Recently my wife and I got into an argument about something. It’s the same something we have occasionally argued about for just about as long as we have been together, and it ended the same way it always does – both of us frustrated, no progress made. It’s as though we periodically say, “Things are…
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My brother takes forever to make a decision. Not always, of course; it’s not like he stays naked until 3pm because he can’t decide what to wear. But he did once take two years to buy a couch. That’s not an exaggeration. From the time he decided he needed a new couch to the time…
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Recently a friend of mine treated himself and his wife to a new mattress, which is the most boring way to begin an article that I can think of. Dinner? No. A romantic vacation? No. How about shopping for a way to more comfortably be unconscious? Woo-hoo! Oh, and by the way, I’m not saying…
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This morning I made the mistake that almost all of us make in our first hour of consciousness – I checked my Facebook account and scanned the headlines. Consequently I learned the following: a friend of mine is leaving today for a two-month vacation to Singapore; the United States has a list of 59 terror…
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My wife and I got into an argument this weekend about how we should be spending time with our son. Sounds like fun, right? That sentence might have conjured up images of wild shouting, doors slamming, and the hours of frosty silence that often follow heated arguments. And with good reason, since all of that…
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For the past eight years, I have delivered a leadership presentation called Unleash Your Inner Tyrant! at conferences across 48 states, 7 Canadian provinces, and six Latin American countries. In that presentation, I pretend to encourage my audience to engage in all kinds of terrible leadership practices – outsourcing blame, avoiding contact with employees, making…
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In the last 24 hours, I’ve received something like 462 emails. Mercifully, Gmail dumps most of those into a ‘promotions’ folder, which may as well be a trash folder for all the attention I pay to it. It’s filled with coupons for things I don’t want, solicitations from companies that have apparently purchased my contact…
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Hey everybody! I don’t mean to toot my own horn or anything, but you are looking at the newest board member for the Affordable Housing Authority in my county. And yes I’m aware that you’re not actually looking at me right now, and yes it’s true that didn’t exactly have to beat out 55 other…
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We are bombarded with choices. Right now I’m sitting at a hotel bar in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I’ve got somewhere between 60 and 70 beers I can choose from. That’s just the taps, by the way – I’m not even bothering to look at what they have in bottles. Most of my choices are some…
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My wife can’t handle the grocery store. She’s an incredibly intelligent and accomplished person – got her Ph.D in organic chemistry, so you know that I married up – but she goes to pieces whenever I make the mistake of letting her come grocery shopping with me. She looks at everything, goes down every aisle…
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I’ve done some preliminary market research, and I’ve learned that the Internet is really popular these days. Have you tried it? Of course you have, unless you live in a re-purposed beaver dam and make all your own clothing out of walrus pelts and alpaca hair. In fact, you couldn’t even be reading this without…
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Ah, the Internet. It’s one of the greatest inventions in the history of humanity. We can do things today that our ancestors never even thought to dream of. If they could come back and see what we’ve built, they’d think we were gods. Which is why tons of people love using the Internet to complain…
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We’re releasing 2 new video series this month! Both focus on Interviewing. One focuses on how to properly conduct interviews and the other is for those people looking to improve their interviewing skills (looking to advance their career). And as usual we had a lot of fun filming these and wanted to let you see…
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Raising prices. It’s a hard thing to say to someone, isn’t it? Although I’ll admit it’s a much nicer thing to say than, “I’ve decided I’d like to make more money while doing the same amount of work.” Still, it’s very difficult to know when you can ‘get away’ with raising your prices. Most of…
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OK, so you’ve decided to steal a little more money from your customers. They’ve been taking advantage of your natural kindness and timidity for far too long, and it’s time for them to pay!!! Great. I’m proud of you. You’re finally becoming the kind of ruthless, heartless capitalist I always knew you could be. That’s…
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A couple weeks ago I was on a plane – shocking, I know – and got into a conversation with a woman returning from a public health conference. The main concern of the attendees was how to combat the proliferation of high-sugar, high-calorie, low-nutrition foods in our schools, primarily (shout-out to my fellow Midwesterners coming)…
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First off, I promise this will have some business relevance. I generally don’t write a lot of articles that deal with parenthood, mostly because there are a trillion blogs that do exclusively that and I have no intention of turning into one of them. However, I’ve realized something recently that I think might help all…
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So I stumbled across this study about six weeks ago, and ever since I’ve been mentioning it in my keynote presentations. I included then link so that you’d know I wasn’t making this up, but I also don’t expect you to go and read the BBC article I’ve linked to, so here’s the summary: A…
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Forgive me for using a title that sounds like a get-rich-quick pitch. “And if you act now I’ll throw in TWO copies of my book for the same price as THREE!” Which would be a terrible deal for you, by the way, but that’s not the point. You’ve probably read a thousand business articles by…
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This video is a quick intro to each of my four most requested keynotes.
My grandmother died last month. It was not an unexpected thing – she was 95 years old, and her health had been failing very gradually for the past few years. By itself, the knowledge that a loved one has lived a long life and that “it’s their time” doesn’t do much to help us deal…
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