How To Release Control Of Your Team’s Work
Let your team do what you hired them to do.
Moving From Control To Influence
Your job as a manager is to unleash the brilliance of your team, not to showcase your own.
A Framework For Choosing The Best Idea
Make the decision in a way that everyone can be onboard with.
Learn To Say “It’s Not For You”
The work you do is a gift to the world, but that doesn't mean it's for everyone.
Don’t Allow Your Rituals To Become Ruts
Simply changing your circumstances or your productivity system might inject a measure of energy into your work and give you a boost for a short while, but that increase in output will be short-lived if you aren’t committed to an outcome.
Are “Time Drains” Ruining Your Productivity?
You have 168 hours each week. Some of those hours you will probably spend doing things you have to do, some of them doing things you choose to do, and some of them doing things simply on autopilot.
Don’t Be “The Coach”
Yes…we need coaches. However, don’t be “The Coach”. Instead, offer feedback that is timely, contextualized, empathetic, and helpful in the context of the outcome you’re committed to.
What Gift Will You Give?
As you consider the gift that you have to offer - the expression that is uniquely yours, and yours alone to give away - consider this: the impact of a gift given away in freedom is vast, while a gift spent on the giver quickly fades.
How Rituals Unleash Your Creativity
What is the first thing you do in the morning? The last thing you do at night? Your first action when taking on a new project? Your impulse when receiving good (or bad) news?
If you asked those questions to many highly productive creatives, they’ll have immediate answers. Not because they are micro-obsessive about their schedules, but because over time they’ve developed predictable rituals around key areas of their life and work.
The 3 Career Investments Every Creative Should Be Making
Here are three career investments that I think every single creative should be making now, and should continue to make consistently. These are the three aspirations that you should be chasing in order to ensure that you won’t be left behind.
Pushing Through The Season Of Incompetence
Any time you are attempting to learn a new skill, or experiment with a new means of doing your work, you will inevitably go through a season in which you risk coming across as incapable of performing well.
Build Buffers To Focus Your Creative Energy
Feeling a bit stressed? Manage your energy and bring more of your best effort every day by establishing buffers between important meetings and tasks.
There Are No Secrets. There Are No Shortcuts.
For creative pros - those charged with turning our thoughts into value every day - the promise of a quick path to successful work is alluring. If there were proven ways to avoid the uncertainty and pain of the process, they would be worth their weight in gold. Unfortunately, they don't exist. Not really, anyway.
Which Productivity Profile Are You?
In my brand new book Die Empty, I examine the common places where bright, sharp, talented people eventually get stuck in their life and career. The goal, of course, is to get your best work out of you every day and to not leave it inside or take it to your grave with you like so many people do.
Getting Out Of Your Comfort Zone
You cannot pursue great work and comfort simultaneously. While you may experience comfort in the course of your work, or as a by-product of your work, great work and comfort are mutually exclusive objectives. Brilliant bodies of work are built as people choose over time to do the right thing, even when it's the uncomfortable thing.
What Your Secrets Say About Your “Danger Zones”
We each have danger zones we have to watch out for in the course of our work. They can be particular habits or patterns we fall into when we go into "coast mode" or areas or situations where we are likely to get irritated and short-circuit collaborative relationships.
How To Get Attention For Your Work
To get attention for your work, regardless of what it is, requires effort and persistence. It also requires that you gain an understanding of how to approach those who might help you get the word out.
How Doing Nothing Makes You More Creative
Ever get inspired in the shower? Have a good idea while driving in the car? Of course you have. We all have. But why do our moments of greatest epiphany happen at the least opportune times?
A Simple Method For Insanely Productive Meetings
While meetings can go bad in an endless variety of ways, one thing is common to all bad meetings: they’re a colossal waste of time. Sadly, if a typical month includes a number of meetings, this wasted time amounts to a massive chunk of our lives! We need a solution.
Why So Many Creatives Struggle With Discipline
Discipline is sometimes perceived as a "dirty word" because it's interpreted as pushing through the muck, doing the unenjoyable activities first, and forgoing the chocolate cake for the steamed broccoli. However, I think this is a gross misunderstanding of the word.
How To Find A Mentor
Ideally, you'll have all three kinds of mentors (pathfinders, virtual, truth tellers) to turn to when you're stuck or generally need advice.
Four Reasons You Should Sketch Your Notes
Still using lists, facts, and to-do's for your notes? Try sketch notes as a way to open your mind and generate new ideas. In this interview, author and illustrator Mike Rohde shows us how.
Stop Worrying About Your Tombstone. Instead, Build A Legacy.
Your legacy is not just what you do, but also how you do it. It will be determined by a series of choices you make over your life about how to spend this moment - here, and now.
One Simple Practice That Will Revolutionize Your Career
Be purposeful about stoking the fires of your imagination, and seeking patterns in the world around you. This is the best way to ensure that your mind is actively chasing insight and to position yourself to be brilliant when it counts most.
Bucket Makers and Bucket Fillers
To be valuable and effective you need to understand which kind of innovator you are.
Be Your Own Champion
No one is going to beat a path to your door. Share your ideas, fight for them, and do whatever you need to in order to ensure that your work gets a fair audience.
Does Facebook Want You To Miss Your Life?
In case you missed it, Facebook launched a new product for the Android platform last week called Facebook Home. In the ads, it seems Facebook is tipping its hand for what they think a digitally connected life should look like.
Dealing With A Crushing Workload
Workloads and expectations are increasing. It’s not a cliché, it’s a fact. How will you deal with it?
Don’t Give Up Before It Gets Good
The lag is the gap between cause and effect. It's the season between planting a seed, and reaping a harvest.
Four Fatal Mistakes Creative Leaders Make
When the pressure is on, and uncertainty is rearing its ugly head, there are traps that even the most experienced leaders fall into.
Dancing With Uncertainty
Uncertainty is an uncooperative dance partner. You have to move in concert with it to do your best work.
How Unnecessary Creating Changes Everything
Unnecessary creating redeems useless time into time spent doing genuinely meaningful things for yourself and others.
Why Ideas Don’t Get Executed
The generation of a great idea is just a small precursor to the real work - the execution.
Want To Get More Done? Stop Doing So Much.
Time alone is not sufficient to do great work. You also need to have the focus and energy to be able to engage.
How To Defuse A Bad Idea
There’s an often cited principle about creativity that states “there’s no such thing as a bad idea.” It’s wrong. There are bad ideas - terrible ones - and they can explode and destroy the vibe of a meeting or project if not dealt with swiftly and decisively.
What To Do When You’re Burned Out
What do you do when you're burned out? How can you begin to reclaim your creative energy and get "back in the game"?
Would You Stoop Over To Pick Up A Penny?
Healthy people, and healthy teams, stoop over to re-claim what is valuable, even when it's inconvenient.
The Death of Downtime
Are we sacrificing the brilliant work that we're capable of in order to satisfy our urge to feel connected?
