I happened upon an interesting principle that understood and properly applied, can make life much easier. This principle became obvious during a recent horseback riding lesson while working on my trot-canter upward transition. Without boring you with the details, the principle I learned or perhaps better put, rediscovered, is this: the solution does not always lie at …
Continue reading Principally Speaking: Solving Difficult Problems
Leonardo DaVinci once wrote, "Life well spent is long." Socrates wrote some 2,000 years earlier, "Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued." To be sure, a life well lived is ideal, but optional. While I typically prefer to consider the positive attributes of any subject in order to provide stepping stones for …
Continue reading The Top 7 Ways to Ruin a Perfectly Good Life by Gregg Hake
Dyslexic as a child and a poor student who left school at the age of 15, Richard Branson now runs the largest group of private companies in Europe. With annual revenues topping $25 billion, Branson's family of "Virgin" companies look to turn conventional business wisdom on its head. Business has grown to be one of the most powerful forces …
Here is valuable insight on how to work smarter, not harder... My father-in-law gave me a fantastic Wall Street Journal Article last week entitled "A New Shade of Green" by the first director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), William Ruckelshaus (see http://tinyurl.com/2d9l9jn). His basic argument is that today's environmental challenges are far different than those faced by our country …
Continue reading A New Shade of Green: Work Smarter, not Harder
Everybody can be somebody. Everyone is free to make a difference in this world. Raul Midon, guitarist and singer, presents a pair of lovely songs at the TED 2007 conference. The first, entitled "Everybody," is inspiring and as the TED summary notes "category-defying" and the second, "Peace on Earth," carries a powerful message that I hope …
Appearances can be deceiving. A great many people I've known through the years prided themselves on their ability to "size up" or to "get a read on" a stranger in the first moments of an encounter. While this is perhaps a useful capability, I have always taken great caution when exercising it myself, leaving ample room for the adjustment …
Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act, - act in the living Present! Heart within, and God o'erhead!
Our planet is a curious place. Filled with a remarkable array of both animate and inanimate objects, its surface and all that dwell thereupon morph from moment to moment. Never were there two moments exactly the same in history. A snapshot taken today of the earth in its fulness would be hardly recognizable if shown …
Continue reading Our Planet is a Curious Place: Change, Grudges and Forgiveness
Look at the world you center. Do you take great pride in it? Do you sweep the sidewalk at the storefront of your life daily, at daybreak? Do you polish the doorlatch to your home and straighten the welcome mat for friends and enemies? Do you feel you have the opportunity, nay the responsibility to aim to be the very best [enter your job title here] that ever walked the earth? If so, kudos to you. If not, get to it. (And have a wonderful day.)
Career analyst Dan Pink, in his fascinating talk given at TED Global 2009, explains why the traditional approaches to motivation (extrinsic) are incompatible with many of the types of work that we do in the 21st century. Autonomy, mastery and purpose. A sensible approach when applied to the right types of work. I suppose the challenge lies in mapping a transition strategy from the …
Continue reading Intrinsic Motivation: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose
Gregory Hake 