We often think of success in life as this grand, complicated plan that needs to be created. That isn’t the case, though. The truth about success is that it comes down to some very simple things.
The first thing is direction. I see so many people that are going through life trying this thing or that...
I have always been fascinated with how we evolve and become the versions of ourselves that we present to the world. One of the great thinkers I have studied for this is Erik Erikson. Erikson was a psychoanalyst and developmental psychologist who is best known for his theory of the eight stages of ps...
I sat down with a new business owner a few years back to help him overcome some struggles and succeed. I had never worked with this guy before but had helped hundreds of other business owners, so I imagined we could make something happen. We will call him, John (not his actual name).
“Hey John, I a...
The theory of reality states that what is real isn’t what you hope for, nor is it what you perceive. What is real is what is measurable and tangible. I say this because it is important to remember that we often perceive ourselves differently than how others will perceive us. We often imagine that th...
Another speaker I listened to this past week talked about his struggle to overcome a stutter. When he was a kid, he suffered from severe anxiety because of the stutter. This anxiety carried over into his adulthood as well. He told about how he spent an entire year as a young adult pretending to be d...
The whole world opens up when you give up the need to be better. The mindset of the beginner is that of curiosity. The longer a person is focused in a given area, though, the more difficult it can be to preserve the beginner mindset. When I first started speaking professionally, I read everything I ...
I believe most people are good. I also believe most people want to be successful. In business, we spend a great deal of time focused on how we can make other people do the things we need them to do instead of focusing on what keeps them from being their best.
As we evaluate ourselves in life, we ha...
There are really two sides of self that we experience as we develop in life. As early as a few months old, we begin to discover that we are separate and unique from others. This first aspect of self-discovery is the existential self. Throughout our lives, we tend to battle with striving to be both s...
Friedrich Nietzsche was a philosopher who is now considered one of the great thinkers of history. That wasn’t his life experience, however, as he was living it. He left academics to pursue his own writing, finding that most people of his time had little to no use for his work. He struggled with wome...
How often have you wondered what was next as an entrepreneur or businessperson? This question can prompt us to think about the next level for our career or business. Or, it can prompt us to wonder why bad things are happening to us. I would propose that we have all wondered exactly that, likely in b...
Lately, I’ve been wondering what makes one person more inspiring than another. It seems that our world loves failure turned success. We glamorize the idea that people made consistently bad choices for years, hurting their family and friends, at times even destroying lives. The story of our lives sho...
One of the things I have experienced in my entrepreneurial journey is facing the same problem multiple times. At the beginning of my career, I made the assumption that I could face a problem once and it would never come back. Instead, the experience I had was facing a problem at a small scale early ...
