and some awesome books. 🧹In Defense of Witches – The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women are Still on Trial by Mona…
-
Announce A Schedule
I was delighted to see one of my favorite productivity motivation techniques called out in Cal Newport’s latest book, Slow Productivity. Committing publicly to deliver results on a schedule creates accountability that forces you to focus. You now face consequences if you do not make good on your promise. Most of the time all you…