Life Coaches Blog

“The key to self-management is self-esteem. You must maintain it even though you may not be as well informed about some essentially meaningless report or arcane issues as your associates. You must be prepared to got a meeting and endure comments such as, ‘You mean you didn’t read’. Better to suffer the humiliation of saying you didn’t and ask someone else to be kind enough to summarize it than to have had to read all the articles that cross your desk.” Something I’ve learned quickly as a tech journalist; you can’t know everything, and you’ll go crazy trying to. More tips on how to work smarter from Ricardo Semler at 37signals’ blog.

“Quitting gets you to mastery. Dropping things that you are mediocre at and focusing on the things that you can be truly great at is the only path to mastery…We have a bizarre preoccupation with thinking that if we only do more things, at a more frantic pace, that somehow we will be successful. Hogwash, says Seth, Andrea Lee and Tim Ferriss…The key is to focus on one thing at a time, and give yourself enough space, resources and energy to grow it to fruition.” Lessons from Seth Godin’s talk about “The Dip” in Phoenix at Escape from Cubicle Nation.

“To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And Number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.” The Simple Dollar reminds us of the things money can’t buy. Be sure to watch the powerful speech by Jim Valvano, who passed away from cancer less than two months afterwards.

“If you’re someone who gets nervous around people because you care about what they think, then you most likely don’t fully understand who you are yet. You’ll lack core confidence, having to work hard to please everyone. Tragically, when you don’t know yourself, you’ll automatically accept the feedback you get from other people as truth.” Kinowear’s writing about the ultimate congruence to your style, but there’s a lot of good advice in there also about being congruent with yourself.

“And, finally, is it conceivable that what you really need the break from is new demands on your time? What does solving that problem look like? And can it really be accomplished simply by unplugging a few things for a day or two?” The always insightful and funny Merlin Mann on taking a virtual break.

P.S. Talking about breaks, by the time this goes online I should be happily on a short break of my own