Leadership
While every child wants to be on a championship team (a desire shared by their parents), the nature of sports doesn’t make that possible. Most sporting contests possess a zero-sum design that creates a winner and a loser. While the creation of winners and losers can seem like a flawed design to a parent trying to comfort a distraught child that missed the potentially winning shot, it also provides some of sports’ greatest lessons.
In my own childhood, I felt the confidence building and joy of being on teams that won every game and the disappointment of finishing the season…
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Leadership
Time management can generally be divided into to two broad topics; answering the big picture questions about life to address effectiveness (“are we doing the right thing?”) and exploring productivity or efficiency (“are we doing things right?”). Both are obviously important though the productivity concern may feel like the more pressing need for many. The burden of getting more done with our limited resource capacity confronts us as we start every working day and equally applies to our personal lives.
Oliver Burkeman in Four Thousand Weeks attempts to answer the productivity question by applying a big picture philosophy. He provides…
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Leadership
Anger seems to be a common emotion these days. If you aren’t angry about something you must not be paying attention. It is hard to watch a news broadcast and not feel like things are going in the wrong direction and it must be somebody’s fault. Who should receive the blame depends on who is doing the talking. While there is great difference of opinion on who is responsible, all sides share something in common, they are confident they know who to blame.
One result of this confident finger pointing is that the most significant problems never get solved. And…
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Leadership
Distractions have been around since the beginning of time. No matter what period of history you lived in, there was always the temptation to do something other than work. You didn’t have to live in a super connected high tech world to find chatting with your neighbor, daydreaming, or taking a nap more appealing in the moment than completing the task. However, it does seem that all those amazing sources of information at your fingertips and all your social media connections ready to converse have taken distractions to a new level.
Some observers and researchers suggest we are rewiring our…
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Leadership
One of the many memorable lines from the classic Christmas movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life” is “Youth is wasted on the wrong people.” The line is delivered by an older man watching a young couple struggling to find the next step in their awkward romantic dance. As we get older and our ideas about the right way to do things become firmly entrenched, we sometimes forget how those ideas were formed. It is easy to believe you simply always thought that way. But if you think back carefully to those formative years of university and early adult life, you…
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