Author: mr

I did not blog yesterday. I also have not formally committed to blogging every day. It’s more like an informal commitment, or something that I will do, like dishes, every day, but if I’m really tired and the day was a lot and I want to go to bed, I will let it go until…

When there’s too much to do, and not enough time in the day, and there’s just no way you can figure out what’s next…. how do you respond? Wait a minute! Step back further. Are any of the first things I said even ‘facts’? Are they indisputably real? We choose, at a very basic level,…

My mom always used to say, about outcomes that might not have been thrilling but were still good (like making a few dollars selling something she made, even though it took way too long to do) “It beats a zero”. I decided to write every day, because one of the things I struggle with is…

While reading this book Straight Line Leadership, he talks about choosing interior stances. What stance could I choose with my kids, who are driving me batty today? All of them are having meltdowns. And there I am telling them “The problem is how you’re thinking about this”. Meanwhile I am getting angry because they’re all…

A good friend texted me to ask about the ethics of one of the ecommerce businesses the wife and I are working on (i.e. is it aimed at a sufficiently good thing, or is there any reason to do it other than making money). My first reaction to this (which was actually just him asking…

Remember, it’s the deed—not the doer—that gets you the results that you are after. Straight Line Leadership, Dusan Djukich All your feelings, all your mental noise, all your fear, all your hesitations, all your talking, all your enthusiasms, all your excitements, all your desires… None of those get the results. None of the qualities of…

In our theme of paying of our debts, I realized that we need to pay off the debt of learning how to deal with our kids at their most difficult.  Maybe they’re not more difficult kids than other people’s kids.  Maybe we’re just more difficult parents. And even if they’re the most difficult kids in…

“It’s too hard” – the common refrain of my son when asked to do almost anything that isn’t his preferred activity at the precise moment in time, even when those things are actual solutions to the problems he is whining about. It is difficult to remain patient in these times.  How can it be too…

I had the conversation I planned to have this week with my boss, in which I was pretty transparent about the uncertainty of my plans for the future. Telling your boss that you are not completely sure you plan to keep working at a place is a conversation I would not have had a year…

Stephen Covey in the 7 Habits lists Habit 2 as “Begin with the end in mind”. This means keeping our end in mind when we set out to do something. It’s hard to do a particular thing if you don’t know what it is, but you will do something even if you don’t know what…

If you are reading this blog, you likely do not know that its posts have been living in a Google Doc for almost a month. Why? Because rather than put up artificial barriers to the commitment of writing every day, we decided we would just start writing every day, and start putting the posts out…

So I realized yesterday that this blog probably feels like a lot of navel-gazing over the last week or so, as I haven’t been sharing anything I’ve been working on. And that’s because we’ve been blogging about our experience of what we’re doing. You might be tempted to think that all we’ve been doing is…

“The gap is too big.  I can’t see the path.  I don’t see how it all fits together.  Maybe I am making a mistake.  I don’t really want it anyway.  It doesn’t matter if I do or I don’t.  The outcome isn’t important.  It’s fine if it doesn’t happen” These are some thoughts I pulled…

What does a good coach do? A lot of it is about noticing the subtext or the expression of the person they’re coaching.  Calling it out, shining a light. In an episode of “Beyond High Performance”, one of the coaches talks about their job of noticing, and shining a light on something their client is…

I had a conversation the other day with a friend about why we don’t do what we could do.   We are afraid to find out how much we can do. Why? A few things appear to me when I ask this question.   The first is similar to my lovely wife’s thoughts.  If you know what…

This evening, I had some friends over, to sit around the fire and talk.  While in some sense, I don’t have this time if I’m going to be hustling and accomplishing all these huge goals, it was one of the major constraints of my vision.  To not neglect my friendships, or my wife, or my…

So I don’t have any coaching for almost 3 weeks due to the holiday season.  What am I supposed to do with that? I’ll tell you what I’m doing.  I’m going through the same pre-coaching questions, looking at what seems good, making some commitments, and putting dates on them. I am recommitting to my vision,…

Sometimes I feel a bit hungover after I discuss my goals.  Like sharing them, casually, dissipates them.  Like some of the power of action goes out of you, as though you’ve actually done them. And then, answering people’s questions can feel tiresome, since you don’t know all the answers yet. What good is all this…

Solving your problems, even little ones.  Just replaced the screens in our sun porch with pet proof screens so that our kitten stops tearing out of it. I sent the emails yesterday.  Today, I feel a bit discouraged, as though this is just more or less impossible, and that I will have to do a…

Normally, I would not have sent those emails.  I cold-emailed 20 executives trying to set up an exploratory meeting so I could learn more about what they’re doing at their companies. I’m not yet committed to starting at a particular date, or moving on from my  job, so the most I can actually do is…