A Simple Test
I put together a simple test that takes less than 2 minutes to complete. It tests your ability to perform a seemingly straightforward activity. Want to give it a try? Click here to launch the video (WMV format – 7Meg) There is audio associated with the video, but the test can easily be done without […]
How to Change Your Emotions by Changing Your Language
Most readers (hopefully) know that there is a huge difference between being goal-less and being goal-free. Goal-less implies a complete lack of direction, motivation, and action. Goal-free means having a sense of direction, not a specific destination, and then meandering with purpose. Goal-free versus goal-less is an example of different words with different meanings. Sometimes […]
A Really Creative Guy
No guy wants a beer belly. Right? Most would rather have a “six-pack.” Of course. But what if you could have a six-pack AND a beer belly at the same time? Well, now you can. The Beerbelly is a “removable spare tire” that holds 80 oz of beer (more than a six-pack), allowing you to bring your favorite beverage into any […]
How to Lose a Sale…by Charging Too Little
I learned an interesting lesson many years back: Charging too LITTLE for your goods or services can price you out of a sale. Let me explain. I was with the management consulting firm Accenture for 15 years. Back in 2001, I left the company to become a “professional speaker.” Although I had been giving speeches […]
Quote of the Day
I’ll play it first and tell you what it is afterwards. – Miles Davis, jazz trumpeter extraordinaire
Make Everyone Accountable
Here’s another tip from my Little Book of BIG Innovation Ideas (this book was replaced by Best Practices are Stupid)… Because a few individuals at the top cannot possibly plan all of a company’s activities, give employees a set of rights, responsibilities and rewards that make them accountable for their own actions. Example: Koch Industries […]
Podcast with Michael Wiederman
In a previous blog entry, I commented on Michael Wiederman’s article in Scientific American Mind entitled, “Why It’s So Hard to Be Happy.” Dr. Wiederman is a Professor of Psychology at Columbia College and a proponent of the “goal-free” philosophy. Today we spoke for 30 minutes discussing many topics including goals, happiness, money, performance, investing, […]
How to Perform at Optimal Levels
In the early 1900s, Robert Yerkes and J. D. Dodson developed the aptly named Yerkes-Dodson Law. The premise is that performance increases relative to motivation (they call it “arousal”) only to a point, after which performance drops. It is typically drawn as an inverted U-shaped curve. You will notice that I superimposed three “goal” concepts […]
Quote of the Day
What big companies do instead of implementing features is plan them. At Viaweb we sometimes ran into trouble on this account. Investors and analysts would ask us what we had planned for the future. The truthful answer would have been, we didn’t have any plans. We had general ideas about things we wanted to improve, […]
How to Tell Fact From Fraud
We are constantly bombarded by information from advertisements, books, magazines, TV and the internet. But how much of this information is true? From my experience, little of it is accurate. People (often unknowingly) make claims that are exaggerated or blatant lies. How can you separate the accurate from the invalid? One way is to understand […]