Always & never.

Never say always. Always avoid saying never.

Story and evidence.

“A shoe factory sends two marketing scouts to a region of Africa to study the prospects for expanding business. One sends back a telegram saying, SITUATION HOPELESS STOP NO ONE WEARS SHOES The other writes back triumphantly, GLORIOUS BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY STOP THEY HAVE NO SHOES ~ It's all invented,

The cycle of fear and shame.

First, fear and perfectionism stop us from shipping on time. Then, guilt and shame make it worse by making it heavy and not letting us move forward. The cycle repeats. Unless, we choose to not give in, we choose to not let these voices become the driver. It's

The invisible driver.

The story we tell ourselves about ourselves determines how status plays a role in our interactions. Status is the invisible driver behind most, maybe even all, human behaviour. Unless we start seeing status, we will keep picking false proxies as the drivers of behaviour.

The skill of "acting as if"

Actors do it all the time. Christian Bale acted as if he was Batman knowing pretty sure that he wasn't. And we believed him. We wouldn't have much enjoyed the movie if Bale was constantly doubting himself. Your best self might, most likely, be a version

Ship it to...?

You can't ship a Fedex box without a destination address. What about your work? Who are you shipping it to? Once you know the "Who's it for?", it becomes easier to figure out the "What's it for?" and to send

Mental Highways.

The neural pathways are similar to the roads in our cities. The roads we take more often are the roads we end up taking more often. And the ones we start avoiding end up being avoided more.

The skill of shipping projects.

It's not complicated: 1. Deciding whether the project is worth getting done or not. 2. Figuring out what done looks like, what's the good enough version. 3. Assigning the resources (time, energy, money) that will help you get to done. 4. Getting to done. 5. Figuring

Strategy is a choice.

When faced with a decision, we get to choose: do we want to be strategic or emotional? Only one leads to where we seek to go. As Seth Godin says, "Strategy is a philosophy of becoming." Emotions usually keep us in the here and now. This is StrategyA

The wobbly table.

It might not be that bad that you can't continue to work on it. But it might wobble enough to keep irritating you again and again. It would take not more than a couple of minutes to fold a paper and put under the table and make it

Do it kindly.

"Can you give me the same information, but do it kindly?" What if you make this request to your critical voice. You might be surprised by what happens next.

Three isn't a crowd.

Three isn't a crowd, it's a gathering. A meetup creates magic. It needs just two more people to show up. Only one more can lead to a direct connection. If no one shows up, well, how fascinating! Let's try again tomorrow. Anything more than

The most difficult workout...

...is getting to the gym.

The sheepish choice.

It's always there for the taking. And it's a slippery slope leading to more of them. Rather, we can start today by choosing the courageous one instead. It might work. It might not. Only one of these leads to possibility.

Getting to the highway.

Getting on track and staying on track are two significantly different challenges. Sometimes, the track is already there. You have been there earlier. You have some idea. Sometimes, you have to find the track. Sometimes, you might even need to create it. Getting on track is challenging, for sure. That’

Trusting yourself.

There is hardly any advantage in doubting yourself. It doesn’t make things better. Neither for you, nor for the ones you are engaging with. Rather, doubting oneself can be a bit selfish as we want others to do the hard work of making us trust ourselves.

The gift of (giving yourself) feedback.

Seth Godin rightly says, "feedback is a gift". Feedback allows us to reflect and learn and do better the next time. When we are giving feedback to others, we are conscious of how we deliver it. We know that if we are too harsh or too critical, not

A project with multiple objectives.

A project with multiple objectives is difficult (rather, almost impossible) to be effective. The word effective in itself requires that we have one objective for which we are striving. We can have multiple projects, each with a specific objective, but having a single project with multiple objectives is trying to

The secret of life.

Excerpt From The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander & Ben Zander: Ben Zander: A few weeks into the first year of the giving the A experiment, I asked the class how it had felt to them to start the semester off with an A, before they had had

Is it a memory?

Sometimes we tend to remember something and we start to laugh, irrespective of where we are sitting at the moment. If someone asks what happened, we find it normal to say, "Oh! I just remembered something (funny)." Many times though, the memories that come up are not funny.

One-off events.

A lot of one-off events take a lot of attention because of proximity and the fear of missing out. However, in the long run, they don't matter much. What they can do though is derail our long term process and interrupt the compounding. We can make some space

When you have a strategy.

You can see what's aligned with it and what's not. You can find it easier to say no to things. You can know where the track is and how you can get back on it. Building a strategy is a skill. And we can learn the

The calculating self is always on.

Well, almost always. Sometimes, we are able to show up as the central self. But the calculating self is always there, lurking behind the scene, looking for signs that can allow it to take over. Instead of trying to get rid of the calculating self (which isn't going

Two types of actions.

There are certain things that give results in a single action. You eat a pizza and you feel the taste and the sensation. Rather multiple repetitions might take away the pleasure. On the other hand, there are things that either give pain or don’t do much in a single

The cost of context switching.

In a day, you may switch the context 5 times or even 10 times and still be able to get maybe 2-3 meaningful things done. The technology though makes it more likely that we switch context sometimes even hundreds of times a day. There is a cost to context switching