A book review by Reg Adkins. You Were Born Rich (1997 LifeSuccess Publications), by Bob Proctor. I read Bob Proctors landmark book some years ago, and I continue to see the message it contained proclaimed over and again by successful people (Sam Kalenuik, Grant Sylvester and many others). When I saw that the book was made available in December as a free PDF download at Insight of the Day I felt it was time to do a review. The book is by and large a road map designed to take you from... More »
Effective leaders treat others with a positive regard. Specifically, effective leaders understand the power of appreciation. This goes beyond the Carnegie precepts of “Be hardy in your approbation and lavish in your praise.” Effective praise is a skill set that must be learned like any other. As leaders we often find ourselves spending and inordinate amount of time identifying what is wrong, identifying mistakes, and concentrating on errors. Effective leaders look for opportunities to find people doing things right and offer them the encouragement they need to keep on doing things right.... More »
One of the challenges faced by great leaders is coaching others into accepting responsibility for their own actions and behavior. We all make mistakes. In order to grow from those mistakes we must be able to accept ownership of the mistake. There is a good metaphor about a storm that looks at responsibility. A person’s behaviors and actions are a storm. At the edge of a storm you can’t really tell what the overall impact will be. If we detach our emotions we can learn by watch the precipitating factors of the... More »
There is a little rebel in all of us. The question is when an employee breaks the rules what should you do about it? It is an important question. The decision can have an impact not only on the employee but the whole department in which he works. Every manager should make it a habit to periodically review company behavior and conduct guidelines. Here are a few of the problem areas you may encounter. The staff is often under the assumption that the rules do not apply to them. The staff may... More »
In most any professional environment you will encounter those who are feeling the repercussions of long hours and impending deadlines. The pre-burnout conditions can manifest themselves in any of the following behaviors. Little or no demonstrated interest in the business at hand. Few outside interests or hobbies. Statements of apathy. Limited or no goals for professional or personal growth. Complaints about required workloads. One of the most expensive endeavors of doing business is in the area of recruitment and training of new personnel. It is almost always more financially sound to retrain... More »
1.4K Shares A series on becoming a more successful leader. There’s no doubt about it. Being in a leadership position is a very difficult job. We are required to do so much and to be all things to so many people. The advice we get is often great in theory, but falls short of the mark in practice. We need practical strategies that will help us, and those around us become, or continue being successful. There seems to be a myth that having been a successful leader once, we know all there is to... More »
A book review by Reg Adkins. The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius (2005, Dana Press), by Nancy C. Andreason. This book is not written for the technical reader. It has a conversational tone and does very little to address neuroscience as the title would lead you to believe. However, the book is a good place to start if you are looking for an examination of the relationship between creativity and mental illness. Andreason stipulates that there is indeed a correlation between creativity and certain type of mental illness. The author notes... More »
The following numbers track the increase in obesity in children from 1963-2002 by percent. 1963-1965 4.2% 1976-1980 6.5% 1999-2002 25.8% Here are some more facts for adults. Many of the statistics come from U.S. data bases others are taken from the World Health Organization. 24.1% of men aged 20-34 are obese 25.2% of men aged 35-44 are obese 30.1% of men aged 45-54 are obese 32.9% of men aged 55-64 are obese 33.4% of men aged 65-74 are obese 20.4% of men aged over 75 are obese 25.8% of women aged 20-34... More »
110 Shares A Michael Gurian, Kathy Stevens book, published by Jossey-Bass, reviewed by Reg Adkins. Michael Gurian begins the book by describing the current crisis in the education of boys. He takes careful steps to note the indicators of this crisis in detail noting facts including boys get the majority of D’s and F’s boys make up 80% of the discipline problems boys make up 70% of the “learning disabled” students boys make up 80% of the “behavior disordered” students boys make up 80% of the children on Ritalin, et. al. boys are a... More »
Studies by Dimetri Christakis at the Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle have determined that the brain need touch, hearing, seeing, smelling, and tasting stimulus to grow fully. Now consider the following facts about the youth of today. The average child spends 900 hours a year in school and 1,023 hours a year watching television. In the average home, the TV is on 6.7 hours per day. By the time a boy reaches eighteen years of age, he’ll have spent 22,000 hours watching television. That is more than any other... More »
Food prices are on the rise again. After the relative stability of the last ten years, this past November (latest finalized data analysis I could find) packaged food makers began increasing prices last year to cover the rising cost of raw ingredients. Specific examples include: Oscar Mayer lunch meats Capri Sun juice pouches Wheat Thin crackers Fig Newtons Jolly Ranchers Twislers Natures Own breads Sunbeam breads many others. Here are a few proactive steps you can take to increase the shelf-life of your foods and thereby stretch your grocery store dollar (as... More »
I recently did a series which compared the usefulness of tools. Since I’m rather linear in my mental processes, that got me thinking about the usefulness of certain foods. So I took a walk to the refrigerator for inspiration. Do you have disgusting things in your refrigerator? I think some of the things in my refrigerator may once have been classified as disgusting. But now they gone beyond that level and entered into the realm of being unidentifiable. For me, the span of time between fresh and toxic is a blurred and... More »
If you have been reading my count down, I’m sure it is no surprise to any of you that my number one greatest tool of all time is the knife. There are hundreds of different kinds of knives designed for the kitchen alone. To choose a knife that is of good quality and best fits your needs, you need a basic knowledge of the various parts and construction of a knife. I’ve looked around quite a bit to find the best descriptions at places like the knife depot, buck, and case. Let’s... More »
What is more useful than a nice hefty rock? You can almost always find one the perfect size (which is just a little bigger than your fist). Yes it’s primitive but it sure makes an “I’m all business” statement. Look down this list and tell me you haven’t used a big ole rock for at least a few of these tasks. Body Work. Banging a dent out from inside your fender well. Door Scotch. Holding open a door. Helper. Pounding on the end of that oversized screwdriver. Persuader. Convincing the neighborhood junk... More »
Number 8 on the greatest tools of all times list that most versatile of all binders, Bailing Wire. Here are a few of its most common uses. Key retriever. Combine a length of bailing wire with a sticky piece of chewing gum to retrieve the key that fell through the sewer grating. Chum Tie. Grind up your bait fish in a gallon milk jug with the top cut off and freeze it with a length of bailing wire sticking through it. Then hang it off the back of your boat. Wrench Holder.... More »
