“You miss one hundred percent of the shots you never take.” (Wayne Gretzky) I’m not particularly gifted (sigh) but I am pretty driven. I choose to be proactive, focused and disciplined (mostly) because I’m fascinated by what we human beings can achieve when we commit to exploring our potential and when we don’t allow our thinking…

What are your critical activities? Critical activities are those activities that directly move you towards your goals.  Every goal has critical activities.  The problem is that most of us spend significant amounts of time doing things that are not critical.  Often we convince ourselves that they are something we ‘need’ to do to be successful…

Every person has a dream, which he or she wishes to fulfill at some point of time in his or her life. It could be about anything – to build a booming business, become a successful model, go on a world tour, serving the less privileged ones or simply getting married to someone you love. However…

The best way to make a rope strong is to make it by weaving many strands together. The best way to create a strong, satisfying pattern for your life and career is to weave together the six different strands that make up a complete career pattern. Success isn’t a matter of completing each strand come…

So there you are with your Today list, your to-do list, your project lists, your house list, your calls list and even your list of lists. You know each and ever one of the 49 things you want to accomplish today. There’s only one small problem: come the end of the day you’ve accomplished zip…

When you do something for the first time and it works, you’ve learned something useful. When you do it again, and it works again, you haven’t learned anything. All you have done is to confirm what you already knew. When you do it for the 20th time, and it still works, you’ve probably become complacent. What…

It can be pretty discouraging when after a long week of hard work you realize you are not one inch closer to the future you want. Sure, you’ve worked all out, chopping through tasks left, right and center, fulfilling all your (conflicting) roles for various people in your life, and here it Friday, your brain feels…

There’s a technique I use to get blocks of work done well. I evolved this technique as one of a host of survival mechanisms over the past few years in response to losing more and more time to IFS – Information Fatigue Syndrome. If you read blogs (and you obviously do), surf sites, scan…

Over time, we all gather a set of constricting habits around us—ones that trap us in a zone of supposed comfort, well below what our potential would allow us to attain. Pretty soon, such habits slip below the level of our consciousness, but they still determine what we think that we can and cannot do—and…

“It ain’t what a man don’t know that hurts him . . . it’s what he knows that just ain’t so.” ~ FRANK HUBBARD ~ Some people think that they have no chance of ever living the…

Hamburger Management is a shoddy, debased version of real leadership that focuses on just three things: whatever demands least, can be used fastest, and costs least. It thrives wherever organizations seek to meet unrealistic targets with insufficient resources to maximize short-term profits. Indeed, Hamburger Management is short-term by nature, and will habitually sacrifice long-term advantage…

We live in world full of pressures to conform: to believe what others tell us is true, to toe the line, to accept the values of those in positions of power, and to follow conventional, approved paths. That’s the way to get on in life and business, we are told. You need to fit in…

I’m amazed at the number of postings and advice articles, let alone pieces of software, that are spawned by the GTD phenomenon. To me, it’s yet another symptom of today’s short-term mentality and our obsession with activity. Getting Things Done is useful, of course. I’m not without sympathy for people with bulging schedules and huge…

The case of Floyd Landis, plus the earlier doping scandals bedeviling the Tour de France, ought to make us all think again about the true impact of competition. Sport (together with warfare) is one of the commonest sources of ideas about business, so when the world of sport seems to be in trouble, it’s worth…

Sport and competition go together. Taking the competition away from sport would reduce it to a pointless, illogical activity. Competition and business go together too, and many links are made between sporting achievement and business success. But work and business are not games. Competition is no longer healthy in the workplace when it gets out…