Author: mr

There’s a strong temptation to give up your agency, and wallow sometimes. Where’s it from? Not God. Praise the Lord for a good wife who helps me give up my BS.

Seriously. When your goals occur to you as basically insane, how do you move forward? The answer is – you don’t. Or – you do. But does your moving actually accomplish those goals? That depends on what you do. But what you do depends on how things occur to you. So it’s very likely, if…

I have too many Yeses in my life. This is why progress is slow. Where’s the obsession? The one singular thing I’m driving at? I tell my team this in lots of contexts… focus beats no-focus. Let’s do fewer simultaneous things. But then I don’t live it everywhere. I let the little tasks pile up,…

Well, no wins in relation to our goal of paying off debt. Tons of wins on the personal growth level. Lots of action. Lots of scary things. But I’m still relating to most of it as pushing myself, and myself has been getting burned out a bit lately, with all the things going on that…

She used to post on here sometimes. If you see her, let her know I still love her, and would love her to come back to our blog.

For a few days, I’ve been a bit worked up. Things are crazy and nothing seems to be working. The question is maybe “What am I getting out of that?” The answer? I want to rest. I want to take a break and give myself some recharge. But I’ve never related to work as something…

Many years ago I was a piano major at Oberlin Conservatory. I was a very good student; not outstanding, but very good. And I very much wanted to study with one teacher who was undoubtedly the best. He’d take ordinary students and turn them into fabulous pianists. Finally I got my chance to study with…

It’s one of those days where I want to just quit everything. I’m tired, sick, and overall not in a positive frame of mind. Nor do I really want to be. Things are not going how I’d like them to go, etc etc. If you’re not always taking the most comfortable option in life, this…

I did a couple things that sounded scary. I am trying to open up conversations with a few more people in the organization, who are important and have big titles. Because if I do that, and I start to get results, it will open up conversations that might get me where I want to go.…

Something I’m wondering about – when you are feeling physically exhausted – how much of that is what you say to yourself? If I stop saying “I’m tired” and “I’m exhausted”, how much of an impact will that have on my experience, and thus my behavior, and how much of that new behavior will actually…

It’s British. It only sounds dirty. To be honest, it might be, because you know those British. “If you say that someone is faffing about or faffing around, you mean that they are doing things in a disorganized way and not achieving very much.” – is what the internet says this means. What’s the confront? (to…

I created some agitation and franticness for myself this week. When I sat down to reflect on it, I realized I didn’t trust myself to keep up an effort without a massive motivating force, a massive scary terrorizing thing that you have to run from. In my earlier years, it was poverty – I didn’t…

So in an attempt to learn some skills I could use in service of my consulting venture (i.e. transforming organizational performance) I decided I would try coaching someone I knew. First session – great. Second session – not great. In fact, the feedback during the second session was that we spent a ton of time…

I realized this morning, as I was having a sort of frantic feeling about some of the endeavors that I’m doing, that I believed that I had to struggle against failure. Or struggle against my dreams not becoming real. But what you resist persists, psychologically speaking. If I am fighting against thinking about snacking, I…

What business are you in? What’s the thing that actually creates the value and captures the value? What’s your sales funnel? How do you get things moving through your system? Without knowing that, you might be doing a lot of work that’s besides the point.

You drop them on the ground as you struggle with your take out containers. Then you are sad, because your lemons are ruined. Sometimes you can’t fix something. That thing is over. It is not coming back. It cannot be salvaged. Obviously I’m not talking about lemons. But you can take comfort in the fact…

If you are having a bad time with something, you are probably doing it to yourself. I spent a week or two angsting about whether or not to drop a commitment I had made. And it was just a commitment to myself. So there I was, thinking “It has to mean something” if I quit…

After weeks and weeks of just “powering through” and/or “making the best of things”, my brain finally broke on Sunday. I just got to the point where I just didn’t want to “look on the bright side” or “choose better thoughts”. I just wanted it to not be my problem and I wanted to be…

There are those times in between moments of great insight and transformation where you still have a lot of work to do. And that’s where I am. I’m moving forward, and I’m keeping everything going, but there’s no great struggle. It’s just… moving. And because there’s no big moments of victory, just a lot in…

One of the best things about Getting Things Done (David Allen’s book), is that you can manage just about any number of projects without worrying too much about how everything is going to get done. You just review weekly, figure out what project you want to prioritize, and then schedule your next actions. I’ve got…