When I was a high school teacher, I had a 15-year-old Kurdish student in my 9th-grade English class. He was a terrible student, constantly disrespectful and disruptive, completely uninterested in learning, and a huge challenge to my newly-minted teacher self. I spent far too much time trying to stop him from derailing my entire class,…
Tech companies get a lot of attention for offering some crazy awesome perks to their employees. Google has on-site masseuses, and Epic Health Systems has a building with a three-story slide in it and another one designed to look like a Dungeons & Dragons game. In fact, these types of perks have gotten so much…
In my Uncrapify Your Future! keynote, I talk about one of the biggest paradoxes of modern work – namely, that productivity doesn’t always look productive. We are accustomed to valuing things we can see, like typing on a computer or turning a wrench, and so we are often far less impressed by things that don’t…
By now I’m sure you’ve had somebody tell you to follow your passion. There are entire TED talks, by (inexplicably) respected speakers, telling people that the secret to life is to find what makes you happy and then build everything else around that. They say it blithely, like it’s the easiest thing in the world.…
I ordinarily don’t write much about my personal life in my newsletters. My job is to talk about business growth – and while there are plenty of parallels between what we do at work and what we do at home, I prefer to keep personal examples to a minimum because everyone’s experience is unique, and…
Hello, and welcome to one of the most difficult jobs you might ever be unfortunate enough to face – telling somebody they smell bad. I’ll be honest, I’m amazed and saddened by how often someone has asked me how to do this. Apparently there are millions of people blindingly unaware of their own foulness. Why…
There are hundreds of arguments that divide us. Soda vs. pop, potato vs. potato – that one makes more sense when you can hear it – red state vs. blue state, and I could go on. I myself have been involved in endless arguments with people about exactly which animal is the cutest one alive…
Somewhere pretty close to 35 years ago this month, I learned how to ride a bicycle. I’d like to pretend that I remember such a pivotal moment in life like it was yesterday, but obviously that’s not true since I don’t even remember exactly when it happened. (Nor do I remember what I did yesterday.)…
Don’t let another year go by with boring conferences! Let keynote speaker Jeff Havens help!
Every year, billions and billions of dollars are spent trying to convince customers to buy things – clothes, toys, hot tubs, insurance policies, private jets, googly-eye glasses, cosmetic surgery, laser pointers, watches, and at least four other things – and 99.99% of the brain power behind that money is focused on trying to figure out…