The purpose of failure is to make you grow Exercise your imagination with me for a moment. Imagine you’re sitting on a piano bench, practicing your scales on an old upright piano. Beside you sits an old Russian piano master who intently watches your exercises. He holds a small ruler in his hand, and when you […]
In Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is lead by the Ghost of Christmas Future to a cemetery and forced to look upon his own gravestone. The inscription had only his name, and yet it was a symbol of terror and despair for Scrooge, the physical manifestation of a life misspent. Suppose for a […]
Option X: the answer that’s not on the test paper. The answer that isn’t obvious. One of history’s most prominent examples of Option X thinking is found in the legend of the Gordian Knot. The legend goes that an oracle in ancient Phrygia foretold that whoever was able to untie a certain intricate knot tied […]
In the 1996 movie Phenomenon, John Travolta plays George Malley, a simple, good-hearted car mechanic living in a small town in northern California. After attending his birthday celebration at a local tavern, George walks outside, looks up at the stars, and is hit with a blinding flash of light. Shortly afterward, George discovers he has […]
It’s time to take some occupational action! I walked into a little shop in an airport and asked the guy behind the counter how he was doing. He mumbled something about being as well as he could be, being stuck there. When I asked him where else he would like to be, he thought for […]
When my wife and I found out that Jerry Seinfeld was going to be performing about 45 minutes away from us in Athens, Georgia, my first thought was, “Why Athens, Georgia?” and my second thought was, “Great! Let’s go!” So, my wife got online and bought a couple of tickets. Shock Alert: They weren’t cheap. […]
Have you ever heard the expression “Out of sight, out of mind”? It means if something leaves your visual range, you’re probably not going to think about it anymore. It’s human nature. We are instinctually and habitually visual creatures. When you think or hear the words “red wagon,” you don’t visualize the letters r-e-d-w-a-g-o-n in […]
Trying to live a successful life in this world can be like trying to compose a symphony in a battlefield. Imagine that all your life you’ve been crawling through a minefield of missed opportunities, bad decisions, and failed attempts. You are now lying wounded in the muddy foxhole of your present circumstances with the bombs […]
Toward the beginning of my speaking career, my main marketing method was telemarketing. Back in those days, I sat at my desk for hours each day making call after call in an attempt to drum up business. If you wanted to get someone’s attention in the days before the Internet, you had to pick up […]
I was riding the bike trails with my neighbor, Mike, at Fort Yargo State Park on a beautiful November afternoon in 2008. I hate to admit it, but Mike must have been in a lot better shape than I was, because after only five minutes of riding with him in the lead, I noticed that […]
