A couple months ago I wrote an article about how to avoid allowing a mistake to challenge your sense of self-worth. This month, though, I realized I left something out of that conversation. It focused on the personal benefit of learning to accept that mistakes are a natural part of the learning process. This month,…
The April 2025 issue of National Geographic featured an awards show of sorts – 33 individuals around the world whose work (at least according to National Geographic) is improving the world in some way. Many of them, as you might imagine, are doing things related to the environment. Several, however, were businesspeople, and two in…
I recently had a conversation with my 8-year-old son about how to deal with failure – and then had an almost identical conversation with a 37-year-old friend about the same thing. It made me realize that, for many of us, our attitude toward failure doesn’t change much as we get older – we don’t like…
Recently my 8-year-old son came home from school and asked me if I knew how many uses for the peanut George Washington Carver had discovered. After silently thanking his teachers for encouraging his love of random information, I admitted that all I knew was that it was a lot. “More than 300,” he told me…
In almost everything we accomplish in life, there are three contributing factors to our success – the work we put into achieving the thing, the intelligence and creativity we apply in pursuit of our goal, and the blind fortune of dumb luck. Most of us spend most of our time thinking about how to improve…
Now with a title like that, this article could be about anything. “Win the next billion-dollar Powerball!” for example, would for many readers constitute a surefire path toward a happy 2025. “Stop doing stupid things!” is another excellent suggestion, and one I hope to follow more closely this year than I have in years past.…
People are always trying to predict what the world is going to be like in the future. Doing so sometimes involves imagining how current trends might affect the cost of doing business a few years from now, or how new and emerging technologies will impact the way we work and interact with our colleagues and…
Normally this article would be designed to improve some element of your psychological life. That’s what most business education focuses on, after all – improving ourselves, or our processes, or our relationships with others. But we shouldn’t neglect the importance of improving our physical lives, and anyway I’m going to a couple concerts this month,…
Everyone everywhere is interested in innovation. Of the various keynote addresses that I’ve created over the years, my Uncrapify Your Future! keynote on innovation is easily the most popular. And I understand why. Coming up with solutions to problems, or taking advantage of possible opportunities, is one of the key drivers of success, both professionally…
Marketing. The very word has the potential to send shivers down the spine. Most of us just want to do whatever it is we do, not spend our lives telling people about it. And yes, I’m saying this despite the reality of social media, which is almost exclusively people telling other people about the stuff…