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Keep Your Eye on the Ball
In golf, the number one rule of the game is “keep your eye on the ball”. Even though you’re aiming away from water and in the direction of the hole, you’ll never get there unless you forget the pin, look down, and focus on hitting the ball. Looking up too soon will ruin your shot.…
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Try Again
“You can’t get back on the horse if you haven’t fallen off it.” – Phil Dunphy, Modern Family Overcoming your fear once, doing something difficult and daring the first time, is one thing. More difficult is giving that speech a second time, going back to the drawing board for a logo design, running a second…
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Finding Your Voice
Donald Miller says that the first stage in writing a book is finding your voice. That might be true of writing a book, on a micro level, but it’s also true of being a writer in general. You need to find your voice. If you’re a leader, an artist, a musician, a speaker, whatever, you…
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8 Minutes
Doing great work requires focus, and you need to be intentional to create time to focus. In any classic bank robbery film, there’s always a safe to crack. As the leaders of the heist put their team together, they always need to find the ex-locksmith guy who will know how to crack this particular latest-technology…
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Perpetual Harvest
I once heard that in the Netherlands, because of over-worked farmland, vegetables now contain about half the nutritional value that they used to. I wonder how many of us are giving less the full “nutritional value” into our work and relationships because we’re over-worked. Our “always on” culture seems to amplify the importance of working,…
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Hip Hop and the Feedback Loop
My favourite way to joke about hip hop (years ago, when I was just a white boy who didn’t understand), was how often rappers would rap about rap. “Listen to words that I create. Watch my lips arti-cu-late.” (My you can tell that my favourite rapper is the hiphopopotamus). But now I get it. I…
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What Sushi Can Teach Us About Mastery
We all want to be great at what we do. In his book “Drive”, Dan Pink says that one of 3 main motivators for people at work is Mastery: the pursuit of becoming great at a particular craft or skill. I love the word “mastery”. More than “talent” or “anointing,” the word “mastery” points to…
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I Make Stuff That ___
Over the past year I’ve aspired to be a person who “makes things”. I look up to people who have a large physical or digital footprint of stuff they’d produced. The above pin was a kind of challenge to me for the last 12 months: be a person who doesn’t just talk about making things…
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Three Lessons from The Accidental Creative
I recently finished reading Todd Henry’s “The Accidental Creative” (check out an earlier post about the book), which has amazing insights and suggestions for developing sustainable creativity. If you’re paid for your creativity (that’s most of us), this book is for you. Here are three lessons that I’ve been putting to action already. 1. Take…
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Where Brilliance Begins
I’ve been reading a super helpful book lately (thanks Kent!), The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry. Aimed at people who do creative work, Henry talks about the importance of being Brilliant, Prolific and Healthy in your work. If you want to deliver the right idea at the right moment, you must begin the process far…