New Blog Features

Starting tomorrow, I will be creating 3 blog features every week: Monday Morning Movie – I will shoot a brief video to share a concept around innovation.  This, as you probably guessed, will run Monday mornings. Tuesday Transcription – A transcription of the Monday Morning Movie. Wednesday Work Wisdom – This feature will be an article which […]

Turn Everything Upside Down

I love to take baths as home.  But the water never seemed deep enough. When I would fill the tub up with 9 inches of water, the overflow plate would prevent more water from entering the bath. I tried a number of ways to cover the drain hole, including Saran wrap, duct tape, and plastic […]

Disconnect to Reconnect

I am now just returning from a month sabbatical. This allowed me to reflect and spend time with friends and family. As part of that month off, I did a two week intensive retreat where they sequestered my phone.  No email, phone, books, music, or videos for a fortnight! Let me tell you, it wasn’t […]

Ignore All Advice

I decided to get with the 21st century.  Starting today, in addition to my regular writing, I will be recording videos for this blog.  Today’s video is a rant about a topic that has been on my mind lately.  Although, this covers content from earlier blog entries, I am going into a bit more detail […]

Not Wanting What You Want

Some will claim that a component to happiness and success involves detachment.  That is, not worrying about how things turn out. But this is easier said than done! People want what they want.  And the more you try to not want something, the more you focus on it. How do you break this cycle? While working […]

Best Practices Are Stupid Infographic

Sacha Chua, a “sketchnote artist and experimenter-at-large” from Toronto, developed this very cool infographic of my Best Practices Are Stupid book. And she was kind enough to allow us to share it under the Creative Commons Attribution License.  So spread the love, and visit Sacha’s site to show your appreciation.  (click on the picture to […]

Study Failures, Not Successes

I recently attended a meeting where we were going to be taught the secrets of becoming a “7-figure” professional speaker.  That is, we would learn how to make $1,000,000 a year.  The presenter is part of an elite group of speakers who earn at least this much every year.  His presentation was based on the […]

Podcast: Interview with Author of "The Antidote"

Today I am thrilled to share with you a 45 minute conversation between me and Oliver Burkeman, the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. I met Oliver several years ago. We got connected through a book review he did back in 2007 for the Guardian newspaper in England. He […]

Reframe Tedious Experiences

I have now spoken in 43 countries (#44 coming soon).  As you can imagine, I spend a lot of time in airports and going through security.  TSA Pre is amazing, and has sped up how quickly I get through the lines. One of the (many) nice things about TSA Pre is that you don’t have […]

Focus on Usefulness, Not Validity

About 10 years ago, I developed the Personality Poker® system. Since then, I gathered a mountain of anecdotal evidence supporting its value.  But one question remained in my mind: Is Personality Poker truly valid? That is, do the words actually measure what they are supposed to measure? Or is it just a fun game? To help assess […]