Jack Barker: Growth. The more brilliant people we can get working here, then the faster we can get whatever's in your head out into the world. Let me tell you a story. In 1999, Google was a little startup just like we are. And when...
A question to help you improve your leadership. Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung often would refer to the two-million-year-old self, even when speaking to a child. Jung understood that inherent in our humanity is the wisdom of the ages. Here are three steps you can take...
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.Mark Twain[1. Gay McLaren, Morally We Roll Along, 1938.] Growing your brand can be challenging, but we don't experience...
Fairy tales are some of the oldest stories in existence. In one form or another, these stories have been told time and time again—admittedly to entertain, but also to teach. The details vary from culture to culture—Europe gave us Hansel and Gretel using their wits to...
This reminds me of a (possibly apocryphal) story I heard about a shoe company back in the 1800s that sent a couple of their employees to a distant land for a month to scout the region and determine the market opportunity there. One of the employees came back and said, “Nobody there wears shoes! There’s no opportunity there!” The other employee came back a week later and said, “Nobody there wears shoes! There’s so much opportunity there!”Tony Hsieh[1. The Employees of Zappos and Mark Dagostino, The Power of WOW: How to Electrify Your Work and Life by Putting Service FIrst, 2019.]
Like many people in the business world, I was saddened to hear of the passing of Tony Hsieh last week. Not only did I have a lot of respect for Tony, but I was fortunate to call him a friend.
If you ever met Tony, you’d know he was definitely like the second employee in the story he recounted. Tony saw potential everywhere, not just in businesses, but also in people. Whether it was empowering Zappos employees to pursue their passion projects or listening to an artist friend around a campfire in the yard near his airstream, Tony saw possibility where others would just see half-baked ideas.
Again, it is well that you should often leave off work and take a little relaxation, because, when you come back to it you are a better judge; for sitting too close at work may greatly deceive you. Again, it is good to retire to a distance because the work looks smaller and your eye takes in more of it at a glance and sees more easily the discords or disproportion in the limbs and colours of the objects.Leonardo Da Vinci[1. Leonardo Da Vinci, “Of Judging Your Own Pictures,” The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci Complete, translated by John Paul Richter, 1883.]
When things are busy or stressful, it’s easy to get caught up in the doing and lose perspective. And, when you lose perspective, it’s hard to connect your day-to-day actions with what you desire over the long-term
Here are three ways taking a break can help you achieve long-term success.
Why are we drawn into stories about adventures? What is our fascination with journeys traveled by characters like Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen or Washington crossing the Delaware or the fabulously named Rough Riders?
Mythology expert Joseph Campbell tells us that these adventures are all part of the hero’s journey—a schema laid out in his ground-breaking book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The heroic quest predates written language and its primary structure can help guide teams through massive changes. This story structure is all but hardwired into the human brain: We tell stories this way because stories that follow this pattern release transformative psychological power.
There are ways to change the tide and bring greater optimism and joy into your organization as well as your personal life.
Fostering a happy workplace starts by cultivating optimism within yourself.
Here are four effective strategies for developing positive personal psychology:
When you visualize daily, you align your thoughts and feelings with your vision. This makes it easier to maintain the motivation you need to continue taking the necessary actions.Hal Elrod, The Miracle Morning
Developing a vision creates energy and momentum in a company.
But, that energy usually fades over time. The pressure of the now takes over. The vision becomes something that will happen in the distant future.
The vision loses the power it was designed to have: create a passion to motivate you through anything in service of the better future you want.
These reflections have dispelled the agitation with which I began my letter, and I feel my heart glow with an enthusiasm which elevates me to heaven; for nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose,—a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.Robert Walton in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Talk of pivoting is popular. But, most companies don’t have a place to pivot from.[1. Eric J. McNulty, “Find your pillar before you pivot,” strategy+business, 2019.]
When a company only chases profits or market share, they only have the whims of the market to anchor their business. And, when those whims change, their anchors get dislodged and they have to scramble for a new spot to give them stability.